"The Body is a Bloody Battlefield": Jackie Kay and the Body in Flux — Page 4:
16 This idea of "purity" and "impurity," as well as the belief in racial differences detectable in blood, is demonstrated by a teacher at the daughter's school. When practising for a dance show, the daughter finds difficulty in performing the "Cha Cha" and the ironically named "Black Bottom." Because of the teacher's assumptions about essentialist characteristics, she shouts "[C]ome on, show / us what you can do I thought / you people had it in your blood" (25). This claim to know more about the protagonist's past than the daughter herself by a naïve reference to biological determinism puzzles and upsets her pupil who reacts:
My skin is hot as burning coal
like that time you said Darkies are like coal
in front of the whole class - my blood
what does she mean? (25)
So, whilst the text clearly recounts the daughter's quest for blood identity as a means of locating and understanding her "self," it seems that it is external forces (such as her teacher and medical professionals) that have a greater influence than her own internal desires. Struggling to define herself in the midst of opposing and ambiguous identities, her adoptive status has implications, both for herself and for those around her. Thus we can read Kay's use of the theme of blood as both metaphor and metonymy. The daughter's search for her "blood" stems from a desire to feel at ease both within her family nexus, as well as the wider society she must inhabit. She longs for a stable and knowable identity, where her body is acceptable both to herself and those around her. The fact that this is so difficult to achieve, and that the text is not conclusive about the outcome of her search could be read as an allusion to the shifting and uncertain nature of identity for black women in this country.
17 These many references to blood discussed above show how racism and racial identity are intimately bound up with the body and issues of health. I have suggested that bodies that are ambiguous, ontologically unreliable or physically dysfunctional may be understood as articulating a feeling of social dis-ease in Kay's work. Whilst most of these texts show the consequences of such alienation in ways that relate to the physical, in her recent short story collection, Why Don't You Stop Talking, there are also depictions of women suffering from a variety of mental "disorders." (Of course I recognize that mental disorders often manifest themselves in physical symptoms, but for my purposes here, I am choosing to analyse them separately.) As is well known, many white women have written about their personal experiences of "madness" in an attempt to offer a corrective to the patriarchal texts that have at times depicted femininity as almost synonymous with madness. One of the ways they have challenged this idea is by demonstrating that, rather than women's behaviour being anarchic or unfathomable, as it is sometimes designated in patriarchal discourse, it should be seen as a rational response to their oppressive domestic and social situations. Black women writers have entered this literary arena too, often depicting similar causal factors in the onset and progression of mental "disturbances"(for example, Jean 'Binta' Breeze's "Riddym Ravings (the mad woman's poem)" and Andrea Levy's Every Light in the House Burnin') For black women, however, there may also be the added environmental component of racism to consider as a contributory factor in issues of mental health.
18 This emphasis on the environment as an aetiological contributory factor is fundamental to Kay's depictions of mental illness in several of her short stories. In the title story, "Why Don't You Stop Talking," Thelma, (the black female protagonist), is perceived as "mad" by others in her community largely because of her outspokenness. When pushed aside by a man in a queue at a cash machine, humiliated by a young woman in the supermarket, and shunned by another on the London Underground, she (understandably) cannot remain quiet. Similarly, on seeing a young mother shouting at her son, Thelma feels it her duty to stand up for the child, saying, "Easy does it love, he's just a little fellow." The mother reacts aggressively with "Mind your own fucking business […] Beat it! […] Shut your fucking trap" (45-46).
19 Whilst the story relates her dysfunctional family background as contributing to Thelma's behaviour, it is also the case that the present social situation in which she finds herself is far from hospitable. In her attempts to make conversation with others, for example, she receives panic-stricken looks. She states, "People often look like that when I talk to them as if I'm trapping them or something when I'm only trying to be friendly" (48). Because her interventions all elicit such overtly unpleasant responses, one suspects this socially alienating behaviour may be a reaction to something about Thelma other than her outspokenness alone. The idea that her outbursts are always in response to other people's impolite behaviour, and, as such, may be justified, is clearly never considered by her interlocutors. Rather, they are repeatedly construed as inappropriate or the ramblings of a "mad" woman. Her claim that, "If I feel wronged, I have to speak up. Simple as that" (44), suggests that her responses are more to do with a social conscience than with insanity. Sadly, however, she has come to think she is to blame for the trouble she causes: "All my life I've been told by so many different people: 'That tongue of yours will get you into trouble one day'. And all my life it has" (50).
20 Thelma's realisation that, "Just because I talk a lot people think I'm mad" (48) highlights the association sometimes made between the outspoken woman and perceived "insanity." This belief has been applied to all women of course, but for the forthright black women such controlling labels sometimes ignore the racial and cultural element inherent in perceptions of madness. In Thelma's case, her behaviour, which does not conform to society's "norm," is stigmatized and misunderstood. Jane Ussher states that: "it is important to note that definitions of madness are consistent within, though not necessarily between, cultures […] and a diagnosis of madness acts as a means of […] controlling what is "normal" in a given society." She quotes one researcher who claims: "[W]hat we recognize as pathological behaviour is usually a matter of common consensus in a society, the standards of consensus vary from one society to another" (138, 139). In this way, the perception of Thelma as "mad" has not taken into account the possibility of such cultural differences. And the text implies that such unsympathetic responses from others, who have been quick to judge her behaviour as "abnormal," may have actually been a contributory cause of her madness.