On Being a Writer: An Interview with Jackie Kay (2024)
C.J. Griffin and Amrita Shenoy
Working across the page, stage, and airwaves, Jackie Kay is one of the most accomplished writers in Britain today. In this interview, held on 13 September 2023, C.J. Griffin (CG) and Amrita Shenoy (AS) ask questions ranging across the different literary forms and themes that have animated Kay’s oeuvre over the last thirty years. In response, Kay reflects on the craft of writing and her career as it has unfolded alongside rapid technological, social, and political change in Britain and beyond.
CG: During a short film you made with the Scottish Book Trust, you said that you ‘write in order to ask questions, not to answer them’. What are the questions you are asking when you write? Have they changed over time?
Jackie Kay: Every book brings its own set of dilemmas and questions, really. In Trumpet, I was interested in the basis of identity — particularly gender identity and how the act of love could transcend concerns or worries about identity. In other words, if you love somebody enough, you believe them. In May Day,I was interested in protest. Protest from throughout my life and in grief, including whether grief is a form of protest.
In The Adoption Papers, I was drawn to ideas of nature and nurture and which of them is stronger in asserting people’s personalities and identities. I suppose the loose theme of a lot of my books is identity and the voice — how the voice works and whether the voice is character and can be plot.
Seamus Heaney once said that every writer has their own plot, their own wee patch of ground they keep digging. It doesn’t matter if the patch of ground is quite small as long as, each time, you find something surprising. My little patches are identity, voice and character and I keep trying to explore these themes from different angles.
CG: In art and life there is a sense of there being a ‘real’ truth and, equally, a ‘fictional truth’ – something you yourself have acknowledged. What does ‘fictional truth’ mean for you? Do you think its distinction from ‘real’ truth is becoming harder to maintain?
JK: Well, I think there are two kinds of fictional truth that currently operate in our world. There’s one I call a pure version of the fictional truth where your imagination gets to something closer to the truth than ‘the truth’. When I, say, created my character Mohammad Nassar Sharif, the registrar in Trumpet, I didn’t interview lots of registrars for the research. He was loosely based on a fleeting moment from when I was registering the birth of my son. Everything else about him was fictitious. Yet, he seemed closer to the truth than if I had to try to recreate somebody from reality.
Whereas Sophie Stones in Trumpet is a character we see often in our society. We have craven, wanton, corrupt, lawless journalists who make things up for their living and distress people. Because she was too close to that truth, I couldn’t breathe imaginative truth into her. And so, she’s the least successful character in the book. For a fictional character to work, it is necessary that something else breathes in them.
There’s another kind of fictional truth that exists in our society. We live in times where reality is challenged and threatened all the time, and where people fictionalise themselves through different social media outlets as the line dividing their real life and their imaginative life is very, very thin indeed. Nobody can tell who the real person is anymore. So, we have a big challenge now, with the question of the truth of a self. And it has a different answer than I would have given ten or fifteen years ago.
AS: Some of your works, such as The Adoption Papers (1991) and Life Mask (2005), have often invited autobiographical readings. However, in terms of literary appreciation, might this limit a text’s autonomy to the scope of the author’s life? How separate can the art be from the artist?
JK: When I first wrote The Adoption Papers, I didn’t expect it to be paid the attention it got. Neither did the publisher.
I think people saw it as a personal story. I appreciate the idea that I write from my own experience but my own experience intersects with those of other people’s. My hope is that a reader will read my works and identify with them however they like. In fact, people do often identify with my writing, and write to me to share how they’ve engaged with my writing.
I think people saw it as a personal story. I appreciate the idea that I write from my own experience but my own experience intersects with those of other people’s. My hope is that a reader will read my works and identify with them however they like. In fact, people do often identify with my writing, and write to me to share how they’ve engaged with my writing.
As to the question of whether it limits a work to just read it autobiographically, I think it does, yes. If we read Sylvia Plath’s poems, for instance — not that I’m comparing myself to her, I’m just talking about a writer who gets read very autobiographically — then sometimes, we can put onto the work itself, things that we know from the life [of the author]. And we don’t then give the writer the freedom or the license to be completely imaginative. An awful lot of writers through time have been hampered by this very dilemma. For Anne Sexton, she was affected by how often her work was read as a cipher for her personal experiences. I think I managed to swerve this problem of seeing myself as representative — since, I don’t even really see that my work, once I’ve written it, is completely me anymore.
AS: Writers of colour in Britain have often discussed a literary ‘ghettoisation’ in the global literary scene, a typecasting of marginalised writers as political voices. In your view, what could readers and scholars of literature do differently to circumvent this problem?
JK: One thing they could do is regard the text itself and not make assumptions or necessarily connect one writer to the other. There are writers that exist in the same space and time, like the writers of the Harlem Renaissance. It’s exciting when you read their works together. Yet, connections between writers’ works happen almost by a process of osmosis or modes we can’t easily, sociologically, explain. But since black writers have been marginalised for so long, literary critics have now got [to find] a way of looking at their works. Sometimes they then lump such writers together and perpetuate a ‘ghettoisation’. I tend to elude such groups because I am a Scottish black writer who writes in a voice different from that of the stereotype for the black writer. Yet, it’s equally problematic if there’s no way of grouping and identifying people because this will also lead to their invisibility.
I would put black writers in parts of the bookshops or in groups where they could easily be found. But I would also advise on doubling up and having them everywhere in the rest of the shop.
CG: Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds is a digital archive of Black and Asian British contemporary writing. How have Britain and Britishness figured in your own writing about Scotland and Scottishness?
JK: Seemingly, Scotland sees itself as a victim of an English colonialism — which it has been, definitely. But it is also true that Scotland’s own benefits from the British Empire haven’t been discussed enough. In The Lamplighter, I wrote about how British cities profited from money from the slave trade. One of the cities that the book covers in detail is Glasgow — a city that would hardly have invited attention for its connections with the slave trade. People knew about the tobacco lords but they didn’t read more into names such as ‘Virginia Street’ or ‘Jamaica Bridge’. Similarly, in the popular imagination, a plantation owner is never wearing a kilt. We need to grow up as a country. It’s taken Britain, generally anyway, an awfully long time to acknowledge racism in its institutions. There are examples of institutionalised racism even in leftfield things.
AS: Interestingly, ‘Makar’ translates to ’maker’. In this sense, the poet laureate and, by extension, the writer, is a maker of fictive worlds. In your time as Makar, which fictive worlds did you feel most compelled to make and share?
JK: I like how democratic the term ‘Makar’ is. It comes from the old word ’to make things’, used in the fifteenth century to describe bards. This was not exclusively Scottish, at first. For instance, Geoffrey Chaucer, too, was referred to as a Makar. It’s the opposite of the word ‘laureate’, which implies monarchs, kings, queens and laurels. Rather, Makar suggests that poetry can be practical — essential as well as elegiac. For example, when I read about the ‘Baby Box of Essential Things’ project, I wrote to the Scottish Government to ask if a poem could be included as an essential thing. To my surprise, they said ‘yes’. That’s something that is important to me; that poetry can have its uses.
I also read the poem ‘Threshold’ for the opening of the Scottish Parliament. I wanted it to be a multi-voiced poem in many different languages to show Scotland as a place of welcome. Because, in that year, 2016, Scotland had voted very differently on Brexit than England and Wales, with 62% of the Scottish population wanting to stay in Europe. So being Scots Makar was a thrilling job to have and, also, to be able to go around Scotland, to the tiny Hebridean islands and see how those places have changed. For instance, I was in North Uist, near Hebrides, and I was surprised that there was a huge lesbian turnout for me. It gave me a sense of how the country was changing; from rural Scotland, down to round all the islands and the mainland, and urban Scotland. And it was great to try and reflect that in my writing.
AS: The ‘many-voicedness’ you discuss can be seen across your works. As you mentioned, a recent example of this is ’Threshold’ which invites Scotland’s diverse ethno-linguistic identities to unite in the same ‘living room’. What is it about multiplicity that you think enables such powerful expression?
JK: The refrain of ‘Threshold’ is ’it takes many tongues to tell a story’. I believe that. The world — particularly the Western world — is very ethnocentric. It promotes certain global languages, overlooking other languages that people speak. People cannot be excluded on such bases and locked out of experiences. Particularly in Scotland, there are more languages spoken than people automatically think of. For instance, Italian Scots and Chinese Scots have been there for years. I then wanted to have as many languages as were actually spoken in Scotland to make the poem multiple. Because, we are obsessed with singular truths in our society, but I believe the truth is multiple. And the closer we get to multiple voices telling their stories, the better society will be.
CG: Across many different genres and forms, your writing often returns to secrets and secrecy. And this interest in secrets is frequently connected with music. The most obvious examples are Trumpet (1998) and Bessie Smith (1997). What interests you as a writer about secrecy? Are secrecy and music connected?
JK: I am fascinated by secrets. We are all are fascinated by secrets, as human beings. It’s interesting to ask which things people will easily talk about and which they’ll be silent about.
Sometimes, silence is as creative or as palpable as noise. I am interested in secrets because, like music, they’re all to do with time. So, I guess secrets and music connect through time. Secrets are time bombs waiting to go off. Why we are perhaps thrilled by them, sometimes in a salacious way, is because we know that sooner or later, the secret will come out. Even if it is after somebody has died, the secret, eventually, does come out. It’s very rare for a secret to even last a lifetime and for anyone to get away with it, completely. So, there’s a kind of discovery in that, which is fascinating.
There’s something very fictive about secrets. That’s why we have so many expressions around secrecy, like ‘the truth is stranger than fiction’. The truth usually involves secrets and in being ‘stranger’ than fiction, the truth is usually a secret truth…
AS: You once movingly said that a poem is a “little moment of belief”. Often however, writers find it difficult to make their moments of belief last, what with rejections from big-ticket publishers and literary prizes that construct notions of the ‘best’ writer. Having navigated the writing industry for more than three decades, which insights are worth sharing with emerging writers?
JK: The advice differs depending on the writing people produce. My advice for young poets would be to read their poetry out loud, to themselves or to friends. To send their poetry to magazines, from Poetry Review to Magma. To enter young poets’ competitions like Foyle Young Poets of the Year. To try and get on Arvon Creating Writing courses and to enter the Poetry Business Award, which publishes a pamphlet of poems first, since it’s difficult to get a collection of poems published without having published first of all. And the pamphlet is enjoying a new renaissance. It’s wonderful how many outlets there are for beautifully, artistically well-produced pamphlets, from Full Candlestick to Lighthouse, and others. There’s even an award for the best pamphlet — the Michael Marks Poetry Award.
If it was a young novelist, I would tell them to join a writers’ group or form one of their own. Because it’s useful to have feedback. The novel is a long and lonely trudge. The little moment of belief with regard to the poem is easy enough to sustain for the length of a poem but much more difficult to sustain for the length of a novel. And writers are Jekyll and Hyde creatures, in a way, because we have to believe in ourselves but we also have to doubt ourselves in equal measure.
So, it’s important to tell young writers to believe in themselves but also to have enough healthy self-criticism; to be able to kill off your darlings, as they say. And to know that editing is, really, the secret of the universe — it’s not so much what you write first of all, it’s how you rewrite and rewrite and rewrite again. And not to be afraid of failure and of bad reviews. To be completely and utterly yourself. To take risks, because writing is a risk-taking business. And sometimes that can feel quite scary. Writing is as psychological a game as football. You know you can get a penalty when nobody’s looking and, then, when everyone’s looking, you suddenly can’t get a penalty!
Every time you get to write a new poem, you must discover something fresh and the challenge of that is terrifying! So, after three decades, I know that there are terrors, but I also know that there are things that we can do about them.
Cite this: Griffin, & Shenoy, Amrita. “On Being a Writer: An Interview with Jackie Kay (2024).” Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds, 2024, https://writersmakeworlds.com/on-being-a-writer-interview-jackie-kay. Accessed 8 November 2024.