Fascists targeted me at university with racist posters, reveals Makar

SCOTLAND’S national poet Jackie Kay has spoken out about the racism she suffered at school and while attending a leading Scottish university.

Scotland’s Makar – or poet laureate – recalled being repeatedly subjected to racism in Glasgow from as young as seven years old.

The award-winning poet, novelist and playwright, 59, said she was later targeted by “fascists” at the University of Stirling, where she studied English.

Speaking on Beyond Burns, a BBC Scotland documentary about Scotland’s poets, to be shown on Sunday, Kay reveals she only truly felt she belonged to Scotland when she succeeded Liz Lochhead as national poet in 2016.

She said: “As a young girl growing up in Bishopbriggs in Glasgow, I felt quite isolated and writing was my companion. I was a victim of a lot of racism. A boy was expelled from my primary school for making up sweets made of mud and shoving them into my mouth and saying ‘that’s what you should eat because you’re from a mud hut’. So that was my earliest experience of repeated racism and that was at age seven.

“When I went to university, there were fascists at the university then, and they put up posters with my name on it at Stirling University. It said ‘would you be seen with that Irish, Catholic wog called Jackie Kay?’ -for some reason they thought I was Irish Catholic.

“They put up these posters and they put razor blades behind the posters so that anybody that tried to rip them down would also get their hands shredded.

“I remember responding to that by calling a public meeting because I thought the thing to do when people are trying to attack you and silence you, is not to be silenced if you can help it.”

Kay was born in Edinburgh to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father, but was adopted as a baby by a white Scottish couple, Helen and John Kay, and grew up in Bishopbriggs.

Her adoptive mother was Scottish secretary of the peace movement, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and her adoptive father was industrial organiser of the Communist Party.

She said her parents loved poetry and kept works by Scottish poets including Norman Maccaig, Sorley Maclean and Hugh Macdiarmid in the family home.

But speaking in the hour-long documentary, she said it was Audre Lorde, the late American writer, feminist and civil rights activist who inspired her.

She said: “We are our influences and I think for a lot of black writers in this country we had to look further afield to find people that would do that amazing thing that you can get as a young writer... hold up a mirror and tell you that you yourself can be possible.

“I started to read African American writers and then I came across the work of Audre Lorde and it was an astonishing experience. She was one of the few openly black lesbian writers and I remember at the time I went through this period of being radically black and was fed up at the kind of passive racism that I received all of the time.

“I told her I was annoyed with Scotland, the whole country, and she said to me ‘you know Jackie, you can be black and Scottish, you don’t have to choose’. That was one of those electrifying moments in your life where I thought ‘oh my God’, and so that was liberating.” Kay said she wrote her poem “In My Country” in her 20s after being constantly asked where she came from in her own country.

She said: “I think that if you live in a country that you feel you belong to and that you love, and then people ask you where you’re from all the time and treat that country as if it doesn’t belong to you it’s deeply hurtful.

“They were so busy seeing my face that they wouldn’t hear my accent. I’d have people saying to me ‘are you over from America dear?’ and that kind of thing.

“I’ve certainly found it’s been a long journey. It actually took me becoming the Makar to feel properly like I belong to my country. I always think that’s a bit extreme because it’s not something you can recommend to every black Scottish person.”