- “We Cannot Wait to Feel at Home”: Jackie Kay, Thatcherism, Brexit
In her article on “Shore to Shore,” the 2016 summer reading tour of Britain by poets Carol Ann Duffy, Gillian Clarke, Imtiaz Dharker, and Jackie Kay, Anne Varty writes of the carefully plotted “performance” that throughout the tour “created an interface between poetry, politics and private experience, in which the poets’ work was completed and embellished by the audience’s contexts of place and time” (Varty 138). Of these, perhaps the most salient—and certainly the most immediate—was the June 2016 referendum on the membership of the United Kingdom in the European Union, a vote that precipitated the highly fractious, often chaotic Brexit negotiations. In organizing the event a year earlier, Duffy could not have anticipated the exact circumstances under which the reading tour would take place; she and her fellow poets nonetheless found themselves engaging with audiences at a time when, as Varty writes, “national identity was under intense scrutiny and resulting political division was palpable” (136).
The black British poet and novelist Jackie Kay, half Nigerian, half Scottish, queer, adopted as an infant by white Glaswegian parents, was already well acquainted with the often volatile links between national identity and private experience. Writing in The Guardian during the “Shore to Shore” tour, Kay spoke of the referendum [End Page 476] result as “a trauma. A body blow to the country” (Kay, “Poets”). Identifying race as the single most explosive issue in the referendum, she added: “The biggest surprise is that none of us saw this juggernaut of racism approaching. It is coming down the main roads and the slip roads and even beautiful country lanes at huge astonishing speed. We have to stop it. We cannot wait to cross the border. We cannot wait to feel at home” (“Poets”). Kay’s 2017 collection of poems, Bantam, published on the heels of the tour, can be read as her attempt to deal with this trauma, to create precisely the kinds of private and public spaces in which British people might “feel at home,” home imagined not only as a place where borders might be freely crossed but as a place defined by the very act of that crossing.
Surely Kay’s surprise at the racialized narrative associated with Brexit was in this case at least partly strategic, for she had already long been familiar with “this juggernaut of racism,” and with the questions of home and belonging it engendered. Just as Brexit’s origins can be located in the long history of English and British narratives of national identity, culminating in contemporary times in the rise and lasting legacy of Thatcherism, Kay’s responses to Brexit in Bantam have their roots in her earlier literary engagements with the politics of Margaret Thatcher. Kay’s description of Brexit as a “body blow to the country” speaks to her work’s long-standing interest in and response to Thatcherism’s definition and positioning of individual bodies in the broader national body politic. In this essay, I revisit some of Kay’s earlier poetry to explore how it sought to give voice to the struggles over the performative body under Thatcherism, struggles that produced intensely impassioned, often violent debates over definitions of belonging, home, and authenticity. I then turn to the more recent poems in Bantam to consider how these highly divisive issues continue to inform Kay’s explorations of the performative body in addressing broader questions of British national identity. Formally, Kay’s poetry, in its theatricality and often explicitly oral tenor, seems to come from the body, while thematically, her work highlights the material effects of Thatcher’s legacy on the lives of black British citizens. Moreover, Kay frequently offers counterdiscursive representations of embodiment: hers are messy, leaky, violent, desiring bodies. In highly nuanced, moving, and provocative ways, Kay’s poetry maps the fraught performance [End Page 477] of the racialized body as it tries to negotiate various, often contradictory definitions of Britain and Britishness in the age of Thatcher and Brexit. Ultimately, Kay’s poetry productively troubles Thatch-erism’s and Brexit’s mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, staging Britishness as a highly...