“We Cannot Wait to Feel at Home”: Jackie Kay, Thatcherism, Brexit

Abstract

© 2022 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System n 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 M I G U E L M O T A