Section:GDN 12 PaGe:10 Edition Date:190808 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 7/8/2019 16:26 cYanmaGentaYellowbla

• The Guardian
  10 Thursday 8 August 2019
  Arts

B efore Jackie

Kay was a writer, she was a

character. “When you’re adopted,”

she explains over lunch in a Glasgow

cafe, “you come with a story.” Her

adoptive mother Helen – fascinated

by her possible origins – encouraged

young Kay to speculate about her

birth parents. It was known that

her father was Nigerian, her mother

a white woman from the Scottish

Highlands. Were the y, perhaps, torn

apart by racial prejudice in 1960s

Scotland?

There was tragic romance to

that idea, and a fairytale quality

in the notion that Kay, off spring of

forbidden love, should come to live

with John and Helen, two people

who had plenty of love – not to

mention songs and stories – to share.

Little wonder that Kay has come to

think of herself as a creature not only

of genetics but of the imagination.

As Scotland’s national poet writes in

her beautiful memoir Red Dust Road ,

she is “part fable, part porridge”.

Red Dust Road is to be staged at

the Edinburgh international festival.

I catch some scenes in a National

Theatre of Scotland rehearsal room:

Stefan Adegbola and Sasha Frost are

running through the moment when

Adopted at

birth, Scotland’s

national poet

Jackie Kay tells

Peter Ross why

she’s bringing the

tragicomic search

for her birth

parents to the

Edinburgh stage

Back

to my

roots

PHOTOGRAPHS: MURDO MACLEOD/GUARDIAN; PA

‘There’s no point

holding on to

bitterness’ ...

Kay in Glasgow

Kay, visiting Nigeria, meets her

birth father Jonathan. “Did you ever

think of me in all those years?” Frost

asks. “No, of course not,” Adegbola

replie s. “Why would I? It was a

long time ago.” This exchange fe els

brutal, but Kay looks on impassive.

She lived it.

Kay is 57 with a strong, theatrical

energy. Joy, the name she was

given by her birth mother, suits her.

There is, though, a darkness, too.

She has written of “a windy place

right at the core of my heart”. How

does she feel about Red Dust Road

becoming theatre? “It’s exciting but

I underestimated how diffi cult I

would fi nd it,” she says. “ I’ve found

the process challenging because it

comes at a hard time in my life.

My mum is about to go into a care

home for a while, and my dad’s

quite frail.”

John Kay is 94. He read the fi rst

20 pages of the Red Dust Road script

and handed it back with the words:

“Jackie, I cannae read any mair.

I’m saturated in my ain life.” His

daughter feels the same. Yet she has

returned again and again to her own

story. Her fi rst poetry collection,

The Adoption Papers, written in

the 1980s before she had made

contact with either lost parent,

imagined her biological mother’s

voice. “I gave birth to my birth

mother,” says Kay with a laugh.

“How creepy is that?”

Red Dust Road, more than 20

years on, told the story of her

search for her parents. Her most

recent book, Bantam, contains two

poems about her birth mother, who

died in 2016 and whose name was

Margaret – but in Red Dust Road,

she is referred to as Elizabeth. Kay

attended the funeral and read two

poems: one during the service,

another at the graveside. It was

a diffi cult experience. She was

introduced as the national poet

of Scotland, she says, but not as

Margaret’s daughter. “I found that

very hurtful, but I will get over it.

There’s no point in holding on to

rancour and bitterness.”

Although she built a relationship

of sorts with her birth mother after

meeting her for the fi rst time in

1991, she only ever had that one

meeting – in 2003, in an Abuja

hotel – with her biological father.

The scene, as she recreates it, is

tragicomic: Jonathan is a born-again

Christian who preaches and dances

and sings at her, stopping only to ask

her inappropriate questions about

her lesbian relationship: “So how

do you have sex?” Kay had hoped

that they would meet again, but he

refused. They are not in contact,

although she is in touch with his

sons, one of whom is coming to see

Red Dust Road.

I tell Kay the memoir made me

feel angry, on her behalf, towards

her birth father. This, she says,

‘I used to not

feel at home’ ...

Kay growing

up in Scotland

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