MEMOIR:THERE ARE TWO kinds of adopted people, Jackie Kay notes: those who never trace their birth parents because they aren't interested or don't want to hurt their adoptive parents, and those who are driven by the belief that a knowledge of their origins will allow them to better understand themselves. Kay – a Scottish poet, short story writer and novelist – falls into the latter category. Though she knew, growing up, that she was blessed with loving adoptive parents, she still felt a sense of aloneness, a "ghostly something" in the dark hours.
Jonathan and Elizabeth, Kay’s birth parents, met in a dance hall in Aberdeen in 1961 when Jonathan, from Nigeria, was studying agriculture at the university. When Elizabeth became pregnant, she went to a mother-and-baby home in Edinburgh to give birth to her daughter.
Kay was soon adopted by John and Helen, unorthodox Scots who had two years earlier adopted a boy of mixed race. John and Helen are lifelong socialists who regard the Scottish Presbyterian Church as “savage”. They entertained Nigerian communists in their home during the 1960s. Members of “the Party” were like extended family to Kay as she grew up. Her adoptive parents are also warm, loving, generous people with a sense of humour.
“By God, did we rescue you!” Helen exclaims – and the reader agrees – when Kay phones her from Abuja after her first encounter with her birth father in 2003.
Though Kay found her mother first – she began tracing her in 1988 when she was 26 – the book opens with this 2003 meeting in Abuja, during which her father, a born-again Christian, spends two hours praying for her in her hotel room.
“The only way I could be open about you,” Jonathan explains, “would be if I was able to showcase you, and you agreed to be born again.” Otherwise, he won’t acknowledge his daughter beyond the confines of that room. “You are my before . . .” he tells her. “You are my sin . . .”
Growing up, Kay had imagined her father as a cross between Paul Robeson and Nelson Mandela. (“Everyone involved in adoption has an imaginary version of everyone else.”) What she got was a selfish and somewhat ridiculous figure who said to her matter-of-factly when she asked whether he had ever thought of her over the years: “No, of course not, not once. Why would I?”
Kay found her father via Google. To locate her mother, she searched old records of marriages and births in Edinburgh. Elizabeth was from the Scottish highlands, but by the time Kay met her she was living in Milton Keynes. On their first meeting, Kay found a sad and troubled figure – though a sense of Elizabeth’s underlying kindness comes through. For weeks after, she was weepy, grieving the loss of the mother she had for so long imagined.
Elizabeth, though not nearly as zealous as Jonathan, was also reluctant to be open with members of her family about Kay’s existence: she had converted to Mormonism and was waiting for a sign from god. The two women met four times over the next several years, but Kay’s attempt to get to know Elizabeth was complicated by the fact that Elizabeth had begun, by the second meeting, to show signs of Alzheimer’s.
Red Dust Roadmoves back and forth in time between Kay's childhood and 2009, and Kay explores the various questions raised by the process of tracing and finding Jonathan and Elizabeth. Does she have the right to turn up, against the wishes of her birth parents, in the lives of extended family members? If she doesn't make her existence known, is she colluding in her parents' shame or respecting their wishes? Do her half-siblings have a right, in fact, to know about her?
The book also treats of Kay’s experience of being black in Britain. There was the incident at the tube station in 1981, the summer of the Brixton riots, when five young thugs started hurling abuse at Kay and her friends, threatening them with broken bottles. They smashed one of the girls in the face. As the 16-year-old gushed blood, Kay pleaded for help. A smartly dressed businessman turned to her and said calmly, “No, we support them”. There was the European summit of poets some years later, when Kay was representing Britain and found herself at dinner seated next to a senior British diplomat who said to her: “You know, I don’t actually know if I like your work or if I just like the contradiction that is you. Because you know that expression, don’t you, there’s no wogs beyond Manchester?”
Red Dust Roadraises some interesting issues. The prose, however, is often a little on the Oprah side. No matter how much her parents love her, Kay writes, "there is still a windy place right at the core of my heart. The windy place is like Wuthering Heights, out on open moors, rugged and wild and free and lonely".
International adoptions are controversial for various reasons, not least of which is the issue of just what happens to the significant sums of money prospective parents pay to participate in the adoption process. There is also the question of whether and when children should be removed from their native cultures, customs and extended families. There is the argument that good intentions would be better realised by offering support to an orphanage instead of selecting out a single child. Whatever one’s views are with regard to both the practical and the philosophical issues, they are important to consider. Though Kay’s case is somewhat different – she was adopted in the country in which she was conceived and would, in any case, have had claim to two very distinct cultures wherever she was raised – people considering international or inter-racial adoption, or those who’ve already adopted, will find food for thought in her memoir.
Molly McCloskey is a short-story writer, essayist and novelist, and the current writer fellow at Trinity College Dublin
