Scottish Nostalgias: Evocations of Home in the 1990s Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy, Jackie Kay, and

177 Pages·2017·0.73 MB·English

Bates College
SCARAB
Honors Theses Capstone Projects
Spring 5-2014
Scottish Nostalgias: Evocations of Home in the
1990s Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy, Jackie Kay, and
Kathleen Jamie
Kathryn A. Ailes
Bates College, [email protected]
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Recommended Citation
Ailes, Kathryn A., "Scottish Nostalgias: Evocations of Home in the 1990s Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy, Jackie Kay, and Kathleen Jamie"
(2014).Honors Theses. 105.
http://scarab.bates.edu/honorstheses/105
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Scottish Nostalgias: Evocations of Home in the 1990s Poetry of
Carol Ann Duffy, Jackie Kay, and Kathleen Jamie

An Honors Thesis
Presented to
The Faculty of the Department of English
Bates College
In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the
Degree of Bachelor of Arts

By
Kathryn A. Ailes
Lewiston, Maine
March 21, 2014

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................. ii

Abstract .............................................................................................................................. iv

Preface ................................................................................................................................. v

Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1

Chapter I: The Limitations of Language to Describe Homesickness in Carol Ann Duffy’s Poetry
........................................................................................................................................... 17

Chapter II: Imagining Biological and Cultural Origins in Jackie Kay’s Poetry, Fiction, and
Memoir .............................................................................................................................. 62

Chapter III: To Cherish or Dump the Relics in our Land? The Poems of Kathleen Jamie101

Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 136

Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 141

Appendix A: Poems Referenced ..................................................................................... 157

Appendix B: Further Reading ......................................................................................... 161

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Acknowledgements

First, I owe sincere thanks to my advisor, Rob Farnsworth. Rob, you have been so
supportive throughout this entire process, nudging me along when I needed to be pushed and
challenging me to perform at the highest level. I am so grateful for your support and for the faith
you placed in me. Your passion and curiosity for poetry have inspired me to delve deep into
poems, and your classes taught me how to truly read a poem on multiple levels. Thank you so
much for guiding me through the thesis process and for reading the pages I sent your way and
providing helpful feedback.
Thank you to Lauren Vedal and Misty Beck. Lauren, your critical eye and articulate
advice on my drafts helped me to see the big picture. Misty, your calm presence and encouraging
words at Thesis Café were wonderfully reassuring.
Thank you so much to the professors and poets on my Honors Defense panel, Betsy
Sholl, Robert Strong, and Laurie O'Higgins. I truly appreciate your reading this thesis critically
and convening to discuss it with me.
A special thank you to Joanne Cole and Therí Pickens. Joanne, thank you for the
invaluable writing training I’ve received through you as a Peer Writing Assistant; your cheery
encouragement and clear advice often came to mind as I wrote and edited. Dr. Pickens, thank
you for taking me on as a Research Assistant last summer; the skills I learned from you were
very helpful as I took on the massive endeavor of researching these poets, and the high standard
you set for my work helped me take it to the next level.
I owe a huge thanks to my wonderful parents, Shirley Dodson and Rich Ailes. Mom and
Dad, your steady, loving support and guidance has boosted me; you always made me believe I
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could achieve anything. Thank you for reading to me as a kid, supporting my travel to Scotland,
and always being by my side for the adventures I take on. Mom, thank you for your eagle-eyed
proofreading of this thesis. Dad, sorry again for taking over your napping couch with mountains
of thesis books over breaks—thank you for graciously allowing me to camp out there.
Finally, thank you to my friends for your camaraderie and encouragement. And a special
thank you to Conor Smith: I couldn’t have done it without your patient, kind, and generous
support.

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Abstract

This thesis examines the themes of nostalgia, memory, and displacement in the 1990s
work of Scottish poets Carol Ann Duffy, Jackie Kay, and Kathleen Jamie. Each of these poets
has emigrated from Scotland—Duffy and Kay permanently, Jamie temporarily—and
consequently they associate Scotland with the past and childhood and express displacement from
a sense of cultural belonging. Their poetry presents Scotland dually, juxtaposing idealized,
clichéd memories and traditions with the physical reality of Scotland’s geographical space and
material artifacts. They negotiate the double estrangement of female Scottishness, partially due
to their shared experience of maturing during the rise of feminism and the movement towards
devolution culminating in the establishment of the Scottish Parliament in 1999. Their poems test
the capacity of language(s), including English and Scots, to embody the intense experience of
both personal and national nostalgias. Duffy, who moved to England in childhood, portrays
Scotland—and the notion of “home” itself—as intangible, dreamlike, and lost. Kay’s genre-
bending, autobiographically-generated work painfully grasps for biological, cultural, and
national origins, and emphasizes the Othering power of racism. Jamie’s writing inquires whether
Scottish culture should submit to nostalgia and hoard its relics, or cut tethers and dispose of
outdated customs, traditions, and objects. Drawing from poetry collections as well as novels,
essays, and memoirs, this thesis undertakes a comprehensive analysis of these writers’
meditations on Scotland as “home” and provides a timely study of Scottish cultural identity
given the current movement for Scottish national independence.

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Preface

As children, many of us have a firm and rooted sense of “home.” It is our house, our
family, our sense of comfort. But the inevitable process of leaving this place and progressing
through the world estranges us from this sense of belonging. Emigrating away, be it twelve
minutes or twelve thousand miles, often provokes in us nostalgia and a sense of conflicted
identity. This narrative is simple and virtually universal. However, for many, the concept of
home is complicated by political crises and deeper issues of exile. What happens when one’s
childhood home is not safe, or never existed as one physical space? What happens when one is
forced from her land, rejected by her government; or, conversely, compelled to remain in that
place for longer than she desires? What happens when a person is not recognized as a legitimate
native of her country?
The concepts of home and identity are intimately connected: the act of claiming a place
as one’s home carries with it cultural, political, and historical baggage that one must either
assume or reject. The poets I discuss in this thesis all have contentious relationships with their
homes due to emigration, estrangement, frustration, and love. They defend their identities as
Scottish women while critiquing that nation’s culture, politics, and social norms, and illustrating
the complexities of their claim to Scotland as a country of origin. Reading their work, one feels
the pain of displacement and the sting of nostalgia coexisting with pride, joy, and curiosity
around the very idea of home.
I came to this thesis through a similar experience of displacement, origin-searching, and
exploration. In my junior year at Bates, I studied for a term in Edinburgh, Scotland. In the four
months I spent there, I grew fascinated with Scottish culture; or rather, the multiplicity of its
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cultures. Shortbread and whisky, haggis and heroin, tartan galore, legendary loch monsters, and
William Wallace (or a blue-faced Mel Gibson): it is a nation that has been romanticized to a
caricature, and I as an outsider was trying to find the genuine within it. Like Kathleen Jamie, I
was a traveler exploring, shaping, and claiming my personal identity as it butted up against a
foreign culture; I was suddenly the Other and found myself needing to articulate my identity as
an American citizen. For me, this meant trying to explain the 2012 Sandy Hook shootings to my
friends from Scotland, where the police do not carry firearms, and attempting to rationalize U.S.
foreign policy that I often wasn’t comfortable with myself.
Upon returning to the United States, I experienced contradictory sensations of nostalgia. I
found myself distractedly saying “I want to go home” and then not knowing where I meant: my
childhood house in Pennsylvania? my dorm room in Lewiston, Maine? or the flat I’d come to
adore in Edinburgh? This multi-directional homesickness attuned me to how nostalgia is not a
longing for one physical place; rather, it is the desire to return to that existential sense of comfort
Carol Ann Duffy so beautifully describes in her poems. She masterfully articulates the sense of
nostalgia for a state which can never be returned to and is inarticulable because it exists only as
an emotion, a longing. We pine for a sense of first understanding, a sense of comfort, of being
found.
Several months before I left for Scotland, my parents revealed to me that my biological
history was more complicated than I had assumed. Like Jackie Kay, I began to question the
complexities of nature and nurture which have shaped me, and I am still in the process (I expect
it never ends) of wondering at how much of myself is constructed by genetics and how much
exists because of my loving parents’ care and environmental factors. I will likely never fully
know the facts of my biological history, but, as Kay keenly observes, only the spark of
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imagination is needed to conjure one’s personal past, inaccurate and idealistic as that conjuring
that may be. Our origin stories are shaped as much by our memories and imaginations as they are
by biology, events, and environment.
In writing this thesis, I fully acknowledge my status as an American scholar. I am still, in
many ways, a tourist in Scotland’s culture, history, and literature, and I do not pretend to have
any native knowledge of her people, language, or customs. But the notions expressed in her
poetry are deeply familiar to me, as they express a sense of estrangement, alienation, and hunger
for true home. Studying the writing of Duffy, Kay, and Jamie reminds us that the desire for home
is perhaps the deepest and most universal of human sentiments, even while it is colored by
regional cultures and has caused some of the most intense wars in history. The desire for a
distinct and unique home has led to the current independence movement in Scotland, which will
culminate in the September 2014 referendum. It is an exciting time to be studying Scottish poetry
concerning identity and origin, and I have made every attempt in this thesis to do justice to the
powerful emotions, arguments, and claims which shape these poets’ work.

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