Some Connection with the Place

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Notes

1 Eg Phillips notes Richard Wright's disappointment ‘with Africa and with Africans’ (A New World Order 91) and that Alexander Crummell and Edward Blyden exhibit ‘a profound distaste for African traditions, cultures and languages’ (90).

2 In an interview Kay describes the impact Bessie Smith had on her: ‘I will always associate the dawning of my own realization of being black with the blues, and particularly Bessie's blues … Bessie's blues still fill me with a strange longing. I don't know exactly what for. Blackness? A culture that will wholly embrace me? Belonging? Who knows’ (Lumsden 83).

3 Kay corroborated my reading in an interview given in Liège, Belgium (Mar. 2013) when I asked her what prompted her to publish her life story as a full autobiography and particularly the story of tracing her birth parents. She said ‘My life turned into a story that was happening to me and I felt that in order to process that story I'd have to write about it as a life-story. There didn't seem to be any point in making it up or putting it into a different form like poetry or play […]. The first meeting with [my birth father] was so extraordinary, partly traumatic, that it compelled me to write, to understand the experience’ (Tournay-Theodotou forthcoming).

4 It is noteworthy that Kay meets both of her birth parents for the first time in a hotel setting, her father at the Nicon Hilton hotel in Abuja and her mother in Milton Keynes. The hotel as a space of fleeting encounters is an apt metaphor for the tentative bonds Kay forms with both of them. Coincidentally both cities in which the meetings occur are ‘planned cities’ with no history behind them, which is reflective of the forced, constructed nature of the relationship between Kay and her biological parents.

5 Eg: ‘Road to Amaudo’: ‘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/to a foreseeable future/and back to/lost time’ (Fiere 52); ‘Longitude’: ‘[…] I glimpse you walking/along the red dust road’ (Fiere 2); ‘Photo in the Locket’: ‘I miss the land. The red dust roads’ (Darling 53).

6 This desire echoes an encounter with a stranger on the train described in the poem ‘Pride’, in which the man identifies Kay's Ibo heritage: ‘“Ibo,” he said, “Ibo, definitely.”/Our train rushed through the dark./“You are an Ibo!”’ (Darling 160).

7 See also the following passages about the connection between adoption and the imagination: ‘There was always something mysterious in the story of our adoption […] something made up about it’ (Red Dust Road 29) and ‘My birth parents are like ghosts dancing. Nothing more than illusions, dreams in my own head’ (149).

8 It is also noteworthy that in this chapter numerous repetitions of the word ‘imagine’ and its derivatives can be found in a seeming effort to emphasise the significance of the imagination.

9 Kay informs the reader that, as a young child, ‘I used to imagine my birth mother was Shirley Bassey’ (Red Dust Road 65). Similar to what Nelly Dean did for Heathcliff (who Kay mentions explicitly along with Jane Eyre as two of the fictional orphaned characters she turned to on her literary voyage of discovery, [235]) in a loving attempt at providing her adopted daughter with self-validation, her mum imagines a royal lineage for her: ‘“Maybe your father was an African chief” […] “Maybe you are an African princess”’ (41).

10 If, as Toni Morrison asserts ‘for a long time, the art form that was healing for Black people was music’ (Lumsden 83), Kay's enduring fascination with Bessie Smith's blues is a case in point. It is, furthermore, interesting to note that throughout her writing Kay resorts to music and song lyrics to establish an atmosphere or reinforce a specific theme. In Red Dust Road it is frequently the theme of the journey and Kay's feelings for the land that are highlighted by these, eg ‘Ray Charles is singing “Hit the Road, Jack”’ (226); ‘“Stuck on you,” Lionel Ritchie sings on the car radio’ (221).

11 Also note the following references to trees in the memoir: ‘a tree might make a kind father’ (Red Dust Road 144) as a bitterly ironic comment following her father's rejection; and ‘Trees are so benevolent […] How they complement each other's growth, how two ash trees might share a canopy of leaves’ (165–66; my emphasis) as a symbol of nurture, support and integration.