Red Dust Road: An Autobiographical Journey by Jackie Kay | Book review
Red Dust Road opens in the Nicon Hilton Hotel in Abuja. Jackie Kay is confronted by the man who is her natural father. He is a born-again Christian and self-styled faith healer who prays over her for two hours. He is disappointed by her failure to give herself to Christ, the condition required by him to acknowledge her publicly as his daughter. "I am sitting here," writes Kay, "evidence of his sinful past, but I am the sinner, the living embodiment of his sin." Kay resists. They do not meet again.
For the previous 40 years Kay's existence had been kept secret from the families of both her natural father and her birth mother. Kay was born in 1961 in Edinburgh to a Scottish nurse and a Nigerian student. Soon afterwards she was adopted. Red Dust Road is Kay's 20-year search for her birth parents and for her existence to be recognised.
From Abuja, Kay returns us to a 1960s Glaswegian childhood with her parents John and Helen, delightful people, communists who spend their summer holidays singing in the car, who cross Russia by train, and raise her surrounded by caring comrades. Her mother tells her the little she knows about Jackie's birth parents and imagines what she does not know: they were madly in love, but he was already betrothed to another, they were heartbroken to give her away. These moments are offered as shared reminiscences, and are interspersed with other memories taken from different times, mainly of Kay tracing and eventually meeting the real people behind her mother's fairytales.
"There are essentially two kinds of adopted people: the ones who never trace, who never want to, are not interested, or who are frightened of hurting their adoptive parents' feelings; and the ones who want to trace, who are curious about their origins, who think that in tracing their original parents they will understand themselves better." Kay wishes briefly she were one of the former, but no writer so good could be so incurious.
Being pregnant with her own son in 1988 provides Kay with the initial spur to trace her roots, and the people she meets are very different from her mother's imaginings. Kay's birth mother, a fragile and wounded creature, battles with mental-health problems, and has become a Mormon. She has gone on to marry a black man and Kay discovers, to her astonishment, that she has sisters with the same colour skin as her own.
And though this is not a book about race, it runs like a refrain through the narrative. How could it not? This is in Britain in the 1970s and 80s. It is there in the crassness of a stranger who asks the Kays whether their two brown children speak English, of Kay being forced to eat mud by school bullies, of finding herself targeted by rightwing extremists at university, of being attacked by thugs on the London underground and pleading for help from a businessman who replies: "No, we support them." It is the story of every person of colour who grew up in Britain, of being told you don't belong. But in Kay's story it carries an extra resonance as her search for her birth parents becomes the desire to find a way to define herself, rather than being defined by others.
Reading Red Dust Road I was struck by how nearly Kay's story might have been mine. My parents, a Scottish girl and a west African student, also met in Scotland, at Aberdeen University, and had a baby in the same year – my elder brother. These African students were Wole Soyinka's "Renaissance generation", who came of age at the same time as their countries and were sent abroad to study in a belated attempt by the British to create a professional class. Away from home for years, many formed relationships with local women. One, a Kenyan who went to study in America, married an American and had a son they named Barack Obama, also born in 1961.
Probably my parents knew Jackie Kay's, for the African students were a tight group. My parents married. Jackie Kay's didn't. That is Kay's "fork in the road". And we all have them: ways in which, but for an encounter, a decision, accident or event, our lives might have turned out other.
We all cherish our stories. They are there in the family photo albums, the well-worn anecdotes, the genealogy records over which millions pore. Jackie Kay wanted to know her story, but it had been hidden. At one point in Red Dust Road she comments that dishonesty does not come naturally to her, and that is what lies at the heart of this stirring and joyful memoir. For this is a book about secrets and their impact – in Kay's fractured story, in her natural mother's frail mental health and father's flight into evangelism. By contrast there are those who live life out in the open – her adoptive parents, her friends, and those she meets along the way in Britain and Nigeria who help her along the red dust road, to find her village, her other African relatives and to retrieve the missing words to the story of her life.
Aminatta Forna's The Memory of Love is published by Bloomsbury.