dialects, idiolects and multilingual poetries 179THE ‘BIG ONE, BETTER TONGUE’: JACKIE KAY
The intervention of Scots dialect in Jackie Kay’s poetry empha-
sises the relationship of language to a sense of place, tribalism and
identity. Kay is the child of a Nigerian father and white Scottish
mother (later adopted by a white Scottish couple). Her poetry
documents the diffi culty of her positioning in a Scottish landscape,
and how language use asserts affi liations while also presenting
diversities. Nancy Gish suggests that ‘Kay’s self-conscious play on
voices, dialects and discourses destabilizes any notion of a consist-
ent unifi ed self.’^25 Kay states that ‘people can’t contain being both
things, being Black and being Scottish without thinking there is an
inherent contradiction there’.^26 These tensions come to the fore in
‘In My Country’, in which the poet is asked by a woman, ‘Where
do you come from?’ and Kay’s response is, ‘Here. These parts’.^27
Finding a space of identifi cation is key to many of Kay’s poems and
this sense of in-betweenness or liminality, Scottish-Nigerian, gay
vs straight, Scots dialect vs English, permeates her work:
If you are brought up in a place, you get that identity very,
very fi xedly. And you don’t necessarily get a sense of your
being Black, because there’s nothing around you affi rming
that you are. So although I was steeped in Scottish culture, of
which I’m very appreciative, I never had any sense of Black
culture at all, until I went about fi nding that and creating that
for myself.^28In ‘Old Tongue’ from Life Mask ( 2005 ), Kay negotiates her rela-
tionship with received pronunciation and Scots dialect. Describing
a child’s journey ‘south’, the poem portrays the colour and
vibrancy of dialect language against the staid confi nes of so-called
‘correct’ enunciation. This movement from place is coupled with
an abstracted sense of loss. Words are mourned since the poem
chronicles not only the loss of accented speech, but of an alterna-
tive language use. Attempting to fi t into a new environment, the
child suffers the loss of an alternative language which gives expres-
sion to emotion and even insult: ‘eedyit’ for idiot, ‘heidbanger’
for someone out of control.^29 Other words describe the timbre of