May Day is Jackie Kay’s latest poetry collection. It is addressed to her parents, Helen and John Kay, who adopted her as a baby. They had both been members of the Communist Party, with John a full time official with the CPGB in his role as Industrial Organiser of the Party in Scotland. Helen had also been the Secretary of Scottish CND.
This collection is both a tribute to her parents and to all those other progressive figures Kay has admired. It is also a collection of loss and grief at their passing – but ultimately the collection rises above loss and grief, because it is essentially a testament to an enduring love. Her parents, no longer with her, will always be her parents.
One of the proudest moments for Helen and John must have been to be present as their daughter, at the time Scotland’s third Makar, read out her poem ‘The Long View’ on the 20th anniversary of the opening of the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood. In this poem she welcomed Helen and John by name. They had a profoundly positive influence upon her. Though proud Scots they were internationalists, they were anti-racists and class warriors, they were music lovers, storytellers, comedians, peace campaigners and friends to many. They were also readers.
Jackie has brought them back to life in this collection and many other comrades of John and Helen have similarly been resurrected. They are all marching again in the pages of May Day. There are two poems in the collection called May Day. One recalls an actual May Day march celebrating the labour of all workers. On this particular march Jackie remembers her father ‘running up and down/the length of the procession/ totting up numbers’ because ‘the Polis count is always out.’ Many activists on many marches will align themselves with this comment.
The great sense of comradeship she recalls becomes evident when:
You’d see all the familiars, Auntie this,
Uncle that, the Party blood, through the veins!
And after the march she would head off to the home of Alex and Jessie Clark, two legendary fighters for their class. She writes with a sense of privilege that she had been brought up by stalwarts of the Scottish working class and they are recalled with much affection.
In the second May Day poem she uses the term as an alarm and joins the two words to read MAYDAY. This construction came about as she thought of a term to rhyme with her surname and she uses it to counter ‘the moral bankruptcy and mendacity’ of her times as she sees:
…beached whales and toxicity.
What can I say but flame the alarm
Before our world goes up in shame
MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY
The moral bankruptcy of our age is in clear contradiction to the circle of friends and comrades her parents associated with. She remembers them all with a fondness and with the sense of morality that they all possessed. They were selfless people who worked to improve the lot of the ordinary men and women at home and abroad. In the poem Last Man in Operations she imagines an After-world of all the old comrades she and her parents had known. She also mentions others who had been in this After-world before them, and adds in her own favourites too who reside in ‘the classless estate o’ the dead.’
The poem is narrated by Mick McGahey, the former leader of the Scottish miners, and there are a few comments he makes in the poem that she had clearly heard which have become quite famous. During the national strike action of the miners in 1972 and 1974, McGahey knew that his phone was being tapped. He would speak to others on the telephone telling them to arrange a picket at a particular power station only for the picket to be arranged for somewhere else. The security services would have alerted the police who would have turned up where nothing was happening. On one occasion ‘I sent them to a lesbian convention!’
There are a couple of other wonderful comments – many would recall McGahey having made such as his proud admission that ‘I was a product of my class and movement.’ And then there’s the comment he would always make when asked at the bar what would he like in his Bell’s whisky, to which he would invariably answer, ’Another wee Bell’s.’
Earlier in the poem Kay had listed many of the names of former comrades – along with many of her own favourites – who reside now in Death’s dominion. She mentions ‘the Jimmies, Reid and Airlie…the Gollans…the Ashtons, Anna, Jack … Gordon McLennans, Alex Clarks… Abe Moffat.’ Some others who get a mention include Bob Crow and Tony Benn, Madame Allende, Rosa Luxemburg, Rosa Parks, Victor Jara, Che Guevara and Nelson Mandela, Jock Stein and Claudia Jones. In naming all these people Kay can imagine McGahey saying, ‘You lived your life alongside those who breathed your beliefs.’
Cleverly, Kay turns this dominion, ‘this land of disbelief’, into a mine that reveals ‘the seams of the human race.’ It was a fitting metaphor to use for the former miner and miners’ leader. Also, in this land of the dead we find Milk Snatcher and Heath, his former adversaries, but McGahey pays ‘them no heed in this democracy o’ the deid.’
While Jackie pays homage to all these dead comrades, she also includes in A Life in Protest many of the demonstrations she attended herself throughout her life. At five months old she was taken on a demonstration against the siting of the Polaris missile, the forerunner to the even deadlier Trident missile system, on the Holy Loch. Her brother was pushed in a pram by Hugh MacDiarmid, a man who doubled as both a Scottish nationalist and a communist – as well as being a poet.
Kay remembers when Madame Allende came to Glasgow and the warm welcome she was given. She also attended, aged seventeen, a women’s Reclaim The Night demonstration. She questions ‘Why should we stay in? Make men stay in.’ She recalls the Pride demo she attended in London in 1984 – ‘watching people watching us… like we were barely human.’ This period in her life involved her staying in South London with Shaila Shah and attending ‘Change your Life’ meetings at A Woman’s Place.’ She even started to wear ‘an Afro like Angela Davis.’ She moved on to Greenham Common and the peace songs.
John and Helen Kay helped nurture a beautiful rebellious spirit in Jacke. She took the knee for nine minutes in memory of George Floyd and took her own son Matthew on a demonstration to free Nelson Mandela. In 2003, back in Glasgow, she was in George Square with Helen and John against the war in Iraq when they were aged 73 and 78, with walking sticks. Later still she recalls her mother ‘as a revolutionary in a red dressing gown’ wearing a badge with ‘I voted Remain’. It is fitting that this poem ends with lyrics from Paul Robeson, a man much admired by her parents and by many in Scotland, with the words – ‘I’m tired of living but scared of dying/ But old man river, he just keeps rolling along.’
There are some deeply moving poems addressed to her mum and dad, in particular she writes three Mother’s Day poems from 2020-22. They are messages of loss and love, and writing them must have been acts of therapy for Jackie. There is so much to love in this collection. Her collection is a May Day march with all her family, friends and personal heroes. There are poems to Nina Simone, Audrey Lorde, the South African artist Albert Adams and there is mention too of the great Paul Robeson.
In one poem addressed to Harry Belafonte she brings back to life all that he stood for as a man:
Harry, who stood with the Native Americans,
who fought Hollywood’s portrayal of black men,
the butler, servant, the Yes Massa man.
Who loved Robeson when he said,
I was an activist who became an artist,
who fought the ghosts of racism past.
This is a private collection of poems, but they are written to be shared by all of us. Kay seems to invite us into a grand house where we can commune with past comrades who can still inspire us. Their names live on as testimonies to selflessness, working-class pride and international solidarity from ‘People who fought to make our world better.’ In the last line of the poem ‘Harry Belafonte’ she lists:
… you, Dad, Audre, Harry,
Paul, Sidney, Nina, Rosa, Bessie
….and has All of you raising a glass. And that glass can be lifted by all who take pride in supporting the human race against the greed that seeks to divide us all. Just as old man river keeps rolling along, so too does the struggle to achieve a fairer and better world.
