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THE BORN IDENTITY INTERVIEW WRITER JACKIE KAY EXPLAINS HOW ADOPTION
Sunday Herald, The, Nov 4, 2007 by PAUL DALGARNO
A DARK hush fills the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester, where technical rehearsals are under way. Three young women form a seated triangle, separated by high panes of glass. A spotlight illuminates the speaker.
"What did you call me?
Say that again. Sam-bo - I shove him up against the wall. Say that again, you wee shite." The words spill out with venom, too fast. The director steps in: "Could we slow it down a bit?" Lisa Livingstone, the 24-year-old actress, bows her head, composes herself. Part-Nigerian, part-Scottish, her cultural make-up mirrors that of the work's writer Jackie Kay, who sits next to me in the dark, looking on at her younger, imagined self. "Shall we go?" she whispers. "Let's sneak out." Anyone who knows Kay, the Scottish poet and novelist, will be familiar with her first work, The Adoption Papers, in which she weaves together the three voices of her younger self, her adoptive mother and her imagined birth mother. First published in 1991, it has been reprinted several times and forms the basis of this new stage adaptation.
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The story pulls no punches, hitting painful emotional lows, but is peppered with redeeming highs.
"I wanted to tell a story about adoption that hadn't been told before, " says Kay. "A positive adoption story, which to this day is still quite rare." This is an exciting time to be Jackie Kay. In tandem with The Adoption Papers, her children's novel, Strawgirl, is being staged by the Royal Exchange in celebration of 30 years in business. On the bookshelves this month are Red, Cherry Red, a collection of poetry for children, and Darling, a book of new and selected poetry that spans her career. The selection process was a way of shedding "old clothes that no longer fit", says Kay, while salvaging the poems she wanted to keep in print. That all of this should be coming to an apex for Kay was unplanned, a series of chance timings, as is the fact that it coincides with the start of National Adoption Week.
For all she has written on the subject, the circumstances behind Kay's own adoption remain murky. She has always worked in the "border country between fact and fiction": a sketchy detail here, a full-bodied work of art there. She knows, for example, that her birth mother is from Nairn; that she was a nurse; that she fell pregnant to a Nigerian student at Aberdeen University. She thinks, then confirms, that the couple met at an Aberdeen dancehall. Born in Edinburgh in 1961 where she was pulled out by forceps and suffered minor brain damage Kay clung precariously to life in an incubator for months. She shows the forceps scar that still lines her left cheek, less pronounced than it once was, but still visible. The name on her birth certificate was Joy, a name chosen by her biological father, and she was five months old when she was adopted. These were the facts, and for a long time little else mattered.
"My birth mother was always my imaginary mother because I had to make her up from these small details, " she says. "I knew she was from the Highlands, and that she had lived with her grandmother in a cottage. They were quite fairytale-like details, especially for a young writer." Kay was the second child to be adopted by John and Helen Kay. The couple were unable to have children and, as active socialists and non-churchgoers, struggled to adopt through predominantly religious agencies. Both white Glaswegians from Bishopbriggs, they wanted another black child to raise alongside their adopted son, Maxwell, who they had almost missed out on getting. "When they went to adopt my brother, my parents were told that there were no babies at all, " says Kay. "Just as they were leaving, my mum thought to say that they didn't mind what colour the baby was, and that suddenly changed everything." Adoption was a word Kay grew up thinking she knew, but didn't fully understand. It was only after seeing a western on TV, and asking why the darkerskinned people were always causing trouble, that the penny finally dropped. "It was very confusing, " she says, "because I loved my mum dearly. The question I wanted to ask in The Adoption Papers was whether somebody is your real mother because they have the same DNA and genes, or because they've brought you up, hidden your milk teeth and pretended to be Santa." In Kay's case, the latter answer seems to fit. She feels lucky to have been picked by John and Helen, and "would have chosen them from an orchard of parent trees" had she been given the choice at birth.
