An Interview with Jackie Kay

Charles Henry Rowell

Callaloo, Volume 37, Number 2, Spring 2014, pp. 268-280 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cal.2014.0074

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/544919

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 AN INTERVIEW WITH JACKIE KAY

by Charles Henry Rowell

This interview took place on March 27, 2008,

at the home of Jackie Kay in Manchester, England.

ROWELL: I am always struck by comments about you, and they are always dealing with
identity politics. Obviously in the United States we live identity politics, but what does
“identity politics” mean here in this setting in Northern England and in Scotland where
you were born?

KAY: Well, for me I’ve got a complex identity because I’m Scottish and I’m African and
I’m adopted and I was brought up in Glasgow by white, working class socialists. My birth
father was from Nigeria. My birth mother was from the highlands in Scotland. I don’t
think you need to go much further than that to get a sense of a mixture or a clash or a
fusion of identities; for me that has always been very enriching and it’s a starting place in
my writing. I’m really interested in the borders and the borderlines that exist between one
state and another and one country and another, one state of mind and other. I write from
that border country. I never think, oh I wish I hadn’t been adopted because I have won-
derful adopted parents. I never think, oh I wish I had never been brought up in Scotland
because I love Scotland—even though it’s problematic in lots of ways—and I see myself
as being Scottish and black. So that’s my identity and my identity is a complex, shifting
thing. At different points in my life it’s been different things to me. I think identity is fluid.
If you go to Scotland you will see it’s light-years away from Manchester where we are
now. Manchester is a multicultural city which is more at ease with itself racially, like say
London. Scotland has no city that is as at ease with itself as Manchester or London. So
that’s why I live south and because I really wanted, I’ve got a son who’s also black and
I wanted to bring him up in an environment where he’d feel completely comfortable. In
Scotland people still ask you where you’re from even with my accent. They’ll say, where
you from? Where you from really? The other day I was in a wee of Scotland, in Drymen,
spelled Dry-men but pronounced Drimmin, but plenty dry men about in Drymen, and I
was trying on this top and my mum said to me, “That color suits you” and this complete
stranger said to me, “I think that color suits you too dear, where are you from?” so I said,
“I’m from Glasgow.” She paused and she went, “Is that right, because I’ve got a friend
from the Dominican Republic.” [Laughter]

ROWELL: That’s extraordinary. She identified you as a Dominican, a citizen of the Do-
minican Republic, and you remained a Dominican, a culture and a people you knew
nothing about. That’s amazing.
268 Callaloo 37.2 (2014) 268–280
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KAY: We find ourselves in the world with our various, different, complex backgrounds.
We define ourselves often in our society by difference or through difference. Actually
everybody has an identity. White people have a white identity and that travels and shifts
and changes in lots of different ways as well. I think that as we still grow towards a new
period it’s been interesting, reading for instance about Obama and the presidential race
because that keeps on changing its focus.

ROWELL: Does your identity place you in the margins of this society, British society, as
African Americans are treated in the United States? How are you treated as an artist? Is
your work also marginalized? Am I misrepresenting your position in British society when
I imply that you are marginalized? Are you marginalized? What is the impact of that posi-
tion on you as an artist, a writer?

KAY: I think you can have a different vantage point, and the vantage point may be an
advantage and because you’re the outsider, and the writer and the outsider have always
been close bedfellows

ROWELL: You are also a lesbian. That, too, affords you a perspective that the heterosexual,
as far as I can tell, does not have.

KAY: No, that’s right, it allows you to have all sorts of different ways of looking at people.
I remember being at this school once, I was asked to write a play for young people, teenag-
ers, a gay-themed play, and so I asked these groups of young people, fourteen-, fifteen-,
sixteen-year-olds what they thought a lesbian was like and they had long descriptions you
know, said she works at a building site, she swears a lot, and you know she’s manly, she
wears men’s clothes. Then I asked them what’s a heterosexual like, can you define it, and
then I asked them what they wear. They mostly defined themselves as heterosexual, and it
was really interesting to me that being of the main group they didn’t even need a picture
or a definition, and the picture that they had of lesbians and gay people was completely
distorted and a massive stereotype and they weren’t even aware that there was one and
so that’s kind of fascinating. It’s fascinating how if you are gay then you actually are more
likely to have a more realistic picture of what being straight involves.

ROWELL: Who are your readers? Who is it that you imagine are your readers or who is
it that you think as your reader? I am not necessarily asking who it is that you write for
because . . .

KAY: That’s a different question. Well, my readers I meet them all the time because I do a
lot of readings and a lot of my readers come to the readings and they’re quite nice when
I actually get a chance to see them, you know, they’re varied. They are all different ages.
A lot of black readers, gay readers, and all sorts of different people and in different times,
obviously, the readership is different depending on where you are. I have a lot of women
readers, probably more women than men but still a lot of young. You know, I had a young
black guy come up the other week and say, “You know thank God for you” you know and

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it was really great. I said, “Come and tell my son.” So I think you have your real readers
and then you also have an imaginary reader when you write, and your imaginary reader
changes as well depending on the book that you’re writing. In a sense I think that the
reader and the imaginary reader link up to yourself in some way or another eventually
even if you’re not consciously aware because reading is a mirrored image of writing and
reading is the other side of writing and they’re opposite sides of the same coin. So in a way
reading and writing are different ways of talking to yourself or understanding yourself
or finding out more about yourself. So I suppose I start with the first reader of my own
writing which is me at different ages.

ROWELL: You know I’m imagining that the reader, the imaginary reader for poems for
the author, the same author and you’re that same author, is different from the imaginary
reader for you as a fiction writer. I guess in another way I’m asking how do you make
the shift from writing poetry and writing fiction? How do you negotiate between the two
genres, which make different demands on the writer?

KAY: That’s a very interesting question and that’s probably true that with poetry I don’t
think of one single person when I’m writing a poem in a way that I can when I’m writing
a piece of prose which is interesting probably. It’s probably more like talking to a wood
or something, writing a poem like talking to a fly or a wood or a tree it’s got more sur-
rounding space . The difference in writing poetry to prose is I think probably you use just
a different side of your brain. You use the left hand side for one and the right hand side
for the other And for me there’s a different writing routine depending on whether I’m
writing poetry or prose. Poetry is less biddable than prose. It is harder to set the clock to
it. But also poetry seems to attract a different kind of idea, or different ideas.

ROWELL: It’s interesting that you use the word “ideas.” I’m puzzled by that word in this
context, the art of writing creative texts.

KAY: I mean the initial idea that, when it comes, comes with the form in tow.

ROWELL: Do you choose the form or does the form tell you what to do? Does form direct
your imagination?

KAY: That’s what I’m saying, I mean the idea already comes within a form for me, the
idea and the form are already married.

ROWELL: So but before you sat at the desk do you know whether it is a poem or a piece
of fiction?

KAY: Yes, I already know.

ROWELL: Please explain that. Could you use a text of yours or two different texts of yours
and give the autobiography of each text to demonstrate that form? Let’s say The Adoption

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Papers, poetry, and Trumpet, fiction? Then, too, you also write plays for the stage and screen
for films. You even wrote about the Atlantic slave trade in The Lamplighter.

KAY: Yes, okay so with The Adoption Papers I already knew that was going to be a poem and
multiple voices, a long poem and multiple voices and that was the first thing that I did. I
knew I wanted to have two mothers and a daughter and I knew that it had to be poetry. Of
course I could have written The Adoption Papers as a memoir or even as a novel, but it didn’t
come to me like that. It came to me that I wanted to capture the rhythms of ordinary speech
and I wanted to do that in poetry and poetry is a very good and concise way of capturing
the rhythms of speech patterns of what I think of as the Glasgow double say where my
mum might say, “I’m not hungry, hungry but I’m hungry” and you’re supposed to know
what “hungry” that means. “I’m not tired, tired but I’m tired.” So I wanted to catch those
kinds of repetitions and link them to other traditions like blues traditions and so on, and
that definitely seemed to me to be song-like and therefore had to be poetry. With a short
story idea, to me short story ideas exist somewhere between the novel and poetry. They
are like a hybrid form, you know they share the brevity of poetry and the preciseness of
language but they have a more open narrative lens and perspective and so if I have an
idea, say as I did for “The Woman with Fork and Knife Disorder” . . . I was putting my
cutlery away in the kitchen one day and the fork kept slipping out of my hand and going
into the knife bed just a daft little thing it didn’t happen twice but I certainly thought gosh
imagine somebody actually having a disorder where their cutlery was all the time playing
up on them so I wrote this story called “The Woman with Fork and Knife Disorder” and
it’s about this woman who is literally driven mad by her cutlery and it ends you know
setting the cutlery along the hall for a banquet, she opens the fridge and the cutlery falls
out of it, and I knew that it had to be a story it couldn’t have been a novel. If it was a novel
it would’ve been too tedious and too long, you couldn’t keep people with it because short
story ideas can be quite quirky. With the novel, with Trumpet, I had the idea and that im-
mediately seemed to me to be an idea for a novel. I couldn’t have imagined that, although
it’s possible, I could have written that as a sequence of linked poems. I couldn’t quite see
it how it would work as linked poems, but the thing that really excites me anyway as a
writer is experimenting with form so that’s the thing that I really love to do.

ROWELL: What happens when you—in the process of creation—try to merge the poetry
(I don’t know whether you know this happens too consciously or not) and the prose we
expect from fiction. As you so very well know, there are some fiction writers who are also
poets—that is, they have never published poems, but there are passages in their prose
that are so very lyrical, which tells us that they could possibly write poetry. There is, for
example, a poet in Toni Morrison. There was perhaps a poet in Woolf and in Joseph Con-
rad. That is, the prose of these three writers suggests as much.

KAY: Well, I’m not a great fan of densely poetic novels. I don’t really like them myself. I
think that they could be very self-indulgent and drown the reader in their own language,
People often say that Trumpet is a lyrical and poetic novel which kind of irritates me because
I didn’t set out to write it like that. I set out to write a kind of a page turning book and I’m

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not aware that it’s particularly poetic, but it must be I suppose, and that’s maybe because
the poet in you can’t really help yourself you know. It’s probably the most important of
all the forms to me, but still I like when I’m writing a novel to try and find a way that’s
character-based and that’s interested in narrative. I find it a difficult form to try and man-
age, which is why I’ve only written one. You know and the one I have written people keep
asking me to write another one, but to me there’s no point in writing another one until I
have an idea that I think is a novel idea.

ROWELL: What did you think your imaginary reader would experience upon reading
Trumpet?

KAY: Well I didn’t know, I mean a lot of the time I was writing and I thought . . .

ROWELL: What would you like that imaginary reader to experience? I’m trying to avoid
saying what do you want us to think because as an artist I don’t think you want to control
the readers thoughts. I don’t think you want to preach to the reader, you know. I’m trying
to figure out what would you like that experience to be in the best of all possible worlds
in any of your art.

KAY: I want the reader to find an echo, a reflection, a friend, a helping hand, another side
of their self, a route, a path, a way of understanding themselves better, something memo-
rable that sparks them off that reminds them of something similar that has happened to
them at one point. The most wonderful things that readers say to me and have said is all
that, “That was so amazing, that was written as if it was just for me and that reminded
me of such and such a time when I felt such and such a thing.” And if I can do that as a
writer then I’m really, really happy. Sometimes you feel as if you’re being undressed as
you read. That’s the other thing that I like, a kind of nakedness, a vulnerability that the
reader can bring, so they bring their own sexuality to my work, their own dreams, their
own accidents, their own embarrassments, their own triumphs, their own joys, their own
losses, and they bring all of these things to the work. So I never like the work to exclude
the reader. I like to have a house of fiction or poetry that invites the reader in but there’s
plenty of windows where the reader can see back out again. I didn’t want to get them in
trapped and then sort of say, “Here’s the door to the cellar,” and then lead them down
there because it’s up to them to perhaps find other rooms in the house that I’ve built that
I don’t even know are there and to me that’s the most exciting thing. I like the reader
to discover things that I didn’t know were there and to say, “Hey look there’s a . . .” to
find some wee old room and open the door to it and the room to be sort of drenched in
sunlight and find these old shutters and open them up and me to not even have known
it was there. So I think that’s a fascinating relationship that you can have between writer
and reader. The writer isn’t God. The reader can actually find out some things the writer
didn’t know themselves. I like the idea that reading and writing are like the blues, there’s
kind of a call and response. It’s not all one way, it’s not a one-way traffic, and so the most
important thing for me in my writing is to leave space for the reader to come in, not to
give answers but to get the reader to ask questions.

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ROWELL: Of self and the world, or of the world?

KAY: About anything, about the characters, about their motivations, about their secrets,
about the mysteriousness of things, about themselves, about their own past, their own
mothers and fathers, their own memories, their own guilty secrets, the lies they’ve told,
anything, any questions.

ROWELL: I have noticed that when you speak of the novel, you have said over and over,
to character and story or narrative. Why do you invoke those more than you invoke lan-
guage? I know nothing about fiction. Of course, I’ve studied fiction in the university, but I
know, I think that I know, about the poetry. I have devoted most of my student and profes-
sional life reading and studying it. For me, the novel—I should say fiction in general—is
too complex; it is indeed an intricate piece of architecture, whose “pieces” or elements
must be very difficult to orchestrate toward coherence. Has that been your experience?
Even though I say that about fiction, I am almost convinced that character and narrative
are everything in fiction.

KAY: Well, no perhaps they are not everything because a novel is voice and tone and con-
sciousness more than anything else. And by consciousness, I mean there’s a consciousness
that comes out of character because you create a character and then you create a sense of
their consciousness. How self-conscious they are, what their state of mind is like. But in
order to create a voice for that character you have to examine their consciousness and in
order to examine consciousness you have to examine character, but once you’ve done these
things you have to find a voice in their language, in the style, in the tone, try to recreate
the internal and external world of your characters. So all of these things are related and I
can’t really say, oh . . . this is more important than this and this is more important that. In
the end you basically have a massive menu that you’re making when you’re creating, a
banquet really, when you’re writing a novel. You want to create a table. I suppose I take
language, or I think of language as being voice and I think of voice as being related back
to people. But most of my work is voice based and voice is the most important thing to
me. So in that sense language is the most important thing to me. Cause, once I’ve got voice
for a character—whether it’s a poem, monologue, or whether it’s a short story, narrative,
or whether it’s a novel—once I’ve got the voice for the person I can run with it. So I’ll give
you an example. Recently I thought I would like to write a book, a novel, in the voice of
mammy characters that appear in a lot of the American movies, like Hattie McDaniels in
Gone with the Wind. And I wanted to write a different kind of mammy novel. But when I
sat down to try and write this, I couldn’t get the voice. I couldn’t get a voice that would
work. And it wasn’t that I was trying to write in an American voice; I didn’t particularly
want an obvious American voice because the idea was of me writing it. But I couldn’t
find a voice that would work off as me and that voice. I might do it eventually, but I still
couldn’t find it. I couldn’t write it. The whole book went out the window because I couldn’t
get that language right of it at all.

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ROWELL: This is really fascinating. Will you just talk about the tension between these
two, between mask and reality? I immediately thought of the grandfather figure’s advice
at the opening of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Yes, there is tension between the mask and
reality or “factuality.” What about the person who is gay and closeted in his gayness on
the job? Would he not wear perhaps a mask to protect his source of employment? Think
of the Paul Laurence Dunbar poem, which begins this way: “We wear the mask that grins
and lies, / It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, — / This debt we pay to human guile;
/ With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, / And mouth with myriad subtleties.” I’m so
fascinated by your selection of Hattie McDaniels. That’s just brilliant.

KAY: Well, I am really fascinated, like you, by masks. In fact, my last poetry book was
called Life Masks. And the whole book is about all the different ways in which people
wear masks in their lives and all of the various guises that we have. I’m really interested
in disguise as a theme because it seems to link so many human experiences and many of
us at different points of our lives have wanted to run for cover. Or to hide or to pretend
to be something else. Also, we often have that feeling of—I remember when I first went
to university because I was a working class kid, I was the first person in my family to go
to university. I had this really strong feeling that I didn’t belong there and sooner or later,
I’d be found out or I’d be thrown out. And it took me a long while to sort of realize that it
was actually my right to be there. And actually, I was just as bright as all of the other kids.
I had this feeling that I was hiding something from them and the same when I first realized
that I was a lesbian. And I actually had this very intense feeling of being followed then. I
thought I was a bit mad, but I remember that, the feeling that somebody’s following you
or somebody’s watching you, which is really your other self, telling you that maybe this
is wrong and it’s also the voice of society you pick up. So in one way or another really,
throughout all of our lives in different ways, wherever we are, we do take on different
disguises, and with Hattie McDaniels, I’m particularly fascinated in that because it’s a
particular disguise I can relate to as a black person growing up in Scotland, where people
would say, “Haven’t you got a lovely smile” or “Haven’t you got beautiful teeth” and that
would be the thing. Eventually, it feels as if you have put on a mask, like a set of clothes.
And so it is fascinating that you tell all sorts of things, jokes against yourself in a certain
way. And in some ways, black people in white society, they can find themselves, doing
this thing where they have to perform in a sense to white people because white people
have the power.

ROWELL: Yes, the threat and terrorism of White Power over us in the United States. In
the USA we have a very history of having to succumb to whites’ power over and against
us as a dominated people. That legacy still persists in various forms in the USA.

KAY: But it’s interesting because I think there’s this thing of audiences, or concern, or
anxiety about an audience. Early, in a lot of early black writing you think, “Who’s this
being written for?” This is being written to and for white people. It’s not written for other
black people. It’s written for someone to say, “Look, I too can sing America, I too can, you
know.” But it’s that tune and you know you can sing America, you know what it’s like to,

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you know. So that’s kind of interesting: who’s the work being addressed to? Who’s the
listening voice? That’s the interesting thing when Toni Morrison came along because she
put her finger on that and talks about it directly.

ROWELL: Is music very important to you?

KAY: Yeah, music is very, very . . .

ROWELL: Do you think it gets into your art, and how?

KAY: Well, everything I write has some, hopefully, music in it. You know I like all kinds
of different music and early blues, you know those Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith kind of blues
and not the later blues. And the music of early Scottish folk songs and the musical nursery
rhymes and of early Scottish poets like Burns who’s a very musical Scottish poet so yes,
very important. We used to have these sing-songs in my house where I grew up, we would
have sing songs actually to raise money for the communist party, but people would come
in and everyone would sit around and everyone would have their own way of singing.
I’ve got a poem called, “Watching People Sing” which is about that. People seem to express
another part of themselves when they’re singing, and people have a dream singing self if
you like where they acquire ways of being in song that they don’t necessarily possess in
real life. So this dream self comes out with the song and I really like that closeness of the
dream to the song, but apart from that I just like how music can give you your identity.
Remind you of a specific place that you were or a specific time when you fell in love be-
cause they hear your song and a specific time. So it gives you your biography if you like,
your own musical biography. Everyone has their own discography. But you can also get
lost in music. So when you’re listening to a piece of music that you absolutely love you
lose yourself, you lose your own identity, you’re not in the room even. If you’re really into
the music, you’ve gone, you’re just in the music, and so I like music’s ability to give and
to take away and that’s to me the most fascinating thing about it.

ROWELL: Do you think it ever gets into your work?

KAY: Oh yeah, it’s in all of my work, yes.

ROWELL: Explain that.

KAY: Well I just mostly write about music in an obvious way like Trumpet is all about
Jazz, yeah Trumpet is about Jazz. I wrote a book about Bessie Smith the blues singer. I’ve
written several poems about Bessie.

ROWELL: Well I meant in another way, not so much as in the subject as in the aesthetic.

KAY: Yeah.

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ROWELL: In the art of?

KAY: I mean in terms of the beats and the rhythms and the sounds of different kinds of
music you know. Lots of my poems are sort of folk type poems or based on folk songs or
based on blues songs. I might copy say the twelve bar beat of the blues in that kind of way,
but also in a deeper way than that. The language of music gets into my work.

ROWELL: Why Bessie Smith as opposed to Alberta Hunter or B. B. King? What does
Bessie Smith offer you as an artist that they do not?

KAY: Well Bessie was before, Ma Rainey was first and then Bessie came next, so these
were the originals and everyone else copied them. We just have a line just as we were
talking about lineage, you have a lineage of blues women and Bessie learned what she
learned from Ma Rainey. Ma Rainey was the first one out there, and also because there’s
something lesbian going on with Ma Rainey and Bessie which I quite like and Bessie had
a lesbian affair. She fell in love with her husband Jack’s niece and she had a love affair
with Jack’s niece while they were traveling about in the Pullman and I quite like the idea
of that. Going along on her own wee personal train having sex. [Laughter] So it’s not a
bad life really. [Laughter] So yeah that’s why I like Bessie, but also Bessie had a sort of
bravado. I like the fact that she had a temper and she just knocked people down. I like
the idea, talking about nice black people, she was the opposite. She didn’t mind being a
nasty black person. She didn’t give a damn what anybody thought of her. She would go
to these genteel parties you know and literally knock people down that annoyed her and
eat her pig’s foot and knock back her gin, and she didn’t like it when refined alcohol came
in. She still went and tried to get the stuff that you had to cover with a brown paper bag.
So she’s kind of rough and ready and I think that’s quite sexy. [Laughter]

ROWELL: You mentioned Toni Morrison, and you also referred to Langston Hughes.
Apparently African American writers mean something to British readers. Some African
American writers are very important to you.

KAY: Yeah lots and because I grew up in an environment where I wasn’t getting to read
people you know, wouldn’t get any black writers at all really. I think we got Wole Soyinka’s
Telephone Conversation at fifteen at school and that was it and nothing else. It wasn’t until
university that we got introduced to any black writers at all. And then at about nineteen
I became quite obsessed with African American writers because there was nothing, there
were no Scottish black writers that I could read. And I really wanted to explore the whole
sense and the white Scottish writers didn’t really speak to me, if you like, at that time.
So I just became, you know, went to see the bookshop called Sisterwrite, an independent
bookshop, and Compendium, another; and then it was New Beacon Books in London, they
were all independent bookshops. New Beacon Books, an independent black bookshop,
and Sisterwrite, a famous bookshop, and I just bought everything that I could. I schooled
myself, and that’s when I discovered Audre Lorde with The Black Unicorn back in 1981.
That’s when I discovered Toni Morison, when she had only just written two books at

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that point, The Bluest Eye and Sula, and Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Nikki Giovanni,
Ntozake Shange, Sonia Sanchez, you know Barbra Smith, Alice Walker, Meridian. They
got Conditions Five, which we like Conditions Magazine and I used to read these from cover
to cover, over and over. And then I went back and read the early, early books of different
black women, like Ann Petry and Harriet Jacobs. And then mainly I focused quite a lot
on black women but I read a lot of black men as well; I found that really, really thrilling
really thrilling to come across all those writers I can’t describe the excitement of it. It was
just fantastic.

ROWELL: Looking back now, will you comment on the specifics of the impact certain
African American writers made on you during your early years? I assume that they must
have affected you in more than one way at that time.

KAY: Audre Lorde directly influenced my poetry. The Black Unicorn was a concept book,
a unified whole. When I came to publish my first book of poems, The Adoption Papers, I
was interested in trying to create a unified whole, a narrative in poems. I found Audre a
complete inspiration in all sorts of ways. She wrote about silence, and the power of silence,
and the need to speak out and be heard. She wrote about fear. She was openly lesbian,
a zami, as she named herself. She also told me, when I met her, that I shouldn’t have to
choose between being Scottish and black. “You can be both,” she said. At the time, that
was a powerful statement and one that influenced all of my work. Audre allowed me to
see the strength in being both black and Scottish.

ROWELL: When you first began writing, who were your models? And why?

KAY: I was inspired by the Scottish poet Robert Burns, because I loved his forms, his songs,
his politics, the range of his subject matter, and the way he made the Scottish language sing,
the way he made it his own. I was inspired by a lot of Scottish writers like Tom Leonard
and Liz Lochhead and James Kelman, who all made me realize it was possible to write in
your own tongue, to write how you speak and how you think. I read a lot of Phillip Larkin
when I was young. I liked the loneliness in his poetry. I read Pablo Neruda. I loved Sylvia
Plath, and her poem in Three Voices also influenced The Adoption Papers. I even invented a
Baby Lazarus after her Lady Lazarus.

ROWELL: This is an embarrassing question for me to ask, but I’ll ask it any way. What
do you and black Brits in general think of African Americans? What image or images do
you have of us? I assume it is different from what you have of white Americans, European
Americans. I assume that your images of us in the USA are different from those you have
of Caribbean peoples, a multicultural lot. I have always been fascinated by how people
of African descent view us, black Americans.

KAY: It is fascinating, but I think there isn’t a simple answer to that question and at dif-
ferent times African American people were seen differently here. Like I remember in the
1980s in London, and Audre Lorde, actually she was over here at the book fair and she

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very concerned, as was say Maya Angelou, of going back to her African roots; there was a
great move in London at that time for the same thing with Jamaican people, people from
the Caribbean, people from Africa to what, to reclaim, and there was a lot of changing of
names, and reclaiming; and then reclaiming traditions, feeling that some part of you had
been silenced. And then still now that’s changed again from the 1980s to people sort of
thinking that actually the fusion is what is exciting, and that’s reflected in say different
rap songs were you might have Nina Simone starting it. So this way I think rap is actually
a brilliant way, certain rap artists not all, some really, really good ones that have found
a fantastic way to fuse the past with the present and making the past still maintain or
contain some of its integrity by showing how its evolved, and I think rap has found a way
to do that, and yet we haven’t yet ourselves. So I think how African Americans perceive
themselves has changed over the last twenty years, and I can see that.

ROWELL: So you can see that?

KAY: Yeah I can see that very, very clearly.

ROWELL: And it seems so where we’re located in the United States, too. The American
South is still a very distinct region as opposed, for example, to the Northeast.

KAY: Well that’s right.

ROWELL: And Los Angeles is totally different from Houston, Texas, or Chicago.

KAY: Exactly. I spent quite a bit of time in America. I remember once going from San
Francisco to North Carolina, and the guy that was doing my bags at San Francisco, black
guy said to me, “What are you doing going there, girl? You don’t want to do that. You
just be careful, take care.” [Laughter] Anyway, so I got to North Carolina and I told this
as a joke and I thought it was funny but they didn’t think it was funny at all. [Laughter]

ROWELL: Oh no, no.

KAY: Then this retired sheriff came up to me, a white guy, came up to me at the end of
the reading and he said, “You ought not to have done that girl.” [Laughter] Well that was
Indianapolis, actually, yeah he said, “Ain’t nothing the matter with Indianapolis.” I mean
it was really menacing you know.

ROWELL: Yes.

KAY: Anyway I just thought so from North Carolina to Indianapolis to Pittsburgh to New
York to Boston to Seattle, I mean it really depends on where you are in America, and New
York is like a wee village unto itself. It’s like nowhere else in America isn’t it, in a sense
because people are sophisticated and different. San Francisco is also very different from
the rest, and then I suppose somewhere like . . .

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ROWELL: Texas is something else, and rural southern Louisiana is a culture unto itself.
New Orleans is another place, another place all together. It is very much unlike the rest
of Louisiana, a world all its own.

KAY: I’ve never been to New Orleans. I’d love to go there. So when I think perceptions of
how you see yourselves and how other people see you changes and then again someone
like June Jordan is very different from Alice Walker and Alice Walker is very different
from Sonya Sanchez and she’s very different from Nikki Giovanni and then there’s all
the people that have moved there like say Fred D’Aguiar who brings something different
to the American table. There’s a lot of writers spotted around the American universities
creative writing departments that come from that kind of tradition who again would
have a completely different story to tell like Caryl Phillips, who was originally from the
UK and now lives in the US and has actually a triangular relationship, and a lot of black
writers have that triangular relationship. America, Great Britain, and either Africa or the
Caribbean, and it actually reminds of the transatlantic slave triangle if you think about it.

ROWELL: Yes, retracing yourself.

KAY: Yes, interesting thing to retrace. I always had the feeling that if I went to live in
America for good because I did in Berkeley for six months because I got a job there as
the visiting . . .

ROWELL: That’s not the United States. [Laughter] Or I should have said it was not the
USA during the 1960s.

KAY: No it wasn’t but I traveled around.

ROWELL: Tell those people in San Francisco that they do not live in the United States.

KAY: I know, I traveled around a lot when I was there, and I often thought that if I went
to live in America permanently I would lose myself. I would lose myself completely.

ROWELL: Talk about that. I like that. What do you really mean about that?

KAY: I just thought it wouldn’t be so easy to keep myself being Scottish in America and
being black. I just thought that it would just be more difficult and it would be difficult to
find a voice because I think that America, I think it’s difficult enough for African Americans
to have a voice, to find it, maintain it, and keep people interested in it. If you think about
how many African American writers out of all the ones that there are have really made
it over say to this country or out to Europe. It’s really a handful that have really made it.
Then there’s some people that get reinvented every wee while like Zora Neale Hurston
who gets brought back from the dead by Alice Walker, but on the whole there’s a whole
host of writers that people have not heard about at all, at all, at all, at all. Then you take a
writer like me and you go there and you’re also battling to be heard amongst all the writ-

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ers. There simply isn’t the space. I think we disappear in America unless you find a way
to have the country reflect you back, and I think that’s quite a difficult thing to figure out.
I think it’s not just true for African writers or writers from the Caribbean but also true for
white writers. I know lots of white writers that have gone over from this country and lived
over in America and just disappeared. Bang. Unless you find some way to cope with it
like Thom Gunn or W. H. Auden and find something that can travel, that’s transatlantic.

ROWELL: How would you describe your overall reception in the USA? Your reception
as a writer?

KAY: I went on a book tour for Trumpet and the reception varied massively from place to
place and you never know how many were going to come. You might have thirty in Coral
Gables and two hundred in Boston, fifty in Washington and two hundred in Seattle . . .
But I loved touring round the country, and people were very responsive to the readings.
Lots of people said things like, “I didn’t know they had any black people in Scotland.”

ROWELL: Thank you very much, Jackie.

KAY: Thank you, Charles.

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