“I think it’s a huge advantage to be adopted . . . because you have the presence of ‘the Other,’ and you have to deal with that.”
Afro-Scottish writer Jackie Kay has no shortage of stories exploring her adoption and no dearth of genres to do it in either. Kay’s books span the range of memoirs to novels to poetry collections—and she is also an accomplished playwright. Born in 1961 to a Scottish mother and Nigerian father, she was adopted by a Scottish couple and raised in Glasgow. Her best-known books include The Adoption Papers (Bloodaxe Books, 1991), Trumpet (Vintage, 2000), and Red Dust Road (Picador, 2011). Shannon Gibney (GV, below) had the opportunity to talk with Kay while she was in Tallahassee, Florida, at the end of March, where she was a keynote speaker at the Alliance for the Study of Adoption & Culture conference.
GV: I read your first book when I was in my 20’s. I just kind of stumbled upon it. It felt like a gift because at that time, in the 90’s, there really weren’t a lot of first-person explorations of the stories of mixed race transracial adoptees.
Even though it was a completely different culture—the Scottish example, being an American—I felt like there was a lot of crossover, a lot things that I could identify with. So I just wonder if you could talk about that first book and your process for writing it, putting together a long series of poems. What were you hoping to accomplish and how was it received?
JK: I thought that I would like to write about the experience of adoption from three points of view: the birth mother, the adoptive mother, and the daughter. I find that really interesting to start out with multiple viewpoints.
Interestingly enough, the daughter, whose experience is closest to my own, was the hardest to write. I found writing both of the mothers easier.
GV: Why is that?
JK: Because I was imaginatively involved in creating them. Whereas the experience of the daughter was closer to my own, and therefore it was harder to find a voice for her that was my own, but not my own. I wanted the adoptive mother’s voice to be earthy and humorous, the birth mother’s voice to be ethereal and ghostlike, and for the daughter’s voice to appear somewhere between those two voices. So I thought of it as a piece of music with three very distinct voices and sounds and three very distinct purposes.
So the daughter’s voice takes the narrative forward in the story. The birth mother’s voice is more lyrical, and the adoptive mother tells you the story of the past. So they each have a triad’s way of looking at it thematically and structurally and in terms of form. It seemed very important to me to get that trio of voices up and running. Plus, I didn’t want to write a book that seemed self-obsessed in any way, so the multiple viewpoints helped with that.
But I was really astonished when the book sold out within six months, and it’s reprinted lots and lots and lots. For a poetry book, it’s done amazingly well. The publishers phoned me up, actually, after it had been out for a few weeks, and they said, “We can’t understand this—this book’s selling really well. I guess we’ll have to go back and read it again, he said” [laughs]. So even the publishers didn’t think that it would sell particularly well. I was honestly overwhelmed by the response that I got. It made me realize that there’s so many people whose lives are connected to the theme of adoption, one way or another—be the birth parents, be the fellow adoptees, be the brothers and sisters of adopted children, be the adoptive parents.
What it made me think was that there’s lots and lots of different ways that people experience loss in their lives, and adoption, mythically and narratively, taps into that. And I suppose that was what I was trying to do with that book, although I wouldn’t have put it like that then.
GV: What about your next book, Trumpet? Can you talk a little bit about that book, what your goals were, and what it turned out to be?
JK: Trumpet‘s my first novel. I wanted to write a story about a jazz musician who wanted to live all his life as a man, and when he dies, it’s discovered that he is genetically, biologically, a woman. And the only person who knows this is his wife, Millie. His adopted son, Coleman, doesn’t know it. I was interested in the tensions between who knows what. And again, I was interested in creating a multiple viewpoint novel. So the story of Trumpet is told from several points of view, but you never really hear from the jazz musician himself, apart from several times in the book.
So I was interested in the concept of an absent presence, in writing about grief, in writing about love and the fluidity of identity, and how music and identity are linked. There were lots of things I was concerned with. Coleman’s also adopted. Fundamentally, I wanted to tell a story of love and loss.
GV: A lot of writers stick with one genre. So in speaking about writing across genre, what was different for you, in terms of the process of writing? How did you come to an understanding that this particular story was going to be a novel, a piece of fiction?
JK: I think for me, the idea and the form come hand-in-hand. So I never sort of sit and have an idea and think, “What form will this be?” I already know the form. So the idea for Trumpet came in a novel form. I’d never written a novel before, but I just knew it had to be a novel. It wasn’t going to be a memoir, it wasn’t going to be a short story, it wasn’t going to be a book of poems. The same thing for The Adoption Papers. I had the idea that it was definitely going to be a series of linked poems that would be narrative, even novelistic, but definitely would be in poetry because I wanted to catch the rhythms and repetitions of peoples’ speech, and that lends itself to poetry. I mean, it’s fairly arbitrary whether you have something in one form or another. For me, the two [form and content] are married together already.
GV: Your next book was Red Dust Road.
JK: Yes. I think there’s a lot of connections between each of my books. In a way, I like the idea of each of my books having conversations with each other, as well as with their potential readers. I like the idea of building up a body of work, where one work feeds off another, feeds off another. So, hopefully, if you have any readers that read all of my work, they will have echoes and ricochets and conversations, and will find one book a companion to another.
Red Dust Road is similar to Trumpet in that it’s multi-viewpoint. And although it’s a memoir, although it’s my story, it’s also the story of my birth parents, and it’s the story of my adoptive parents. I tried, as faithfully as possible, to capture their authentic voices, their speech rhythms, their syntax, their repetitions. So after they’ve read the book, I want people to feel like they’ve spent the whole afternoon with my mom and dad.
The interesting thing about being adopted, as you know yourself, is that your story’s never singular. It seems singular, but on the other hand, it taps into something quite universal, or taps into something that unnerves people, or makes people be able to relate in so many different ways. I wanted that to be reflected in the form itself, and to recreate these big characters in my life: my mom and dad, who are larger than life in the book, and so is my birth father.
The person who was hardest to write in Red Dust Road was my birth mother, to find her voice, because her voice has changed. She used to have a Scottish accent, and now it’s English. That was a hard voice to capture. And also because she’s moved away from herself, in the sense that she has vascular dementia, so she’s already becoming further and further away from her own memories. So she was very hard for me emotionally to connect with and write about.
Really, the book is about what makes us who we are: nature, nurture. It’s a journey really, from Glasgow to Lagos to Aberdeen and beyond. In the course of that journey, I ask lots of questions of myself, and of all four of my parents, and of the various different friends that I meet along the way. I never thought I would write a memoir. It was provoked, really, by me finding my birth father and my life suddenly becoming a story that was happening to me. There was no point in me making anything up—it was already weird enough.
I wrote Red Dust Road twice—the first time chronologically, and then I threw it away. And the second time, I wrote it episodically because it seems to me that memory works like that: things years apart can bounce off each other and seem as if they existed right together. I was interested in the collision of memory and these kinds of ways that it’s prompted by something, and right now reminds you of something, in echoes. I wanted to capture that in the structure itself. Once I found a structure for it, I found I could write it.
GV: What are you working on now?
JK: I’m writing a novel at the moment. For me, writing long prose, whether it’s Red Dust Road, Trumpet, or this project, is the hardest thing to write. I find I’m more naturally a poet or a short story writer.
The new book is called Bystander, and it’s really about a group of people who witness an event, and whether or not they are passive or active about the things that they witness. Writing a novel is a struggle for me; I’ve been writing this novel for a number of years. I’ve got all the themes, all the ideas, and the form, but it’s the actual characters that are taking longer to properly develop, but I hope to get there by the end of the summer. Writing a novel to me is like having a long illness. It’s not the easiest of forms.
GV: How do you feel your identity as an adoptee has either influenced or affected your life as a writer?
JK: That’s an interesting question. I think when you’re adopted, right from the get-go, as you say in the States, you are introduced to this imaginary “Other,” this other presence that you can color in if you like. You can give them eyes, nose, voice, height. You can make them up, literally. You have a person close to you that you have to make up. You have a stranger that is a mother, a haunting stranger. You can be haunted by the absence or you can be imaginatively engaged by it. And I think I chose to be imaginatively engaged by the absence of my birth parents from the very beginning, and I think some of that made me into a writer.
So you have two things going on: you have “the real,” which is your adoptive experience, and you have the imaginary, which is your birth experience. When people say, “Who are your real parents?” that always seems to me a strange question because to me, my “real” parents are the ones who brought me up, and my birth parents were actually much less tangible, much more ethereal. So that already introduces you to something that’s topsey-turvey from the way that society sees things. It already means that you’re questioning what makes us who we are. And really as a writer, that’s your biggest question. Any writer, whether you’re adopted or not, is interested in the human condition, is interested in the mysteries—the things that we can’t explain and the things that we can.
So, in many ways, adoption gives you a head-start. I think it’s a huge advantage to be adopted, even to be unhappily adopted is an advantage in some ways because you have the presence of “the Other,” and you have to deal with that. One of the ways to deal with difficult things, for me anyway, has always been to write and to express myself through my writing. Not to make my writing into some kind of therapy because I want it to be crafted. But one of the challenges for me is to find a craft that accurately captures the conundrums and the complexities of my adopted identity: of that woman growing up in that white environment, with that absent African father. That’s my story, and I’ve found various ways to write that story. I’ll probably continue to do that. Each writer finds a territory that they’re interested in and that territory feels uniquely mine. There’s not a lot of other Black Scottish writers out there [laughs].
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