How using her imagination saved Scottish author Jackie Kay

As Writers & Company wraps up after a remarkable 33-year run, we're revisiting episodes selected from the show's archive. 

Jackie Kay is a prolific writer of prose, poetry and drama who focuses on the theme of identity. 

Born in Edinburgh in 1961, her father was Nigerian, a student of agriculture at Aberdeen University, her mother from the Scottish Highlands. Kay was adopted at birth by a politically committed, white Glaswegian couple. 

When she was almost 30, she published an autobiographical book of poetry, The Adoption Papers. Focusing on a child's search for a cultural identity, it won top poetry prizes in Scotland and England, and effectively launched her career. 

Since then she's written over 20 books and was Scotland's National Poet for five years. She was also recently named a Commander of the British Empire for "Services to Literature" and opened a plaza named after her in Glasgow.

Eleanor Wachtel spoke with Kay in 2007, following the publication of her short story collection Wish I Was Here.

Animals as a mirror

"I absolutely love animals. I know a lot about different animals, about foxes and elephants and tortoises. But it seems that animals are a nice mirror as well — I'm interested in reflecting human beings back and in finding different mirrors. They're not necessarily distorting or circus mirrors. Actually, I think of them as quite a true mirror. And I think that we have examples in literature for the use of animals and metamorphoses and I like the idea that people literally can transform themselves through a relationship with an animal. 

"And I like using animals as metaphors for other things. So in the shark story, the sharks are a metaphor for death. And then in the elephant story, the elephant is a way of trying to deal with death as elephants do. Elephants have their graveyards. They carry bones around for days. They go and visit sites. They have rituals around death.

They have fantastically sophisticated and complicated rituals and that actually human beings, we'd do well now with having — we used to have some of these rituals, but they've gone at least from this part of the world. 

I'm interested in reflecting human beings back and in finding different mirrors.- Jackie Kay

"So I loved riding the elephant story, even though I found it sad to write because I like the idea that these two people — there was a certain nobleness — I've always noticed that people that are dying or very ill have an incredible nobility, incredible generosity of spirit. Even people that die way before their time have a sort of joie de vivre and a sense of humour often about it. So I wanted to explore that.

The strength in facing something really, what I would think of as, terrifying. The strength that people find in themselves to face even the most frightening of things."

Doubleness in Scottish life and literature

"Growing up in Glasgow was a mixed experience. I loved Glasgow and loved Glaswegian talk and humour and the way that people express themselves — the Glasgow double where people, my mom will say, 'I'm not hungry hungry, but I'm hungry,' or  'I'm not tired, tired, but I'm tired.' And you're supposed to know in between these two tired and hungry the exact kind of tired or hungry the person is.

I love that way the language is very, very vibrant and wonderful for a writer. And I love the warmth of Glaswegian people and the humour. I mean humour even in the face of adversity or in tragic situations.

"So I liked that, but I also did get a lot of racist abuse and bullying when I grew up too. So that meant I had a kind of a double relationship to my city and to my country. And that doubleness is a theme that runs all the way through Scottish literature. 

"I think that Scottish writers like Robert Louis Stevenson, James Hogg, Robert Burns, Hugh MacDiarmid, Edwin Morgan, and contemporary ones as well, are interested in doubleness. And I think it might be to do with this 'wee country thing' — that you're part of a wee country. Canadians might have that with America as well, that you're constantly having to stick up for your side. But when you do that, you're always aware of the other, the more powerful other.

So automatically built into Scotland's history, you've got a sense of otherness. So you've got a twin relationship to your country itself. 

"But deeper than that, I think there's something actually in the Scottish psyche, a kind of schizophrenia, a Jekyll and Hyde. I think Jekyll and Hyde comes out of a kind of a nature where people will be very nice, very friendly, very polite, particularly here in Edinburgh, the kind of morning side politeness. And then underneath that there can be a different darker side that is not so easily expressed. And because it's not so easily expressed, it's pushed down into the sort of deeper reaches of the imagination and writers therefore drawing that all on all of the time.

We've got endless examples in Scottish literature to delve into."

Using imagination as protection

"We just return to our childhoods, don't we? All of us do, writers or not. We return back to certain essential things. We go back and we find the little wounded bird and we look at it in the palm of our hands and we stroke its little wings. And sometimes we show it to a friend and we say, 'this little wing was broken in this way, and this was that way.'

Sometimes we have a conversation with a little wounded bird another time, we let it fly again, and it can actually fly. 

"So the things that happened to us that wound us are also the very things that make us strong. And so you have a funny relationship to them. It's not that you would wish it on anybody, to be bullied or to have any of those experiences, but if you have them and you've got some sort of resource to deal with them, which is the imagination itself, which is an incredibly powerful tool. 

I can't think even if I'd be alive if I hadn't had an imagination.- Jackie Kay

"I mean, when I was 12, I'd write revenge poems and it was great. I'd go into my wee sanctuary, which was my place of writing — writing for me was like a kind of a den. I'd go in there and I'd make things up and it was a response.

"So for me the imagination is a kind of a defence and it's saved me. I can't think even if I'd be alive if I hadn't had an imagination, in a funny way. Certainly not alive in the way that I am now."

Jackie Kay's comments have been edited for length and clarity.