Festival Books
IDENTITY LOSS Jackie Kay’s novel about finding her biological parents is a remarkable account full of passion and humour, writes Doug Johnstone
T he ideas of belonging and identity are at the very core of what it means to be human, but those themes become much more complex when the person in question is adopted. The adopted person’s search for their biological parents is a familiar narrative, but also one fraught with emotional dangers and complications, and it’s a journey that is given new insight in Jackie Kay’s remarkable new book.
Red Dust Road, subtitled ‘An Autobiographical Journey’, is the poet and novelist’s account of the search for her biological parents and it is, typically for Kay’s writing, full of passion, intelligence and a healthy dose of self-deprecating humour. Kay was born in Edinburgh to a Scottish Highland mother and a Nigerian father, and given up for adoption as a baby. Her adoptive parents, two card-carrying members of the Communist Party, brought her up in Glasgow where, thanks to her skin colour, she always felt like she was an outsider. Despite a childhood she describes as full of love, Kay always had a lingering emptiness inside, the knowledge that her parents had given her away gnawing at her a little. ‘I’ve spoken to a lot of adopted people and many of them have that sense of emptiness,’ she says. ‘I think at some very deep level the knowledge that you’ve been given up for adoption as a baby, that your original parents shipped you out, it’s almost an existential thing to deal with. Although all of us are alone in our various
different ways, the state of being adopted can make you feel even more alone, even when you’ve got wonderful parents. That’s the contradiction.’ That contradiction did not lead to a particularly happy state of mind for Kay, who confesses in the book to terrible feelings of guilt about wanting to know more about her biological origins. ‘I couldn’t have wished for a better upbringing,’ she says. ‘My parents were much better than a lot of people’s biological parents, so when I started looking for my biological parents, I felt as if I was almost being adulterous. It feels disloyal at a very deep level.’
The initial trigger that set Kay off on her journey was when she became pregnant with her son, making her wonder about the woman who had carried her. When she tracked her down, her birth mother was clearly suffering from the early stages of Alzheimer’s, leading to frustration and distress on both sides of the meeting. For Kay, this fracturing of memory was absolutely key to her thinking about identity. ‘To me the book is really about memory,’ she says. ‘It’s about how our memories form us, and how the lack of them disrupts us, so when they start to break down like with Alzheimer’s, people literally lose themselves, because they lose the ability to remember. We’re actually made of memories as much as flesh and blood, we’re made of memories
20 THE LIST 19–26 Aug 2010