Jackie Kay: Off Colour (1998)

 Off Colour

A review by Goodreads:

Off Colour

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These poems explore illness, sickness and health, past and present, in a dynamic and original way. They examine not only the sick body but the sick mind and sick society, racism and prejudice. It is Jackie Kay''s third collection.'

These poems explore illness, sickness and health, past and present, in a dynamic and original way. They examine not just the sick body, but the sick mind, the sick society, the sickness of racism and prejudice. Here are fresh voices, black people from Britain's past, the voice of a dying Sunday, the voice of a woman dying at the hands of the immigration authorities. The book grapples with obsessions: teeth, death, sex, colour, health. It is a book for our troubled times, both strange and funny. A virus runs through the book, attacking other poems. The finger is on the pulse in Off Colour. Off Colour is now out of print but all the poems in the collection are included in Darling (2007).


Recommended Reading: An academic article, that takes in many of the collections we have now read.
Right, let's get down to the poems:
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Race, racist, racism (with Jackie Kay's experience of racism in Scotland).
Academic Article: by Katharine Burkitt 
It is a poem which explores the effect of race on personal identity and highlights the problem of selfdefinition in that context, as it demonstrates the marginalisation that racism produces and explores the definition of self at those margins:
1 There is no such thing as black, said he. A pot is black, the earth, a shoe, But not I, said he, not I. I am not black, said he. ... I will be oak or hazelnut or coffee. I will be toffee. I will be donkey. But I will not be black, said he. So you will be donkey, said I. (129) 
Kay’s poem highlights the effect of racist comment on the definition of black British identity as the poetic voice is both guilt-ridden and resentful of the implication that racism is “down to me./ Entirely” (128). In this poem “black” becomes a term of racist abuse and is revealed to be wholly inaccurate in the categorisation of racial identity, as it is a suitable description of objects like, “a pot,” “the earth,” “a shoe,” but not of human skin colour. 
As the poem foregrounds the problems that occur when the terms of identification are set by others, it also demonstrates the inadequacy of language to articulate experience and identity. The concurrent denial and repetition of being “black” draws attention to the limits and unsuitability of the term. 
However, the subject’s repeated rejection of his own blackness is not a straightforward denunciation of terms, but also generates his search for new ones: “I will be oak or hazelnut or coffee.” 
This line demonstrates the way in which skin-colour becomes an identity. 
Kay’s use of nouns rather than adjectives highlights the absolute, but vaguely incongruous, nature of these terms, and reiterates it with the repeated, “or,” that suggests identity is singular and a matter of choice. Although, perhaps more descriptively accurate of the skin colours that are easily labelled black, these terms set by the subject himself are still revealed to be inherently problematic. 
This is most notable as the term “donkey” is introduced and reified in the line which is repeated by the poem’s narrator. The paradoxical identity, “donkey,” is explicitly chosen to concur with physical racial determinates, however, it also has other semantic associations which include animalism and the slang for foolishness. 
As such, even terms set by oneself, are revealed to be inherently problematic, and language is represented as both unreliable and limiting. In this sense, the term “black British” is tense with its plethora of meanings and their potentially contradictory nature. 
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Gambia : Gambia, an African kitchen maid, testifies against her mistress for brutality, after the "cruelty man" comes to collect evidence from her owners. reference to the Gold coast? Ghana? 
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False Memory
Some summaries:
In the powerful later poem False Memory she speaks, through a fictive persona, of self-discovery: ''The dark developing night./ Now I can peel back the wet/ pages,and let her out,/ carefully. I won't damage her head.''
Kay has a real talent for reinvesting a colloquial phrase with a richness of meaning; "False Memory" ends with the abuse victim carefully cutting herself out of old family photos, a resonant image in itself, but concludes: "Now I can peel back the wet / pages and let her out / carefully. I won't damage her head."
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Lucozade (p19)
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Somebody Else
Short and sweet this week – Somebody Else is poem on identity, a matter long-discussed by Ms Kay who is a biracial woman adopted and brought up by a white family.  Her ultimate conclusion was that rather than trying to be like one person or another, she should instead try to be like herself.  These words are simple but the quest to be like oneself rather than anybody else is something many of us struggle with our whole lives.  If you haven’t got a New Year’s Resolution, remember – when you are busy being somebody else, people mistake you and you mistake yourself.







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