![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.gfdesign.co.uk\/culture\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/4c1649a98f1721694fad3df4956deed9.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
May Day<\/em> is Jackie Kay\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 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.<\/p>\n One of the proudest moments for Helen and John must have been to be present as their daughter, at the time Scotland\u2019s third Makar, read out her poem \u2018The Long View\u2019<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2018running up and down\/the length of the procession\/ totting up numbers\u2019 because \u2018the Polis count is always out.\u2019<\/em> Many activists on many marches will align themselves with this comment.<\/p>\n The great sense of comradeship she recalls becomes evident when:<\/p>\n You\u2019d see all the familiars, Auntie this, 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u2018the moral bankruptcy and mendacity\u2019<\/em> of her times as she sees:<\/p>\n \u2026beached whales and toxicity. MAYDAY MAYDAY MAYDAY<\/em><\/p>\n 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 \u2018the classless estate o\u2019 the dead.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n 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 \u2018I sent them to a lesbian convention!\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n There are a couple of other wonderful comments \u2013 many would recall McGahey having made such as his proud admission that \u2018I was a product of my class and movement.\u2019<\/em> And then there\u2019s the comment he would always make when asked at the bar what would he like in his Bell\u2019s whisky, to which he would invariably answer, \u2019Another wee Bell\u2019s.\u2019<\/p>\n Earlier in the poem Kay had listed many of the names of former comrades \u2013 along with many of her own favourites \u2013 who reside now in Death\u2019s dominion. She mentions \u2018the Jimmies, Reid and Airlie\u2026the Gollans\u2026the Ashtons, Anna, Jack \u2026 Gordon McLennans, Alex Clarks\u2026 Abe Moffat.\u2019<\/em> 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, \u2018You lived your life alongside those who breathed your beliefs.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n Cleverly, Kay turns this dominion, \u2018this land of disbelief\u2019<\/em>, into a mine that reveals \u2018the seams of the human race.\u2019<\/em> It was a fitting metaphor to use for the former miner and miners\u2019 leader. Also, in this land of the dead we find Milk Snatcher and Heath, his former adversaries, but McGahey pays \u2018them no heed in this democracy o\u2019 the deid.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n While Jackie pays homage to all these dead comrades, she also includes in A Life in Protest<\/em> 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 \u2013 as well as being a poet.<\/p>\n Kay remembers when Madame Allende came to Glasgow and the warm welcome she was given. She also attended, aged seventeen, a women\u2019s Reclaim The Night demonstration. She questions \u2018Why should we stay in? Make men stay in.\u2019<\/em> She recalls the Pride demo she attended in London in 1984 \u2013 \u2018watching people watching us\u2026 like we were barely human.\u2019<\/em> This period in her life involved her staying in South London with Shaila Shah and attending \u2018Change your Life\u2019 meetings at A Woman\u2019s Place.\u2019 She even started to wear \u2018an Afro like Angela Davis.\u2019<\/em> She moved on to Greenham Common and the peace songs.<\/p>\n 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 \u2018as a revolutionary in a red dressing gown\u2019<\/em> wearing a badge with \u2018I voted Remain\u2019<\/em>. 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 \u2013 ‘I\u2019m tired of living but scared of dying\/ But old man river, he just keeps rolling along.\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n There are some deeply moving poems addressed to her mum and dad, in particular she writes three Mother\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n In one poem addressed to Harry Belafonte she brings back to life all that he stood for as a man:<\/p>\n Harry, who stood with the Native Americans, 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 \u2018People who fought to make our world better.\u2019<\/em>\u00a0In the last line of the poem \u2018Harry Belafonte\u2019<\/em> she lists:<\/p>\n … you, Dad, Audre, Harry, ….and has All of you raising a glass.<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n
Uncle that, the Party blood, through the veins!<\/em><\/p>\n
What can I say but flame the alarm
Before our world goes up in shame<\/em><\/p>\n
who fought Hollywood\u2019s 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.<\/em><\/p>\n
Paul, Sidney, Nina, Rosa, Bessie<\/em><\/p>\n