But this changed, the need to fully understand her origins, became more pressing. How was she conceived? Why couldn't she have been brought up by them! What sort of persons are they? What have their lives been like since? What had she inherited from them! Would she like them as people? Will they like her? Will they even want to meet her?
Red Dust Road is carefully constructed, like a mixed media collage of Jackie Kay's life, and how the desire to meet her birth parents affected it. Moving back and forth you learn about Jackie Kay's circumstances, encounters with racism, assumptions made about her, coming out as a lesbian, and learning the true nature and cost of her birth parents relationship. She found her Scottish birth mother relatively easily, a mentally fragile woman not entirely able to rise to being who Jackie imagined she was or wanted her to be.
Her father proved a much more challenging person to meet. A renowned African biologist who, out of guilt over his previous sexual behaviour, has since discovered god, but doesn't want his family to know about her. She recounts their first truly bizarre meeting in a hotel room, brilliantly capturing the ludicrous hilarity of it, and at the same time her depth of distress. This was after all her father. How on earth could she develop a meaningful relationship with this man?
This deft mixing of hilarity and pathos is one of Red Dust Road's striking qualities. Kay is also unfailingly frank about her own failings, her naive expectations, the joys of being brought up by her Scottish parents, as well as the bitter sweet discovery of her true origins. Offset by the culturally rich ancestry she now found herself part of.. How this in itself challenged and changed her view of her own persona and life.
CARROT REVIEW 6/8
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