The Adoption Papers
The Adoption Papers
by Jackie Kay
THE LITERARY WORK
A narrative poem set Glasgow from 1961 to 1990 and a collection of 17 poems set in various parts of Britain in 1he 1980s; published in 1991.
SYNOPSIS
“The Adoption Papers,” a narrative poem for three voices, tells the story of an adoption from the points of view of the birth mother, the adoptive mother, and the adopted child, “Severe Gale 8, a collection of 17 poems, chronicles private experiences delating to the sociopolitical landscape and to the emergence of AIDS-related deaths In Britain during the Thatcher era.
Events in History at the Time of the Poems
Jackie Kay was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1961. A black child adopted by white working-class socialist parents, she was brought up in Glasgow. The experience of transracial adoption has informed Kay’s work from “The Adoption Papers” to her recent prize-winning novel, Trumpet (1998). In addition to poetry and fiction, Kay has also written for television and for theater. Chiaroscuro, presented in 1986, was the result of a fruitful collaboration between the Theatre of Black Women, which commissioned her to write the piece (and who eventually performed it), and the Gay Sweatshop theater. The Adoption Papers, Kay’s first published collection of poetry, won an Eric Gregory Award (1991), together with the Saltire and Forward prizes (1991) and for her second collection of poems, Other Lovers, she garnered a Somerset Maugham Award (1993). More success followed, this time in fiction, with Kay’s winning The Guardian Fiction Prize for her 1998 novel Trumpet, loosely based on the life of the American transgendered jazz musician, Billy Tipton. Jackie Kay has also written biography (Bessie Smith, 1997) and poetry for children (The Frog Who Dreamed She Was an Opera Singer, 1998). The Adoption Papers contains poetry about, rather than for, children, treating some of the very different issues that concerned Kay during the 1990s, from her personal experience of transracial adoption to her poetic accounts of Margaret Thatcher’s socially divided Britain.
Events in History at the Time of the Poems
The Adoption Acts
The Adoption of Children Act was passed in 1926 in England and Wales, and in Scotland four years later in 1930. Up until these dates, birth parents had been able to reclaim their children when they reached wage-earning status. A further Adoption Act was passed in 1950, “which outlawed so-called ‘third-party’ adoptions in which children could be placed for adoption without the intervention of a local authority or recognised adoption agency” (Gaber, p. 13). The number of adoptions rose dramatically over the 30-year period following the passing of the Adoption Act in Scotland. The total of 339 adoption petitions in the sheriff courts of Scotland in 1930 climbed to over 2,000 in the late 1960s, then dropped during the late 1970s to about 1,600 (McNeill, Preface, p. vii).
Historically, during the late 1950s, it was difficult to place children from ethnic minority backgrounds in suitable permanent family homes precisely because of their color. In “The Adoption Papers,” it is only when the adoptive mother comments that she doesn’t mind what color the baby might be that the waiting is over “just like that” (“The Adoption Papers,” p. 14). Until she has said that color is irrelevant to her, the agency had told her that they had no babies, presumably on the assumption that a white woman wouldn’t want to adopt a racially mixed child (in the poem, the daughter’s birth mother was white, her birth father black). Adoption and tine Coloured Child, published less than ten years after the 1961 start date of “The Adoption Papers,” asserts that “few adoptions involving coloured children appear to come under the ‘third-party’ heading [i.e., occur outside authorized adoption agencies or local authorities], and that other placements of such children remain at rather less than 3 percent of all adoptions. Indeed, only a minority of agencies will accept the responsibility of finding suitable adopters for a non-white child” (Kareh, p. 30). This point is underlined by a research project for the National Council of Civil Liberties undertaken in 1960, which discovered only five agencies that were willing to place “colored” children: in London, Bristol, Edinburgh, the Church of England Children’s Society, and Dr Barnardo’s (Gaber, p. 15).
By 1962, there was concern about the high number of children from ethnic minorities who were still in local authority care and an Action Committee was formed, which resulted in the founding of the British Adoption Project in 1965, specifically to address the need to locate a permanent home for children in care.
Postwar immigration
Large-scale twentieth-century immigration of blacks to Britain began in 1948 when the 55 Empire Windrush docked at Tilbury with 492 Jamaicans on board. The immigration resulted from a number of factors. One popular perception has been that the immigrants on the 55 Empire Windrush were the fruit of a recruitment drive: 1948 witnessed the end of British postwar austerity and, with it, the need for an increased work force. Other reasons have been suggested as well: “If they [the immigrants] were moved by anything it was their own drive to escape the boundaries of colonialism, allied to a unique combination of historical circumstances, the most important of which was to do with the logistics of travel” (Phillips, p. 46). In 1948, the government adopted the British Nationality Act, which ascribed British citizenship to the United Kingdom, its colonies, and newly independent Commonwealth countries such as India, which had gained independence from Britain the previous year, in 1947. According to Mike and Trevor Phillips, “The juxtaposition of the Nationality Act and the arrival of the Windrush was a pure coincidence, but the two events seem to fit together because the Act itself enshrines what became a classic uncertainty about how to define the nature and the boundaries of British citizenship” (Phillips, p. 74). This “classic uncertainty” was profoundly problematic: if the postwar breakup of the British Empire led to crises of what now constituted British identity, some of those crises were undeniably racist: “The debate on the Nationality Act was actually the beginning of a trauma about citizenship, race and nationality which swiftly became associated with the arrival of Caribbean immigrants” (Phillips, p. 75). The numbers escalated rapidly. From 1948 to 1961, Britain would receive 66,000 West Indians along with 48,000 Indian and Pakistani immigrants (Porter in Phillips, p. 159).
In 1962 the first Immigration Act to curb black immigration became law. Growing racial prejudice in Britain also led to the Race Relations Act in 1965, which prohibited racial discrimination in public places, outlawed the promotion of racial hatred, and formed a Race Relations Board to hear complaints. The Act’s mandate did not extend to racial discrimination in private places. In contrast, the Sexual Offences Act, passed two years later, legalized private homosexual acts (under specified conditions) but kept them subject to prosecution if indulged in public.
The passage of the Race Relations Act points to mounting racial discrimination by 1965. Although “Commonwealth immigrants were in fact British citizens … nevertheless racial discrimination was ubiquitous and continuous” (Sinfield, p. 126). For example, Baroness Valerie Amos, who came to Britain from Guyana in 1963, recalled the imperialist and erroneous geography lessons that her sister received at school: “I mean, they were talking about Africa rather than South America, and they started to show the kinds of houses that they thought people like us lived in, and it was all wrong” (Amos in Phillips, pp. 205-206). Evidence of racist abuse is alluded to in Pan Two of “The Adoption Papers” when the daughter is at school. This takes the form of physical violence that is perpetrated by her peers. But she is also subject to a different form of abuse by her teacher, who attributes racist stereotypes to her. The daughter’s experience of domestic and public spaces is a shared one, evident in Baroness Amos’s recollections:
I think they [her parents] spent a lot of time guarding us from the overt kind of racism which I don’t really remember as being a real part of my childhood. I think that my parents had a lot to do with that, and quite a lot to do with the fact that I was so much into social justice issues from a very early age.
(Amos in Phillips, p. 206)
In part, Valerie Amos’s recollections agree with those of Jackie Kay herself, who recalled not only being subjected to physical and verbal racist abuse when growing up in Glasgow, but also being nurtured in an environment that introduced her to such positive black role models as the activists Angela Davis and Martin Luther King, as well as to blues, jazz, and politics. This environment has clearly been influential for the subjects of her poetry.
Assimilation and difference
Two distinct phases emerge in adoption and fostering practices. The pre-1970s era saw these practices being based on the concept of the fully racially integrated society, “as symbolised by the multicultural family” (Gaber, p. 15):
This philosophy was based on the notion that skin colour was irrelevant and that everyone was the same underneath—the melting pot theory of the decade of peace, love and flower power. It was at a time when the persistence of white racism and the need for ethnic minority groups to sustain themselves through their own cultures was not fully recognised. Such philosophies were prevalent in social services departments and adoption agencies throughout the country. Transracial placements were seen as positive steps towards a more integrated society.
(Gaber, p. 15)
Notions of assimilation were to be replaced, during the 1970s, with ‘the politics of black self-identity, and, for some, separatism” (Gaber, p. 19). This change is reflected in the rites of growing up experienced by the daughter in “Adoption Papers.” The cultural figures that the child turns to when she is growing up are all black (and American): the celebrated singer, actress, and advocate of humanitarian issues Pearl Bailey (1918-90), the blues singer Bessie Smith (1894-1937), and the political activist Angela Davis (1944-).
Notably, the daughter’s heroines are all black women. In his survey of the history of sexuality post-1800, Jeffrey Weeks notes “[t]he emergence of a powerful black feminist presence in the women’s movement” during the 1970s and 80s (Weeks, p. 299). For Weeks, this presence has repercussions in terms of the dynamics and construction of the family unit, and these repercussions are interesting because of the ways in which the family unit was being utilized by the Conservative Government of the 1980s:
The debates over the family and the whole question of reproductive rights were transformed by the black presence. It became less easy to criticise ‘the family’ as if it were an unproblematic unity when black people in their own communities were struggling to protect family integrity against immigration legislation and racist attacks.
(Weeks, p. 299)
For the Conservatives, the family was seen as the necessary foundation of a good and moral society. Sex education in schools during the 1980s emphasized the importance of a stable married life and responsible parenting skills. Anxieties that family life was under attack by alternative or nontraditional familial models (for example single parent or same sex families) were in fact unfounded. Although divorce statistics were on the increase, so too were marriage and remarriage:
Nearly 400,000 marriages took place in 1986, lower than the peak figure of 480,000 in 1972, but up on the low figures of the early part of the decade. And there was evidence of the continued growth of stable non-marital relations. Some 21 per cent of live births were illegitimate, but half of these were registered by both parents.
(Weeks, p. 296)
However, in the 1987 Local Government Act, the Conservatives added a contentious provision, Clause 28, which outlawed the “promotion” in schools of homosexual lifestyles and sexuality. While liberal agendas since the 1960s had promoted a greater degree of toleration towards homosexuality, the 1980s witnessed the attempted reining in of this perceived permissiveness. Schools were now prohibited from “promoting the acceptability . of homosexuality as a ‘pretended’ family relationship” (Weeks, p. 295). And yet, during the 1970s and 1980s, alternative forms of sexual identities were increasingly visible, evidenced by gay and lesbian sexualities, same-sex parented families, transvestite practices and so on. Clause 28 had prohibited the “promotion” (or toleration) of same-sex lives, and in the process had inadvertently helped mobilize and unite gay communities.
While race and immigration had been high on the political agenda during the 1960s, by the 1980s, sexual issues had been added to it. One critical issue emerged not as a result of the Thatcher administration, although it would help fuel the moral agendas of the new right conservatives. The critical issue was AIDS—acquired immune deficiency syndrome and HIV—human immuno-deficiency virus. The AIDS crisis in Britain came to be associated predominantly with promiscuous gay sexual practices. Weeks estimates that by 1988, there had been “some 1500 cases of people with AIDS, over half of whom had died, with the numbers doubling every ten months. At least 10,000 people were known to be infected with the HIV virus which caused AIDS, with the likelihood that many thousands more were similarly at risk (Weeks, p. 300).
The Thatcher years and “Severe Gale 8.”
While the voices in “The Adoption Papers” look to Europe and America as locations of profound significance, the subpoems in the poem “Severe Gale 8” are concerned with matters much closer to home: Britain during the Thatcher years. All five poems are concerned with events in the 1980s. Margaret Thatcher was Britain’s first woman Prime Minister, elected in the General Election of May 1979. Her premiership was marked, for those on the left, by profound social unease and unrest. By August 1980, unemployment had surpassed 2 million for the first time since 1935. Anxieties ran high, but developments gave way to new hope by the 1990s. In view of the looming threat of nuclear war, for example, the Labour Party voted for unilateral nuclear disarmament in September 1980. In South Africa, the government began to dismantle apartheid in the mid-1980s, and the activist Nelson Mandela was released after 27 years in prison. (In “The Third Hurricane,” last in the sequence of “Severe Gale 8,” the poet envisages children bringing a turtle dove, emblem of peace, to the newly released Mandela, who is un-named in the poem.) Urban violence was rife and was given dramatic expression in a series of race riots across the country. Unemployment remained high. Against the odds, Thatcher was re-elected to a second term in office in June 1983 following a wave of patriotic fervor that had swept Britain following the Falkland Crisis of 1982. But by July of 1983, £500 million had been cut from government spending, £140 million of which was from the health service. By December 1983, records showed that Britain had, that year, experienced the lowest level of economic growth since the Second World War” (Peacock, p. x). A miner’s strike began in 1984 after the National Coal Board laid off 20,000 miners, leading to violent disputes between police and striking miners. In September 1985, there were more urban riots in Handsworth, in Birmingham, and in Brixton, South London. The following months, violent riots broke out on the Broadwater Farm Housing Estate in London. But these were not the same kinds of riots as those that had occurred in Nottingham and Netting Hill in the late 1950s, of white against black. The 1980s riots register a change in attitude in multi-cultural Thatcherite Britain, forcing a recognition that “black people and their interests were no longer marginal” (Phillips, p. 368). Riots in the early 1980s were due to any number of socially motivated problems, but they were also clearly happening in response to racially motivated arrests of black men by the police. What finally sparked the 1981 Brixton riot, for example, was the stop and search of a black taxicab driver. The police claimed that he was hiding drugs in his socks; in fact, this was where he kept his cab fares. They then decided to search his car, in spite of the fact that a crowd of young and angry black men were surrounding the vehicle. One of these men blocked a policeman’s path; he was arrested and bundled into a van. Bricks were then thrown in protest at the van, more police arrived, and the riots escalated from there.
In June 1987, Thatcher won a third election victory, and in July she announced what many would see as the beginning of her downfall, the Poll Tax. This tax was to replace the old property-based rates tax, but it sparked public outrage because it taxed people, rather than property, and levied the same basic charge, irrespective of the different kinds of property people occupied. The introduction of the Poll Tax in Scotland in April 1989 produced widespread revolt; further violent riots ensued in London’s Trafalgar Square in March 1990, prior to the introduction of the tax in England in April of that year. Kay’s poem “Death to Poll Tax” weaves private experience in and out of the violent public responses to the poll tax. The poem’s voice addresses a friend or lover whose mother’s death is imminent. As the poet/persona tries to get out of the subway s/he discovers that most of the exits are closed, and in the first stanza, s/he begins to imagine some sort of violent disturbance. In the second stanza, it’s not clear where the reality and the fantasy of violence begin and end, but the images nonetheless convey the anger of the people and the violent tactics of the police:
The third thing is a man screaming
DEATH TO POLL TAX-a policeman punching him every time
he gets to Poll. Death to Poll THUD Tax.
(The Adoption Papers, p. 60)
In November 1990, after internal dissent within the Conservative party, Thatcher resigned.
The Poem in Focus
Contents summary
“The Adoption Papers” is a poem in three parts. Part One: 1961-1962 (subdivided into five chapters) traces the period of birth and adoption from the perspectives of the birth mother, adoptive mother, and daughter: the three voices are distinguished by different typefaces (Palatino for the daughter, Gill for the adoptive mother, Bodoni for the birth mother). The voices of the birth and adoptive mothers follow each other, the birth mother speaks of the ease with which she conceived the child, the adoptive mother of her longing to be pregnant and to endure the discomforts and pain of pregnancy. The poem first establishes that the child is mixed race (a white Scottish mother, a black Nigerian father) and illegitimate and thus doubly stigmatized in terms of the moral climate of the early 1960s.
“SCIENTIFIC” RACISM
So-called “scientific racism was, … discredited by many biologists in 1951, but the belief that black people belong to a different and inferior race, and that ‘interbreeding’ would harm the white race, lingered on in popular consctoysness, and many whites continued to show strong disapproval for white-black marriages, According to a Gallup poll in 1958, 71 percent of respondents disapproved of mixed marriages while only 13 percent approved, A Gallup poll conducted in the United States that same year found that over 90 percent disapproved, Patterson’s field stydy in Brixton (South London), carried out in 1955-58, showed that local attitudes to mixed relationships varied from the mildly disapproving to outright distaste; “Disgusting. I don’t know how a decent woman could let a blackie touch her” (Patterson in Tizard and Phoenix, p. 23). The study claims that few “respectable” local white girls would be seen out with a West Indian. The late 1960s saw the beginning of more liberal while attitudes. The proportion of people disapproving of marriages between whites and nonwhitet fell to 57 percent hi a 1968 Gafhip poll, and to 42 per cent in 1973, (The comparable U.S. proportions were 76 percent and 65 percent [Spickard In Tizard and Phoenix, p, 23)
Next the poem traces the beginning of the daughter’s attempts to locate her birth mother, interspersing the daughter’s voice with the birth mother’s thoughts after the birth. Then comes the adoptive mother’s voice, narrating the processes of visiting different adoption agencies and then making her house “look ordinary” for the social worker who comes to assess her suitability for adoption (“The Adoption Papers,” p. 15). (This involves hiding her books by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and Vladimir Lenin, the communist newspaper The Daily Worker, her “dove of peace” and her poster of the singer, actor, and political and human rights activist Paul Robeson.) The section then describes the adoptive mother’s excitement about going to see the new baby, interspersing this with the voice of the birth mother, who stages an imaginary and symbolic funeral for her baby, digging a hole in the garden and burying the clothes that she’d bought for the infant. Shifting its focus, the poem moves to the anxiety of the adoptive mother that the birth mother will come back to claim her daughter, interweaving this with the adoptive daughter’s continued search for her birth mother.
Part Two: 1967-1971 re-introduces the voice of the daughter, not as the adult voice tracing her birth mother, as she was in the first section, but as the child either protesting or working out how she came into being:
Ma mammy hot me oot a shop [my mammy bought me from a shop]
Ma mammy says I was a luvly baby
Ma mammy picked me (I wiz [was] the best)
your mammy had to take you (she’d no choice)
(“The Adoption Papers,” p. 21)
In this section the adoptive mother reveals to her daughter that she is adopted. The daughter’s difference is not only marked out by her adopted status and her blackness in contrast to her parents’ whiteness, but also by her cultural preferences. She and her best friend reject the white American popular cultural influences embraced by their peers (singers Donny Osmond, David Cassidy, TV cops Starsky and Hutch), preferring to mime, instead, to the songs of blues singers Pearl Bailey and Bessie Smith. Next the section moves to the racist abuse that the daughter suffers at school, both from her peers and her teachers. The adoptive mother wants to disavow the issue of her daughter’s skin color, believing that “colour matters to the nutters [colloquial reference to a mad or eccentric person]” (“The Adoption Papers,” p. 24). But color also matters to the daughter.
Although the daughter is able to stand up for herself against the bullying and racist abuse of her peers, it’s the supposedly educated voice of her teacher she can’t understand, “like that time she said Darkies are like coal” (“The Adoption Papers,” p. 25). Interspersed with this recollection is that of her birth mother’s own recollection of the hostile stares that she and Olubayo, the birth father (and the only protagonist in the poem to be given a name) attracted as they walked down the street. The daughter searches for a role model to support a sense of her fragmented identity, lighting on white American movie stars (Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, and the British-born though American-based Elizabeth Taylor) as possible models for imitation, since they have greater visibility in popular cultural media. In the end, though, it’s not Bette Davis that she settles for as a role model, but the African American black rights activist Angela Davis. Again, the issue of cultural visibility and paucity of role models is underlined. The daughter realizes that she has only seen one black woman on TV, playing a nurse. As Kay herself has said in interview:
Most black children brought up in a white environment will experience some form of psychological distress. It’s hard to get a strong sense of being black and proud when there is nothing to reinforce this notion.
(Kay, Interview, p. 38)
Part Three of the poem incorporates the years 1980-1990, continuing to intersperse the three voices. The birth mother shows awareness of herself as the subject of gossip; the daughter imagines her painful birth (she was pulled out by forceps) and the faithful visits made by her adoptive mother. The cultural and environmental considerations that constituted the second pan of the poem now give way to the daughter’s desire to know her birth mother and to know her genetic inheritances.
The poem ends with the daughter’s imagining what it would be like to meet her birth mother; envisioned is an understated reunion that takes place on a walk along the seashore and in a room with “no sentiment” (“Adoption Papers, p. 32). Although the adoptive mother acknowledges that she, too, would want to have met her birth mother, she still believes that there’s no one closer than the two of them: “Closer than blood./Thicker than water. Me and my daughter” (“The Adoption Papers,” p. 34).
Five subpoems make up “Severe Gale 8,” the opening poem of the collection’s second section: “NHS,” “Cardboard,” “The Pound,” “The Third Hurricane.” The third subpoem in the sequence, “Cardboard,” makes this clear: “It had come to this when Poll Tax/arrived that winter of the second hurricane” (The Adoption Papers, p. 37). The 1980s was the decade of power for the former British Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, and the poems stage some of the despair due to the effects of Thatcher’s period of office, such as the decline of the National Health Service (“NHS”), the introduction of the poll tax (“Death to Poll Tax”), increases in pollution and traffic congestion, and the rise of the so-called “cardboard city”—a reference to visible increases in homelessness (“Cardboard”).
Other poems in the second half of the collection can be read alongside “The Adoption Papers” in terms of common themes of maternal loss and longing. “The Underground Baby Case” chronicles the theft of a small child on a crowded underground [subway] train by a woman whose own child has recently died. “Summer Storm, Caplona” recalls a memory of an unmarried woman with a small child taking shelter from a storm in Caplona; the two invite the pity of the old couple who offer them refuge. The image of running through the rain and getting soaked is also used in “Pounding Rain,” a poem that focuses on a renewed friendship between two old schoolfriends who embark on a lesbian relationship when they’re much older. “Mummy and Donor and Deirdre” deals with lesbian parents from the perspective of a child as well as the parents, and the ways in which childhood innocence and acceptance are corrupted by adults who uphold one particular parental model as the only possible alternative. Other lesbian-associated poems in the section are “In the Seventh Year” and “Photo in the Locket.” “Close Shave” explores the consciousness of a working-class man who is married but is also involved in a gay relationship with his barber that must be kept secret. “Dressing Up” is about a working-class male-to-female cross-dresser and his relationship with his parents: his mother is highly critical of her son’s cross-dressing practice. Meanwhile, the poem itself is critical of the parent’s own violent and abusive relationship, which suggests the absurdity of the situation: violence within heterosexual relationships is tolerated whereas the cross-dressing son is open to censure. While all of these poems speak to the emerging visibility of different social and sexual identities, other poems in the collection address issues that are specific to the decade in which they were written. “Dance of the Cherry Blossom,” “He Told Us He Wanted a Black Coffin,” and “Lighthouse Wall” all concern AlDS-related illness and death. “My Grandmother’s Houses” explores the notion of the grandmother in the poem as a figure at the intersection of postwar private and public memories and histories and “Death to Poll Tax” again engages with the location of private memory at a historically specific moment.
Against the grain
“The Adoption Papers” concerns the impact of learned responses from familial environments and the movement of a child out into the mid-to-late-twentieth-century public world of politics and history. In “The Adoption Papers” only one of the protagonists in the poem (Olubayo, the birth father) is mentioned by name, but the poem refers explicitly to several real historical figures, mainly in the first two parts of the poem, which cover the periods 1961-2 and 1967-71. These include the clandestine communists Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and show business personalities Pearl Bailey, Bessie Smith, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor, Donny Osmond, David Cassidy, and the fictional Starsky and Hutch. By naming these figures the poem evokes issues of profound political concern (communism, the desire for world peace) beginning in the late 1950s; also the poem shows the daughter rejecting some of the de-politicized role models available to her (white American and Anglo-American) in favor of more radical black figures who straddle political and cultural fields of representation. More generally, the references make apparent a global political culture. This emerges not just in relation to immigration and transracial adoption in postwar Britain, but also in the adoptive parents’ concerns for world peace (evident in their support for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, or CND) and for civil rights (evident in their support of Paul Robeson). They also stress the importance
PAUL ROBESON 1898-1976
Robeson, the son of a former slave, was a prominent black and civil rights activist. His was a distinguished career, both celebrated and reviled in turn. He was only the third African American to enter Rutgers m 1915, He began his career as a professional footballer, earned a law degree from Colombia University in New York Che resigned when a while secretary refused to take dictation 1mm htm), and debuted as a professional actor in 1922. Robesoo was politically active, He spoke out against Nazism, and in 1934, the film director Sergei Eisensstein invited Robesort to the Soviet Union, a place he admired for the apparent equality with which people wera treated. Also Rofaeson visited Spain dyring the Civil War and sang for the Republican forces, who were fighting against Franco’s Fascists But by 1943 fthe same year he was awarded the Abraham lincon Medal), the FBI accused Robeson of being a leading communist. After denouncing the Korean War and refusing to deny that he was a Communist, his US passport was revoked in 1950. Ntkita Kruschev’s revelation of Stalin’s crimes against humanity in 1956 led to a two-month emotional collapse for Robeson. Following the return of his passport in 1950 he traveled regularly between London and Moscow: he and fiis wife foite did not return 10 the States until 1963, The FBI renounced any further need for investigations into Paul Robeson in 1974 He died at the age of 77 in 1976, Although his passport had been reissued by the time the adoptive mother hides the poster urging its restitution, the very fact that she has the poster remains an important sign of her support for civil rights m general, and Rdbeson’s in particular.
of not forgetting the fate of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who, with very little evidence against them, had been executed by the electric chair on June 19, 1953, for allegedly selling state secrets to the Russians. The political concerns of the parents are passed down to the daughter, seen to support the then current plight of the jailed Angela Davis.
When the adoptive mother is in the process of being surveyed by social workers, she is aware that certain cultural items are acceptable while others are not. Consequently, her bust of the Scottish poet Robert Burns (1759-96), her complete works of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) and her more “low-brow” detective stories are left exposed to view (the assumption here is probably that the social worker would perceive Shelley as a high cultural poet and not as a revolutionary figure). As the voices in the poem engage with a series of human rights activists and high profile African American entertainers, the daughter begins to forge a deliberate historical, political and cultural agenda that she can claim as her own. She chooses and rejects certain cultural figures as being important to the formation of her own sense of self in the world. This sense of self is obviously informed by the fact of her personal (transracial) adoption and her relationship with her adoptive mother and imagined relationship with her birth mother. At the same time, the poem suggests that she is also formed by more public factors of her twentieth-century global environment. In the daughter’s case, the influence of Paul Robeson, Angela Davis, Pearl Bailey and Bessie Smith are lasting, whereas the products of white Anglo-American mainstream popular culture are rendered negligible and transient. And it’s in “The Adoption Papers” particularly that Kay’s poetry reaches out to a history of Black oppression, civil rights and Black culture, making this history important also to Black British identity.
Literary context
Valerie Mason John’s interview with Kay points to a vacuum her verse begins to fill: “Kay is concerned about the lack of recognition of black women writers in Britain and points out that although the U.S. appears to foster black women’s talent, with the success of writers like Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, one cannot be complacent” (Mason John in Kay, p. 38) Bruce Woodcock identifies two significant moments in Britain’s postcolonial publishing history of black women’s poetry: the publication, in 1977, of a special edition of Savacou, (a magazine run by the Caribbean poet Edward Kamu Brathwaite) that was called “Caribbean Women.” And in 1980, the publisher Heinemann produced an anthology called Jamaica Woman, featuring 15 Caribbean women poets. Into this emerging context, Woodcock notes Kay as one of “a number of women poets not included in these collections, but who can be found in other recent anthologies not devoted to Caribbean writing or in individual volumes” (Woodcock, p. 58). The best British examples of Caribbean women poets, according to Woodcock, are Jackie Kay and Maud Suiter, (although he mistakenly assumes that Kay is of Caribbean rather than part-African descent). Kay’s work has appeared in A Dangerous Knowing (1983), a collection of poetry by black British women poets Barbara Burford, Gabriela Pearse and Grace Nichols. At that point in the 1980s, Kay’s work had only appeared in anthologies. In common with Grace Nichols (b. 1950 Guyana), Kay’s early work points to a need to recognize and assert the specificity of black women’s experiences. But even in the 1980s, while “The Adoption Papers” was being written, the circumstances of Kay’s upbringing were contributing to a distinctive poetic voice: motherhood in relation to adoption, Black-Scottish (particularly Glaswegian) identity, and lesbian relationships. Woodcock points out Kay’s poem “Happy Ending” (not in The Adoption Papers) as significant for “wryly rejecting the enforced tragedies of past writings on lesbianism” (Woodcock, p. 69). While Kay’s voice has been located in the context of the growing volumes of Black British and Caribbean women’s writing (including, for example, Paula Burnett’s edition of The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse, published in 1986) her poetic voice has remained distinctly and recognizably hers in its global and insistently local (Glasgow and London) geographies.
Reception
Sections of “The Adoption Papers” were published and performed on BBC Radio 3 before publication on October 10, 1991, in the collection to which the poem gives its name. Kay was showered with prizes: the Eric Gregory Prize, the Saltire and the Forward Prizes for poetry.
Asked whether she felt that reviewers tended to pigeonhole her work, Kay responded affirmatively:
Yes, I think reviewers do review your work depending on who you are. That’s annoying for me, particularly because I have a whole set of labels which reviewers could put after my name—like Scottish, woman, black, lesbian, socialist, adopted. . It is very irritating for me. In my children’s poetry books, for example, I write lots of poems about lots of different topics, but reviewers still find a reason to name me as: ‘Jackie Kay who is black and adopted and was brought up in Scotland. ‘ And that won’t necessarily have anything to do with the poems.
(Goodman, p. 255)
One reviewer, at least, did respond to her poems rather than to Kay herself as a series of labels: Robert Potts reviewed The Adoption Papers in the Times Literary Supplement shortly after its publication. He found the collection to be “an inspiring volume” (Potts, p. 30) for its “remarkable technique and knack for quick, telling characterisation” in the series of poems that make up “Severe Gale 8” (Potts, p. 30). But he also singled
ANGELA DAVIS (1944-)
Angela Davis was dismissed from her post as Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the University of California at Los Angeles for her involvement with the Coiwntiriist Party, to which she belonged from 1968-91. Through her involvement with prisoners’ rights, Davis met George Jackson, one of the Soledad brothers (jailed in Soledad Prison), who had been falsely charged with killing a prison guard in January 1970. She established friendships with the Jackson family, and espedally with George’s brother fonathon, who became one of her bodyguards, on August 1970, in order to draw attention to prison conditions and abuses perpetrated against the Soledad Brothers Jonathan carried gum into a courtroom in the Marin County Civic Center, in northern California, and took the judge, district attorney, and members of the jury hostage. In the ensuing standoff, Jonathon Jackson was killed, Davis, who was out of California at the time, was named as accomplice because the guns were registered in her name. She escaped underground, arid, as the daughter in “The Adoption Papers notes, the American Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) put her on its most wanted list. Taken prisoner in October 1970, Davis remained in jail for the rest of that year, She was released on bail during the preparation for her trial, which in June 1972 ended in a not-guilty verdict Acquitted by an all-white Jury, Davis became a symbol of the fight against racial oppression in America.
out for praise “The Adoption Papers”: “the juxtaposition of dialects and perspectives, married to a sureness of phrase and metaphor, raise questions of blood and identity (both cultural and biological) skilfully and almost tacitly” (Potts, p. 30).
—Tracy Hargreaves
For More Information
Foner, Philip S. Paul Robeson Speaks: Writings, Speeches, Interviews, 1918-74. London: Quartet, 1978.
Gaber, Ivor, and Jane Aldridge, eds. In the Best Interests of the Child: Culture, Identity and Transracial Adoption. London: Free Association, 1994.
Goodman, Lizbeth. Feminist Stages: Interviews with Women in Contemporary British Theatre. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic, 1996.
James, Joy. The Angela Y. Davis Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.
Kay, Jackie. The Adoption Papers. Newcastle: Blood-axe, 1991.
____.Interview by Valerie Mason John. The Guardian, 10 October 1991, 38.
McNeill, Peter G. B. Adoption of Children in Scotland. Edinburgh: W. G. Green & Son, 1982.
Peacock, Keith D. Thatcher’s Theatre: British Theatre and Drama in the Eighties. London: Greenwood, 1999.
Phillips, Mike, and Trevor Phillips. Windrush: The Irresistible Rise of Multi-Racial Britain. London: Harper Collins, 1998.
Potts, Robert. Review of The Adoption Papers. The Times Literary Supplement, 22 May 1992, 30.
Sinfield, Alan. Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989.
Tizard, Barbara, and Ann Phoenix. Black, White or Mixed Race? Race and Racism in the Lives of Young People of Mixed Parentage. London: Routledge, 1993.
Weeks, Jeffrey. Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800. London: Longman, 1989.
Woodcock, Bruce. “‘Long Memoried Women’: Caribbean Women Poets.” In Black Women’s Writing. Ed. Gina Wisker. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993.