Scotland's Makar Jackie Kay opens up about life, love and writing

“I’m really interested,” she says, “in how poetry can form part of the national conversation. The idea that poetry should get out and about and not be seen as a small thing.”

Kay has other ideas, too, yet to be put into action, that would extend the reach of poetry within Scotland. A “poetry on wheels service”, similar to meals on wheels, in which carers would read a chosen poem once a week. Recently, she recalls, after a literary event, she walked past an old people’s home and was struck by the fact that none of the people there would have been able to come out and see her.

“I just thought it unfair. So I went and rang the door and said, ‘Hello I’m the national poet of Scotland.’ And I asked if I could come and perform.” She laughs. “I think the woman thought I was a fantasist!"

The travel she has done over these past two years has changed her perception of Scotland. What she found was a country far more diverse and welcoming than the one she left when she moved to England decades ago.

In Uist, she says, she was surprised to find that a large number of lesbians turned out to see her. “I said to the woman who was driving me round that I didn’t expect so many lesbians to turn out. She said, ‘Aye we manage to hing on to oor lesbians… We lose oor gay men, though.”

Scotland, she believes has made a massive shift in recent years. “I don’t think you would have ever heard that even five years ago. It seemed though cities had changed, rural places hadn't really. There wasn’t even a concept of the gay in the village in rural Scotland. But in rural Scotland now it feels absolutely fine to be a lesbian in the Highlands and islands.”

Diversity, whether in terms of sexuality, gender, or race, wasn’t something that characterised the Scotland of her childhood. Kay, now 55, who was born to a Nigerian father and a Highland nurse, grew up in Bishopbriggs, the adopted daughter of a communist white couple, John and Helen Kay, the only black child, other than her brother, for miles around.

She soon started to observe that in closed-minded, predominantly white Glasgow, people would make the assumption that since she was black, she couldn’t be from there. Such was her discomfort that she decided to leave for England. Back then, she recalls London and the city of Manchester, where she now still part-lives, were much more mixed.

“There was more diversity there and it just felt if you were going to have a kid bringing them up in a school where they had loads of kids looking like them, then it was easier to do that in Manchester or London than it was in Glasgow or Edinburgh, then.”

Kay had a son, Matthew, now a successful film-maker, with her friend the Afro-Caribbean writer Fred D’Aguiar. She would go on to raise him in a long-term relationship with the poet Carol Ann-Duffy.

Now, she observes, Glasgow and Edinburgh are much more mixed. “You get a real sense of a country in flux and changing. There’s a sense of confidence in Scotland now that there certainly wasn’t in the same way when I was growing up. And there’s a welcoming a sort of embracing of difference, and a confidence about being a country that wants to have different values.”

Bantam, her latest collection of poems, is published next month and contains works written not just during her time as Makar, but the three years beforehand, poems about identity, her key subject, about memory and forgetting.

The title poem is one inspired by her great grandfather, but also a response to Siegfried Sassoon’s Survivors. The ‘Bantam’ here is a term used to describe the small men, little more than boys, that were sent out to fight, when height restrictions were dropped. The poem is told in the voice of her father, beginning with the line, “It wisnae men they sent tae war. It wis boys like the Bantams – wee men named efter a small breed o' chickens.”

She goes on, “I think it’s important that we don’t just glorify our past or that we don’t become too much like people in a shortbread tin come to life. We have to be self-critical as well as self-congratulatory." One of her recent poems was on Robert Burns, "a wonderful poet, but a flawed man. Like we all are, we’re all flawed. But we tend to put Burns up on a massive pedestal.”

Douglas Gordon’s smashed statue of Burns in the National Gallery of Scotland, she says, helped her accept and appreciate Burns again. “He’s taken down from the pedestal, but by being taken down, you might actually see him clearer and you might actually even love him more. There’s something extraordinary. It’s almost as if by smashing him up on the gallery floor and making him black marble, he has given Burns back to me. I felt I could personally have him back in a less complicated way than before.”

Amongst the statues in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, is also one of Kay, herself, by the artist Michael Snowden. “When I look at it,” she says, “it reminds me of the time that it was made when Michael made it, and he literally did it by making life mask, so it was quite claustrophobic, two little holes for your nose to breathe you. And I was going through the break up with Carol Ann at the time, so I think about that.”

Kay, has, for the past 11 years been in a relationship with sound technician Denise Else, though she is still good friends with Duffy, who happens now to be the UK equivalent of the Makar, the Poet Laureate. “We would never have thought that this might happen,” says Kay, “when we were together all those years. It’s quite amusing. I did call her when I was given the position. I told her right away. She was very excited about it, wildly pleased. And she’s been very supportive as well, because there’s not that many other people you can talk with about the role. She and Liz Lochhead [the former Makar], both have been supportive.”

Kay now spends a great deal of time now, in Glasgow, looking after her s own parents, Helen and John, 87 and 92 years old, who this year celebrated their 62nd wedding anniversary. “I remember,” she says, “when they had their fiftieth, my son said to me, 'You’re not going to manage that now Mum, unless you meet somebody tomorrow.' It suddenly dawned on me that that was right, but perhaps that’s not what we all want."

Both parents still live at home. “I stay with them a lot, at least a couple of weeks of every month, because I don’t think they would be managing to be at home if I wasn’t home quite as much.” She feels, she says, stretched, caught in the middle. “One minute I’ll be helping my mum and the next I’ll be walking out onto a stage. I think at this stage in my life if we’re lucky enough to have our parents alive, we’re stretched. This is middle age, this is midlife.

It's a sign of the changes that, she says, her mother recently told her how bad she felt about the fact that she had struggled to accept that Kay was a lesbian, when she came out to her as a teenager. “She actually looks back on that and thinks she should have been different. And she is now able to speak out. She also wants to defend me. She went to some classical concert a while ago and somebody said something homophobic and she turned around to them and she said, 'My daughter’s a lesbian and the only thing that’s spoiling my retirement is you saying things like that'.”

Scotland has indeed changed. Much of the world has changed too. Kay talks, for instance, of how recently she performed with George Elliott Clarke, a black Canadian poet who is Canada’s national poet, and with whom she had last shared a stage twenty years ago. “George was saying, who would have ever thought 20-odd years ago that we’d be our national poets? It’s mind blowing.”