Evocations of Home in the 1990S Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy, Jackie Kay, and Kathleen Jamie Kathryn A
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Bates College SCARAB Honors Theses Capstone Projects Spring 5-2014 Scottish Nostalgias: Evocations of Home in the 1990s Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy, Jackie Kay, and Kathleen Jamie Kathryn A. Ailes Bates College, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://scarab.bates.edu/honorstheses Recommended Citation Ailes, Kathryn A., "Scottish Nostalgias: Evocations of Home in the 1990s Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy, Jackie Kay, and Kathleen Jamie" (2014). Honors Theses. 105. http://scarab.bates.edu/honorstheses/105 This Open Access is brought to you for free and open access by the Capstone Projects at SCARAB. It has been accepted for inclusion in Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of SCARAB. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Scottish Nostalgias: Evocations of Home in the 1990s Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy, Jackie Kay, and Kathleen Jamie An Honors Thesis Presented to The Faculty of the Department of English Bates College In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Arts By Kathryn A. Ailes Lewiston, Maine March 21, 2014 Table of Contents Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................. ii Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iv Preface ................................................................................................................................. v Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter I: The Limitations of Language to Describe Homesickness in Carol Ann Duffy’s Poetry ........................................................................................................................................... 17 Chapter II: Imagining Biological and Cultural Origins in Jackie Kay’s Poetry, Fiction, and Memoir .............................................................................................................................. 62 Chapter III: To Cherish or Dump the Relics in our Land? The Poems of Kathleen Jamie101 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 136 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 141 Appendix A: Poems Referenced ..................................................................................... 157 Appendix B: Further Reading ......................................................................................... 161 i Acknowledgements First, I owe sincere thanks to my advisor, Rob Farnsworth. Rob, you have been so supportive throughout this entire process, nudging me along when I needed to be pushed and challenging me to perform at the highest level. I am so grateful for your support and for the faith you placed in me. Your passion and curiosity for poetry have inspired me to delve deep into poems, and your classes taught me how to truly read a poem on multiple levels. Thank you so much for guiding me through the thesis process and for reading the pages I sent your way and providing helpful feedback. Thank you to Lauren Vedal and Misty Beck. Lauren, your critical eye and articulate advice on my drafts helped me to see the big picture. Misty, your calm presence and encouraging words at Thesis Café were wonderfully reassuring. Thank you so much to the professors and poets on my Honors Defense panel, Betsy Sholl, Robert Strong, and Laurie O'Higgins. I truly appreciate your reading this thesis critically and convening to discuss it with me. A special thank you to Joanne Cole and Therí Pickens. Joanne, thank you for the invaluable writing training I’ve received through you as a Peer Writing Assistant; your cheery encouragement and clear advice often came to mind as I wrote and edited. Dr. Pickens, thank you for taking me on as a Research Assistant last summer; the skills I learned from you were very helpful as I took on the massive endeavor of researching these poets, and the high standard you set for my work helped me take it to the next level. I owe a huge thanks to my wonderful parents, Shirley Dodson and Rich Ailes. Mom and Dad, your steady, loving support and guidance has boosted me; you always made me believe I ii could achieve anything. Thank you for reading to me as a kid, supporting my travel to Scotland, and always being by my side for the adventures I take on. Mom, thank you for your eagle-eyed proofreading of this thesis. Dad, sorry again for taking over your napping couch with mountains of thesis books over breaks—thank you for graciously allowing me to camp out there. Finally, thank you to my friends for your camaraderie and encouragement. And a special thank you to Conor Smith: I couldn’t have done it without your patient, kind, and generous support. iii Abstract This thesis examines the themes of nostalgia, memory, and displacement in the 1990s work of Scottish poets Carol Ann Duffy, Jackie Kay, and Kathleen Jamie. Each of these poets has emigrated from Scotland—Duffy and Kay permanently, Jamie temporarily—and consequently they associate Scotland with the past and childhood and express displacement from a sense of cultural belonging. Their poetry presents Scotland dually, juxtaposing idealized, clichéd memories and traditions with the physical reality of Scotland’s geographical space and material artifacts. They negotiate the double estrangement of female Scottishness, partially due to their shared experience of maturing during the rise of feminism and the movement towards devolution culminating in the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999. Their poems test the capacity of language(s), including English and Scots, to embody the intense experience of both personal and national nostalgias. Duffy, who moved to England in childhood, portrays Scotland—and the notion of “home” itself—as intangible, dreamlike, and lost. Kay’s genre- bending, autobiographically-generated work painfully grasps for biological, cultural, and national origins, and emphasizes the Othering power of racism. Jamie’s writing inquires whether Scottish culture should submit to nostalgia and hoard its relics, or cut tethers and dispose of outdated customs, traditions, and objects. Drawing from poetry collections as well as novels, essays, and memoirs, this thesis undertakes a comprehensive analysis of these writers’ meditations on Scotland as “home” and provides a timely study of Scottish cultural identity given the current movement for Scottish national independence. iv Preface As children, many of us have a firm and rooted sense of “home.” It is our house, our family, our sense of comfort. But the inevitable process of leaving this place and progressing through the world estranges us from this sense of belonging. Emigrating away, be it twelve minutes or twelve thousand miles, often provokes in us nostalgia and a sense of conflicted identity. This narrative is simple and virtually universal. However, for many, the concept of home is complicated by political crises and deeper issues of exile. What happens when one’s childhood home is not safe, or never existed as one physical space? What happens when one is forced from her land, rejected by her government; or, conversely, compelled to remain in that place for longer than she desires? What happens when a person is not recognized as a legitimate native of her country? The concepts of home and identity are intimately connected: the act of claiming a place as one’s home carries with it cultural, political, and historical baggage that one must either assume or reject. The poets I discuss in this thesis all have contentious relationships with their homes due to emigration, estrangement, frustration, and love. They defend their identities as Scottish women while critiquing that nation’s culture, politics, and social norms, and illustrating the complexities of their claim to Scotland as a country of origin. Reading their work, one feels the pain of displacement and the sting of nostalgia coexisting with pride, joy, and curiosity around the very idea of home. I came to this thesis through a similar experience of displacement, origin-searching, and exploration. In my junior year at Bates, I studied for a term in Edinburgh, Scotland. In the four months I spent there, I grew fascinated with Scottish culture; or rather, the multiplicity of its v cultures. Shortbread and whisky, haggis and heroin, tartan galore, legendary loch monsters, and William Wallace (or a blue-faced Mel Gibson): it is a nation that has been romanticized to a caricature, and I as an outsider was trying to find the genuine within it. Like Kathleen Jamie, I was a traveler exploring, shaping, and claiming my personal identity as it butted up against a foreign culture; I was suddenly the Other and found myself needing to articulate my identity as an American citizen. For me, this meant trying to explain the 2012 Sandy Hook shootings to my friends from Scotland, where the police do not carry firearms, and attempting to rationalize U.S. foreign policy that I often wasn’t comfortable with myself. Upon returning to the United States, I experienced contradictory sensations of nostalgia. I found myself distractedly saying “I want to go home” and then not knowing where I meant: my childhood house in Pennsylvania? my dorm room in Lewiston, Maine? or the flat I’d come to adore