"If human beings don't have hope, then why do we live?" Jackie Kay on poetry, politics and retaining optimism in dark times

Maybe it’s because the Makar has one of those voices that could soothe an angry volcano and comes across as warm enough to be a factor in climate change. Maybe I’m hoping she will make everything better.

Or maybe it’s because I’ve met her a couple of times, know she’s roughly the same age as me and might know all about what it feels to be at this point in our lives. Not an absolute beginner. Not (one hopes) near any sort of ending yet. But aware that there’s more behind than in front of us.

And so I’m only five minutes in the door before I’m quoting Dante’s Inferno at her. The question is, Jackie, is that how you see your own mid-fifties?

“They feel chiaroscuro, these years,” Kay admits as we wait for our risotti. “A mixture of light and dark. If you’re lucky enough to have your parents alive, as I have, they feel incredibly blessed. But on the other hand there’s an incredible stress to having older parents, and to the intensity and loudness of the ticking clock.

“Your sense of time becomes really heightened in your middle years and it is possible to get lost in a Dante-esque way in the middle of the dark forest, because middle age is one of these times where you don’t actually see yourself. You become curiously invisible in middle age.”

She pauses, looks at me and smiles. “Perhaps it’s not the same if you’re a man.”

If it wasn’t such an invidious label, I’d be happy to suggest Jackie Kay is a national treasure. Poet, novelist, short story writer, owner of the biggest smile in Scotland, she is a pleasure to spend time with (even if the feeling might not always be mutual).

Although she spends half her time in Manchester, Kay is, you could certainly argue, a symbol of the new Scotland. Born to a Nigerian father and a Highland nurse, Kay is the adopted daughter of a Communist white couple, John and Helen Kay. She grew up in Bishopbriggs on the edge of Glasgow and in a world of casual racism. The colour of her skin and the fact she was gay and (even worse) a feminist have been held against her at some point or another.

And yet here she is, the country’s Makar, someone who is welcomed into town hall and knitting club the country over. But then as she says the country itself has changed hugely from the one she grew up in and opted to leave.

“It’s surprising to think how Scotland  is changing and the sense of confidence  in Scotland; the sense of difference  from England. That feels quite strong at the moment.”

Is it a better country than the one you left, Jackie? “Yes, yes. Obviously there are parts of it that are beleaguered and poor and stressed and tense. It’s important not to romanticise Scotland, but it feels like a country that is completely shifting and changing its axis and its identity to me.”

Kay is in a good position to know. As Makar she aims to cover the country in her five-year tenure (she’s about 18 months in) and when we meet she’s not long back from a visit to Moniaive and Selkirk where she did a reading in a car showroom. As you do.

“I love being Makar,” she says. “People take a real interest. They’re proud of having a Makar. I was on the ferry from Harris to Benbecula and the man helping me with my luggage said to me: ‘Am I right in thinking you are our Makar? My wife came to see you last night. Half the island came to see you.’

“Wherever I go in Scotland people stop and say: ‘Are you our Makar?’ And stop and shake hands with you. And all of that is pretty joyous.

“I don’t take it personally, in a way. It feels like it’s the role itself getting attention.”

Perhaps. Or perhaps it’s down to the way she incarnates it. In her life and work she is attuned to the small acts of everyday kindness that underlie and undermine the froth and fury of our online lives these days.

Her new book of poetry, Bantam, is emblematic of that. A mixture of pre and post-Makar poetry. Kay writes about the First World War shrapnel in her grandfather’s right arm, new birth (Welcome Wee One, the poem included in the Scottish Government’s baby box), holiday snogging sessions – “And we kissed, we kissed, we kissed, we really did” – and Kay’s first period (Caravan, Avielochan), dead friends and refugees.

Some of them are political with a big “P”, like Planet Farage (“We closed the borders, folks, we nailed it”). And in some the “p” is lower case and low-key. Like the mention of her mum and dad in Threshold written for the opening of the Scottish Parliament last year. (“Good Day Ma’am, Ma’am Good Day/Good Morning John and Helen Kay”).

You’re writing them both into the literary landscape, Jackie. “I think ordinary people need to be in the literary landscape.”

Helen and John Kay

She writes – and talks – about the parents who adopted her when she was a baby with obvious love. Helen is 87, John 92, but they remain “fiercely independent”, their daughter says. “I took them to see a respite care home just to see if they’d want a couple of weeks break. Not as a permanent thing. And my mum took one look at the people sat there at the table. Some of them were obviously suffering from Alzheimer’s and that freaked the hell out of my mum.

“She said: ‘Jackie, I’ll tell you where I want to go. The youth hostel in Ullapool.’”

She’s just come here from seeing them this morning. “They’re very engaged with the world. My mum was crying the other day watching what was happening in Catalonia [the images of the police attacking Catalan protesters]. The tears falling down her face. She felt it was the return of fascism. And then the two of them together burst into singing last night. There’s a Valley in Spain. That old Spanish Civil War song. It was quite moving. I wish I had got my camera out to film it.

“I find the way they are approaching being old fascinating. They are changing and shifting and adapting themselves to suit their life. Every time you are there there’s a new change. That’s a shifting landscape.

“Old age is the biggest shifting landscape out there, with all its accoutrements, all the things you need – walking sticks, the zimmers and all the paraphernalia of old age. You have as much paraphernalia with being old as you do with being an infant.”

This conversation is a sign of how things change in these middle years. When I met her in her Manchester home back in 2006 she was worried about her son Matthew who was then in his teens, had just passed his driving test and was off to Alton Towers for the day. She was envisaging motorway pile-ups. Now he’s 29, an award-nominated filmmaker and a source of maternal pride.

Kay’s back story takes in Stirling University, political activism (she was a marcher; perhaps not unexpectedly given that her mum was the Scottish secretary of CND), won a Saltire prize for her first book of poetry The Adoption Papers at the start of the 1990s, had a lengthy relationship with fellow Scottish poet Carol Ann Duffy and was given an MBE for her services to literature in 2006.

More than most, then, she can point to the gains she has made. But there have been losses too. Friendships and relationships come and go, of course. And, yes, friends too. There’s a poem in Bantam dedicated to her late friend and fellow novelist and poet Julia Darling. It prompts a conversation about loss.

“When you’re a kid you can’t really fathom death,” Kay suggests. “It seems unfathomable. And as you become this age and even older you accumulate deaths. Your whole identity shifts and changes with the people you have lost and loss becomes part of you. You become partly defined by your losses. What did you forget to say? What did you forget to do?

By the time you get to my mum and dad’s age …” She impersonates her mum for a moment: “Christ, we cannae look at the address book. He’s gone. She’s gone. They’ve gone. Oh it’s a nightmare.”

We’re both chuckling at the impersonation. But at the same time, she continues, her parents don’t want to get a new address book. “It feels like denying all the people with lines stroked through.”

And, anyway, she says, those we have lost live on within us. “The minute you say their name they snap into being. Your pals also become dead pals and they become the pals you remember too. They’re there in your life, they don’t go until you do. They’re still around in some sort of way.”

The question in all this is where is Kay herself at this point of her life. Is she invisible to herself too? In a way maybe, she accepts. “Perhaps the time that’s most difficult to grapple with is the last 10 years,” she says.

Who is she now, then? Someone who loves to cycle, who likes to cook, whose guilty pleasure of choice is watching MasterChef and Coronation Street.

Does she still feel close to that  11-year-old version of herself in the  caravan in Avielochan?

“I think the interesting thing about writers is they often keep the child in them close. Because your imagination is a childlike thing. Writers are grown-up children. They are surviving from their imagination, from making things up, from play and so that child that you were is only inches away. She’s still pretty close. Close and distant at the same time.

“I remember all the different phases of me. I remember being at school, being this stroppy teenager. I remember developing into an angry black feminist and coming out of the other end.”

That’s not to say the anger is all gone. Kay is one of life’s natural optimists. And maybe there’s reason for that. She grew up in a racist, sexist country and for a while there that no longer seemed to be quite so much the case.

And then came Brexit.

“I find these the most challenging times ever that I’ve ever lived in to be an optimist. The most challenging times politically. They make you feel flat. You ask: ‘Is the flatness me? Is it my middle age?’

“My perception is ever since that vote there’s been one thing happening after another. It’s very hard to retain optimism.

“We’re living in a world where the fake reality is very difficult to separate from the real reality. I think that’s profoundly unsettling. I think it shakes at the core of who you are and what it’s worth. What’s the value of things? We’re questioning the value of things because so many of the things we built up so carefully have been trashed.”

Was she more optimistic in the 1980s than now? “Yeah. I think in the 1980s we thought we could fight against racism and that battle would be won. I think now in 2017 we have this terrible knowledge. That adage ‘history repeats itself’ – we didn’t take it seriously.”

So yes, she says, optimism is difficult these days.

We are both quiet for a moment. I guess I’m thinking: “If even Jackie Kay is worried …” I’m also at a loss as to what to say, how to end this conversation. “And on that cheery note ...” I venture limply.

But she’s not quite finished. She begins to talk about the Women’s March that followed Trump’s election, all of those women wearing their “pussy hats” and saying they are not going to be defined by what the president represents. All those women fighting back.

“We need the fighting spirit more than ever. We finish on that. We can’t give up.

“If human beings don’t have hope then why do we live? We actually live for hope.”

We are in the middle of the woods and the light is fading.  But the sun will rise again.  On all of us.

Bantam by Jackie Kay is published by Picador, priced £9.99