Fiere
By Jackie Kay
63pp
Picador
Jackie Kay’s latest
collection, ‘Fiere’, in which she negotiates between her Igbo
(Nigerian) and Scottish identities, brings to mind the famous lines
from Derek Walcott’s poem, ‘A Far Cry from Africa’: “I who am poisoned
with the blood of both, / Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?” But
the parallel ends with the existence of a keenly-felt double heritage.
Kay’s dilemma (if any), unlike Walcott’s, is not in what direction to
turn. She has turned her back on the path of ambivalence; choosing
instead to embrace her twin “bloods.” The first hint of this is to be
found in the title of the collection. “Fiere,” we are told, is a
Scottish word that means “a companion, a mate, a spouse, an equal.” The
next hint is in the epigraphs that open the collection. Two lines from
the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, (who, like Kay’s birth father, is
Igbo) – “Wherever someone stands, / something else will stand beside
it” – sum the collection up. (The other epigraph, introducing the word
“fiere”, is by the Scottish poet Robert Burns)
That Achebe quote –
see it as an English translation, mediated by an Igbo sensibility, of a
Scottish word (“fiere”) – gives resonance to Kay’s life story; the
secrets and revelations that have showed up over a lifetime, regarding
her origins, and formed the inspiration for much of her writing. (The
title poem of ‘The Adoption Papers’, her debut poetry collection,
published in 1991, is a narration by a trio of voices: “Daughter”,
“Adoptive Mother” and “Birth Mother.”) Soon after her birth in
Edinburgh in 1961 to a Nigerian father and a Scottish mother, Kay was
adopted by a Scottish couple. In 1991, aged thirty, she met her birth
mother, and then her birth father when she was in her forties. Now
imagine Kay’s adoptive parents “stand[ing] beside” her birth parents,
and Kay beside another version of herself (“you, who were with me all
along, / walking that road not taken”), and you will realise the
significance of Achebe’s words.
Haunting these
poems is a keen awareness of the fragile nature of life, lived as it is
beneath the shadows of fate and “accident”. So when the poet,
addressing a 12th century bronze head from an ancient Nigerian
civilisation, says: “Looking back and furward in time, / ye could hae
been forgotten, / dug up, as ye were, by accident: / but naw, ye’re
here…,” she might well have been speaking to and about herself.
Travelling is a
strong motif in the collection; many of these poems are odes to roads,
rivers and restlessness (“I have travelled the roads and the miles; /
I’ve crossed the rivers and lakes”). Now and again a “farandman”
(“travelling person”) shows up: the poet driving her mother through
miles and miles of a nostalgia-suffused landscape; her mother
“[remembering] Sri Lanka”; her “bold adventurer son” going to Mexico;
her father crossing over into the second half of his eighth decade.
Love, loss and
longing swirl relentlessly in these pages, all of these underwritten by
a keen ear for language, and an eye for the raw splendour of nature.
Belonging and exclusion are also never far away. In Ukpor market in
South-Eastern Nigeria (the land of the Igbo), Kay sees “a row of women
/ with my face: mirror image. / Same square physiognomy, / same wide
nose, same broad smile…”
Tongues however
differ, as does skin colour and how it is perceived. Kay sees herself
as merely “another shade of black”, but to those women, she is “Oyinbo”
– a white person (mistranslated in this poem as “white woman”). Here,
therefore, is a poet who knows what it means to “stand alone in the
middle ground.” The collection’s blurb describes it as a “lyric
counterpoint” to ‘Red Dust Road’, Kay’s memoir, published last year, in
which she narrates her journey in search of her birth parents.
“The road to Amaudo
/ like the road to Nzagha / like roads all over Nigeria / all over
Africa / is a winding and long / red dust road / stretching / perhaps
into infinity…” she writes, in ‘Road to Amaudo.’ Fiere is indeed ‘Red
Dust Road’ set to music; the song-like vernacular of a Scottish dialect
colliding, jazz-like, with the watery rhythms of an “Igbo bath”; the
red dust of an Igbo village and the haar (sea fog) of coastal Scotland
rising to stand beside each other in tentative friendship. “C’mon,
c’mon my dearie – tak my hand, my fiere!”
Tolu Ogunlesi is studying Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, UK.
