May: Jackie Kay’s Red Dust Road (2010)

At our session on 20 May, we discussed Jackie Kay’s memoir Red Dust Road (2010). In this recent work, Kay narrates the emotional and physical journeys she experienced as an adopted child, and incorporates the stories of her biological and adoptive parents into a history of her own life.

We began by discussing readers’ initial impressions of Kay’s story, its themes of family, memory, inheritance, race and racism, politics, and sexuality. Readers were intrigued by the structure of the memoir and its movement between past and present, which we explored by reading aloud incidents from Kay’s early life, retold in the language and from the perspective of childhood. The group noted Kay’s ability to create a ‘voice’ for others and many of us were moved by the lack of judgement and the kindness, empathy, and forgiveness exhibited in the memoir as well as the warmth of Kay’s depiction of her adoptive parents. We spent some time reading aloud passages depicting the ‘red dust road’ of the title, encountered on Kay’s journey to Nigeria as well as in her imagination and dreams, and we reveled in the pleasures of the poetic depictions of landscape, trees, birds, and flowers. The metaphors Kay uses to describe the frailties of memory were particularly striking to readers.

To inform our discussion we listened to an interview with Kay in which she suggests that memoir-writing enabled her to become a character in her own life story and led her to the conclusion that truth is stranger than fiction. We ended by reading some poems from Kay’s earlier collection, The Adoption Papers (1991). This enabled us to consider the difference literary form makes to the way this story is told and to reflect further on the portrayal of the relationship between child, birth mother, and adoptive mother. Reading these poems prompted discussion of motherhood and the social expectations on women in the 20th century. It also returned us to questions of inheritance and belonging that have been recurrent themes in our readings.

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