"The Body is a Bloody Battlefield": Jackie Kay and the Body in Flux
1 In Jackie Kay's poem "Where It Hurts," from which the above quotation is taken, and which opens the collection Off Colour, the body is depicted as a network of illnesses that is unceasingly being subjected to disease and pain (9-12). In this text, the body is in constant conflict, failing to resist the multifarious afflictions that befall it, eventually culminating in the prophecy of death. The poetic persona predicts that she will die, "A great thumping death." Unlike other "light people" who will "take flight / like graceful swallows," she will be a "huge pig / squealing," ending her life with "A fucking great fucking big death." Whilst this reference to "light people" here could simply be referring to body mass, it could also be alluding to skin colour, implying that those with "light" skin (white people) may experience both life and death in a different (perhaps easier) way.
2 This ambiguous duality present in the notion of "light people" is also present in the title of the collection itself. Richard Dyer points out in an interview with Kay that "Off Colour" can refer to both not feeling well and to mixed race-ness (57-61). That these two states of being are simultaneously present in the indeterminate phrase "Off Colour" alerts the reader to the idea that health can, in some way, be connected with identity; in this case, racial identity. This correspondence between race and health is also suggested in many of the poems in Off Colour, as well as elsewhere in Kay's writing. Because in the above poem the implication is that being black and female is almost co-existent with being "Off Colour" or physically unwell, one could infer that an individual's skin tone may be involved in the state of health of that individual. And, for the protagonist in "Where it Hurts," inhabiting a body that is not "light" seems to have increased her suffering.
3 Whilst I acknowledge there are other equally important elements to be considered, such as regionalism, Scottishness and issues of class, I believe these have been more than adequately dealt with elsewhere. (See for example Papaleonida, Somerville-Arjat and Wilson, Hagemann, and McMillan, For this reason, I am choosing to limit my focus to an exploration of the textual link between the black feminine body and sickness, both physical and mental. In this endeavour particular reference will be made to The Adoption Papers (1991), Other Lovers (1993), and Off Colour (1998); as well as Kay's collection of short stories Why Don't You Stop Talking (2002).
4 This notion of the body-as-text, able to convey meanings that are outside of verbal language, has secure theoretical foundations. For example, Michel Foucault posited the notion of the discursivity of the body, citing its ability to display symptoms that, according to Bryan Turner are thus "a system of signs which can be read and translated in a number of ways" (Body and Society 208). Similarly, Susan Bordo claimed that a woman's anorectic body, defeminized by the process of starvation, may be perceived as articulating a rejection of patriarchally constructed roles. In her thesis, the emaciated body, therefore, must be "read" as a "text of femininity" (16, emphasis added). It is because these theoretical propositions suggest that the body can supplant language as a means of expression, that I believe we need to interpret Kay's representation of corporeality as something other than mimetic.
5 It is important to note at the outset that the history of the relationship between black people and health issues has been a problematic one. Racist discourse has associated blackness with bodily disease and contamination, as well as with a variety of mental disorders. Chris Shilling notes that, during the period of colonial slavery, black Africans were seen as "diseased and dirty" (58). Similarly, there has been an assumed equivalence between blackness and insanity. Sander Gilman informs us that the Victorians believed it was "specifically the physiology of the blacks which predisposed them to mental illness" (Difference 138). Categories were invtented by the white plantation owners to "explain" the slaves' behaviour. For example "rascality" was the name given to a disease "peculiar to negroes," the symptoms of which caused slaves to run away or behave in a lethargic manner. Such "symptoms" were pathologized rather than considered as a rejection of the institution of slavery. Gilman claims elsewhere that these kind of racist mythologies were promulgated because "[M]edical tradition has a long history of perceiving this (black) skin colour as the result of some pathology" ("Black Bodies" 250). Black women, he argues, were particularly singled out in this regard. The medical mythology engendered in the nineteenth century designated the black woman as hypersexual and, as a result, a likely carrier of syphilis. Because of her perceived lascivious and "deviant" sexual appetite, it was believed that "the qualities of blackness, or at least of the black female, are those of the prostitute" ("Black Bodies" 148). It is not difficult to see how promiscuity, madness and disease thus became conflated in the Victorian imagination.