ILLUMINATING

I keep thinking I should try and express the many thoughts in my mind as I've listened to the extensive BBC radio coverage of the 200th anniversary of the Act abolishing the transatlantic slave trade on British ships. Something about how the many considered, knowledgeable, heartfelt talks and conversations, poems and plays inspired by the anniversary have made me think widely about the meaning of freedom, choice, equality, about the many ways in which we enslave ourselves and each other, at the very same time as making me think that any comparisons and musings touching on my own experience are impudent and inappropriate in the face of something so horrific, so ungraspable, so terrifyingly institutionalised. I think the main thing to note, and welcome, really is the mere fact that they have made me, and apparently a lot of other people, think - at length and uncomfortably.

Particularly worthy of note was Jackie Kay's lyric play, The Lamplighters, on Radio 3 last night, and the following hour of prose, poetry and music about slavery and freedom which she curated (listen again at the links until 31 March).

I saw Jackie Kay read some of her poetry recently at the London Review Bookshop (just noticed that they are highlighting a great list of books for the anniversary). She's half-Scots and half-Nigerian, a warm, solid woman with a lilting lowland-Scots voice that is surprisingly small and sweet. She read a funny, troubling poem about meeting a Nigerian man on a train from Glasgow to London. Uninvited, he waved a finger in her face and declared that he could tell she was, like him, an Ibo; she had an 'Ibo nose'. Ibo, in her Scots accent, sounded like the French word, hibou - ' you're an hibou, that's an hibou nooze'. Her accent wasn't just an incidental, charming addition - it underlined powerfully how she's not just Ibo, not just Scots, how none of us is reducible to one identity, how identity is both a comfort and an imposition. Her voice and the poem, its wonderful mingling of humour and indignation, communication and isolation, confusion and laughter, lingered in my mind and linger still, as will The Lamplighters.  Work that hits you on every level.

Comments

[Richard Lawrence Cohen]

I think we should always be suspicious whenever anyone tries to tell us who we are.

[Michael]

As a dear friend once told me, when people tell you who they think you are, they're really revealing who they are, subconsciously or otherwise.

[Lesley]

So now you have me wondering where I can find a recording of Jackie Kay's intriguing voice; whether or not I can afford to resubscribe to the LRB; and what the possible connection is Between Kay's The Lamplighters and R. Louis Stevenson's novella of the same title. So many questions for one post and an old one at that — I'm glad I dropped by.