An Evening With Jackie Kay

This year, Durham Book Festival had the pleasure of welcoming to the Gala Theatre stage poets Jackie Kay and Romalyn Ante. The evening included beautiful poetry readings tracing protest, family relationships and the plight of nurses during the COVID-19 pandemic, and was rounded off with a discussion between event chair Jo Clement and Jackie Kay, where Kay showed that her eloquence and humour extend far beyond the page.

The evening started with some excitement in the theatre, which abated as the Gala trailer rolled on screen. Then Clement made her way on stage to welcome Romalyn Ante, who read from her poetry collection, AGIMAT. Ante provided the audience with context on the meaning of the word ‘agimat’, and the multilingual nature of the poem she chose to read, which relied on phrases from ancestral languages of the Philippines, as well as from Japanese. Her poem focused on forms of care, from emotional support from her husband, to health and community care through her mother’s work as an NHS nurse, with a touching line about how her mother would type ‘LOL’ when being texted bad news, meaning ‘lots of love’. It was the perfect way to introduce Jackie Kay, whose work is also very much rooted in themes of care and attention.

Ante left the stage to well-deserved applause that barely died down before Clement was introducing Jackie Kay. Kay’s manner was jovial and vulnerable all at once, as she described her new collection, Mayday, from which she would be reading.

The room was filled with quiet appreciation from beginning to end, the audience listening rapt to Kay’s dynamic voice as she recounted poems telling of her life as an adoptee in Scotland, her mother’s vibrant dramatics, and her experience marching for queer rights. However, she had absolutely no trouble breaking out of her poetic voice at times, even in the middle of a reading, to offer asides. At one point, she turned back to the projector screen and challenged how well the automatic captioning system could pick up the word ‘loch’. Other instances had the poet offering live commentary on her work as she read it. Such moments were handled with ease, it was no trouble transitioning back into the rhythm of the poetry, and they added another layer of fun to poems that covered more sombre affairs. They were a testament to Kay’s own spirit of joy, as well as her talents with not only poetry but people and performance; as one might expect of Scotland’s former Makar.

In the discussion segment, Kay continued to display the immense thoughtfulness that fills her poetry. Clement and Kay dove into topics such as Kay’s family relationships, the poet’s advice for approaching grief (“That’s the funny thing about love: you don’t think it’ll have a timer on it,” Kay said) and pondered the unthinkable when Clement asked whether a Jackie Kay raised by Tories would ever have become a poet – a question that Kay joked made her feel the “need to go and exfoliate”. Kay was humble and easily complimentary, often flustering Clement with the quickness of her replies and sharp humour. At one point, when Clement expressed a wish that Kay’s poetry could “go viral”, the poet gravely replied that she wouldn’t want to go viral… “after all, I’d have to go on antibiotics!”, leaving everyone in the room in peals of laughter once again.

Whilst discussing selfhood (“how far away you are from becoming the person that you are”), experiences of racist hate on university campuses, and her father calling her the ‘Poet Laminate’ upon seeing one of her poems laminated inside a gas station, Kay showed us all how we can handle the adversities of life with humour and compassion.

From beginning to end, this event was a perfect example of what it means to be in solidarity with each other, be that through protest, care, or the simple sharing of laughter. It was truly a privilege to spend an evening with Jackie Kay.