Jackie Kay: race and identity (homework for September 18 2023)

  Homework for Monday 18 and Monday 25 September: read this blog entry and prepare remaining poems;

Here is an interview with Jackie Kay, from March 2016:

"Opening one of Jackie Kay’s books is like walking into a busy metropolitan bar that has accommodated within its walls the deep past, character and charm of a country pub. You know you will encounter stories comic and sad, that you will never leave thirsty, and that the mind will feel renewed with the spirit, musicality and colour of life.

Kay’s second poetry book, Other Lovers (1993), explored the impact of colonialism and slavery on black culture, and it was a topic she returned to in her play The Lamplighter (2008). She has a written a sequence of poems about Bessie Smith. 

-----------

A key message from the article is that "Jazz and blues have been a lifelong love" of Jackie Kay.

This is a good starting point to the issue of race... as many of her poems include reference to Bessie Smith.

You can check out her music on Youtube, of course. What a voice !

Jackie Kay even wrote and published a biography on Bessie Smith.

Now, if we turn to Other Lovers, we can recognise that "Kay explores the qualities of love in a variety of relationships, moving from the familiar—parent, child, lover—to the extraordinary, including a sequence on Bessie Smith."

She created this Youtube Interview in 2021, during which she read "The Red Graveyard" (which is in our collection but is not one of the examined poems). 

Let's read the poem ourselves.

She says the "blues told the truth" and is about "real life"  and "taps into loneliness." and "allows for a kind of transformation." 

She encourages us to tap into "the other" that is inside each of us. Kay says, "If you can recognise the other in you then your life can become meaningful in some way." (5-6minute mark).

She admits : "I grew up in an all white part of Glasgow and I made Bessie part of my extended imaginary family". 

In her book, she says "blues travels to where-ever blues lovers go". She continues, "The first time I saw Bessie Smith it really was like finding a friend... I was 12... I remember the cover captivated me. I stared at the image of her trying to remember who she reminded me of....I stroked her face. I soothed her. I felt sometimes shy staring at her... I had made a friend for life." (7minute mark of the video).

She can also be heard reading the poem here. 

In an article on the Black Atlantic narrative, the following words are said:

Kay has managed to situate Scottish literature in a wide frame of cultural associations through an intense exploration of the self that exceeds both the limits of the writer’s individuality and the constrictions of traditional narratives of collective memory.

Read:

1. Even the Trees (hint: look at /listen to "Strange Fruit" .. but also the car crash that killed Bessie Smith.

2. The Right Season hint: look at slavery as business)

3. The Red Graveyard (hint: look here)

4. Race, racist and racism (see below)

5. read Somebody Else and reread Gambia.

Research:

A. The blues, Bessie Smith, and the slave-trade.

B. The Blues Trail and the Underground Railroad

The Right Season: the blues trail:

https://msbluestrail.org/blues-trail-markers

Blues Trail: https://www.visittheusa.com/trip/blues-highway

Bessie Smith on Blues trail

https://www.mississippibluestravellers.com/riverside-hotel-clarksdale-mississippi/

Underground Railroad

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/underground-railroad/

---------------

Race, racist, racism (with Jackie Kay's experience of racism in Scotland).

Academic Article: by Katharine Burkitt 

It is a poem which explores the effect of race on personal identity and highlights the problem of selfdefinition in that context, as it demonstrates the marginalisation that racism produces and explores the definition of self at those margins:

1 There is no such thing as black, said he. A pot is black, the earth, a shoe, But not I, said he, not I. I am not black, said he. ... I will be oak or hazelnut or coffee. I will be toffee. I will be donkey. But I will not be black, said he. So you will be donkey, said I. (129) 

Kay’s poem highlights the effect of racist comment on the definition of black British identity as the poetic voice is both guilt-ridden and resentful of the implication that racism is “down to me./ Entirely” (128). In this poem “black” becomes a term of racist abuse and is revealed to be wholly inaccurate in the categorisation of racial identity, as it is a suitable description of objects like, “a pot,” “the earth,” “a shoe,” but not of human skin colour. 

As the poem foregrounds the problems that occur when the terms of identification are set by others, it also demonstrates the inadequacy of language to articulate experience and identity. The concurrent denial and repetition of being “black” draws attention to the limits and unsuitability of the term. 

However, the subject’s repeated rejection of his own blackness is not a straightforward denunciation of terms, but also generates his search for new ones: “I will be oak or hazelnut or coffee.” 

This line demonstrates the way in which skin-colour becomes an identity. 

Kay’s use of nouns rather than adjectives highlights the absolute, but vaguely incongruous, nature of these terms, and reiterates it with the repeated, “or,” that suggests identity is singular and a matter of choice. Although, perhaps more descriptively accurate of the skin colours that are easily labelled black, these terms set by the subject himself are still revealed to be inherently problematic. 

This is most notable as the term “donkey” is introduced and reified in the line which is repeated by the poem’s narrator. The paradoxical identity, “donkey,” is explicitly chosen to concur with physical racial determinates, however, it also has other semantic associations which include animalism and the slang for foolishness. 

As such, even terms set by oneself, are revealed to be inherently problematic, and language is represented as both unreliable and limiting. In this sense, the term “black British” is tense with its plethora of meanings and their potentially contradictory nature. 

-------------------

Gambia : Gambia, an African kitchen maid, testifies against her mistress for brutality, after the "cruelty man" comes to collect evidence from her owners. reference to the Gold coast? Ghana? 

--------------

Somebody Else

A nice review: 

Short and sweet this week – Somebody Else is poem on identity, a matter long-discussed by Ms Kay who is a biracial woman adopted and brought up by a white family.  Her ultimate conclusion was that rather than trying to be like one person or another, she should instead try to be like herself.  These words are simple but the quest to be like oneself rather than anybody else is something many of us struggle with our whole lives.  If you haven’t got a New Year’s Resolution, remember – when you are busy being somebody else, people mistake you and you mistake yourself.