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The date on the paper was April 1962. “So she must have just found me,” explains Kay. “And straight out on demo.”
Kay was adopted by Helen and John Kay, both committed socialists, and grew up in Glasgow. That march against Polaris was the first of many that Kay would attend over the years. In A Life in Protest, the third poem in Kay’s new collection of poetry, called May Day, she records some of them; Back to the Night parades. Pride marches, kneeling in memory of George Floyd.
In short, a whole line of Marching Jackies, holding flags and singing, singing, singing down the years. Venceremos. Free Nelson Mandela. Sing if you’re proud to be gay.
“Marching Jackies, I like that,” Kay says in that soft, familiar Scottish voice that sounds like a warm hug.
“And some of the demonstrations I’ve been on throughout my life I have no memory of,” he continues.
“I met this old friend recently who is a farmer in Dumfries and Galloway. And he told me when he came to Stirling [University] to visit me, he was delighted. It was all very exciting.
“I had taken him on a Back to Night march and I had dressed up as a back street abortionist. I was like, ‘What? What was I really wearing?’”
Kay is smiling and it’s good to see. Calan May is a book full of defiance, but it also has a heavy weight to it. Helen, Kay’s mother, died in 2021, the year after her father John. Kay, as she writes in Calan May, is currently “walking the long corridor of grief,” trying to find the words to ease the journey.
“There’s nothing between me and the sky now,” he said, reciting a line from a poem in the book, Mother’s Day, 2021.
“I came across that line in my head. It describes how I feel having lost my mother. There is nothing now between me and the sky.”
Protest, pain and poetry are the themes of today’s conversation. The first feels more urgent than ever given the increasing restrictions placed on those who would challenge the status quo by the current Westminster government.
“We live in horrible, horrible times with the most despicable government. Just when you think it couldn’t get any worse it does. Just when you think they wouldn’t do another thing they do another thing. And it’s incredibly deep, shocking to the core. There are some things that you would think are basic human rights that we’re missing out on.”
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That is why she marches, why she has always marched. Kay looks back on her life in protest with a mixture of pride and frustration. “There has been a change,” she notes. “There’s gay marriage now. We live in a society where you will have a man asking his husband to sing like that on radio phone programmes.
“But then you can look at the lack of change, at the change you would have expected. When I was 17 years old and joined the Anti-Nazi League and on Anti-Apartheid marches I didn’t think I would be here kneeling in my local park after the death of George Floyd. I thought racism was a battle we could fight and maybe win.
“I thought we wouldn’t have a world that is at war the way it is at war now.”
She paused, sighing. “It’s very stressful, the world at the moment. For me it has never been more stressful. I’ve never been closer to feeling hopeless about it.
“But I really feel that we have a duty to cling to hope.”
May Day is a collection of poems that not only corrals all the marching Jackies in their dungarees, Red Kickers and Angela Davis Afros, but also collects the love and loss of parents, political heroes (Paul Robeson, Jimmy Reid, Jimmy Airlie, Annie Besant, Mick McGahey all appearing) and the odd poet too.
Like MacDiarmid. A friend of the family.
“That big head of hair, huge ego and when you went to Brownsbank [MacDiarmid’s home near Biggar], the cottage was full of green spikes from the Penguin detective series. He loved his detective books.
“I know he has lots and lots of faults. He was terribly flawed as a man. But the big head, the big hair and all the contradictions I embrace.
“The particular poems of his that I really love – because there was a lot of his work I really didn’t like – are these short lyrical poems. I just feel that they are all wonderful; six lines or seven or eight.”
“Mars is fragile in overwhelming…” I begin, reciting the opening line of McDiarmid’s The Bonnie Broukit Bairn.
“Actually, if you’re reading that again it’s a warning for the planet,” Kay reminds me. “He was often very knowledgeable about the things he wrote about. I have that in my bathroom. I read that poem every day.”
There is a poem in May that I want to ask about. Inspired by a sketch Kay came across in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Fanny Eaton, The Pre-Raphaelite Muse is the story of a real 19th century woman, a working class mother of 10, who, although forgotten by this, a huge picture. impact in its time. She posed to the artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Her image was used on the cover of an edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. And yet she ended up in a pauper’s grave.
Eaton’s is not the kind of Black British story we hear enough about, let’s face it. “I felt we needed to honor our complicated past,” Kay agrees. “We need to have more Fanny Eatons. We can’t tell a one-note story.”
There is a postscript to the poem, he adds. A descendant of Eaton heard Kay’s poem while visiting the Fitzwilliam and as a result the family invited Kay to come and read it when Eaton’s headstone was finally erected in 2022.
It is now three years since Kay stepped down from the role of Scotland’s Makar. Does she miss it?
“No, I don’t miss having a big public role. Although I’m good at talking, I’m quite shy.
“But I loved it. And I loved people stopping me in the street and going, ‘Makar.’ “And I liked the sense of belonging, an easy sense of belonging that I’ve never felt in my whole life in Scotland. I liked that, finally feeling like I belonged to my country.”
The years since she quit have been difficult for the arts and culture in Scotland and the UK in general. Kay is horrified by the cuts that have affected the arts and closed libraries. As we speak in early April Aye Write has just been canceled (the partial restoration was still in the future).
“The arts need to understand ourselves, it’s that simple,” argues Kay. “We need stories, we need poems, we need easy access to libraries, to festivals. I think it cannot be overestimated how important they are to people or what a difference they make in people’s lives.”
I wonder what Glasgow, the city of her childhood – a city that now includes the Jackie Kay Plaza at Strathclyde University – means to her now?
“I’ve been thinking a lot about this. When you lose people, do you belong to the place in the same way? I have to find out what Glasgow means to me now that mum and dad are dead.
“If I’m in some other city – Newcastle or whatever – and the announcement comes over the tannoy, ‘The train for Glasgow Central is leaving…’ it really hurts.
“That’s personal. But beyond that, Glasgow is a city full of contradictions. A city with a great radical past, a shipbuilding city, a city that grew like Jimmy Reid and Jimmy Airlie into the national heroes they were. A city that welcomed Paul Robeson, welcomed Nelson Mandela, and a city that had an extraordinary artistic tradition. Still doing.
“Glasgow is a really vibrant city, a city with a huge big heart and it gets up and back on its feet again after every random disaster.
“But on the other hand there’s Buchanan Street, there’s Virginia Street, there’s the tobacco lords, there’s the fact that the average Glaswegian doesn’t know that the city was founded on the slave trade and it’ all these complicated things to say about Glasgow too. ”
No one is in a better position to say it. Jackie Kay is now 62, but will still march when needed. This is a protest.
May Day, by Jackie Kay is published by Picador, £10.99
