Poem: My Grandmother by Jackie Kay
“Even just the other day, this taxi driver said, ‘Where are you from?’ and I said Glasgow and he went, ‘Oh, how do you explain that tan?’ … The image of a Scottish person isn’t me, and I think that we need to try and change what we think of when we think of a Scottish person.” (Jackie Kay)
Identity, racism, and the feeling of not belonging - these are themes that Jackie Kay frequently explores in her poems. Her fascination with these themes can be traced to an upbringing that set her apart, in many ways, from the majority culture in her native Scotland. She was born in Edinburgh to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father, and adopted by a white family in Glasgow, where she grew up. Being a biracial child in Glasgow, which is mostly white, was not easy. Her feeling of not fitting in was a central part of her childhood, and she later explored this feeling of being different in her poems.
In this poem she presents two sides of a grandmother: one side that is strong, proud, and deeply rooted in Scottish culture, and another side that is hard, cold, and reserved. Jackie Kay may be describing her own grandmother and actual things that have happened to her, or the grandmother could also be a symbol of the society in which Jackie grew up, a traditional Scottish society that was not very welcoming to her as a biracial child. What do you think?
My grandmother is like a Scottish pine,
tall, straight-backed, proud and plentiful,
a fine head of hair, greying now
tied up in a loose bun.
Her face is ploughed land.
Her eyes shine rough as amethysts.
She wears a plaid shawl
of our clan with the zeal of an Amazon.
She is one of those women
burnt in her croft rather than moved off the land.
She comes from them, her snake’s skin.
She speaks Gaelic mostly, English only
when she has to, then it’s blasphemy.
My grandmother sits by the fire and swears
There’ll be no darkie baby in this house
My grandmother is a Scottish pine,
tall, straight-backed proud and plentiful,
her hair tied with pins in a ball of steel wool.
Her face is tight as ice
and her eyes are amethysts.
Copyright © Jackie Kay,
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