Poetry Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

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 genrebending, 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inquires whether Scottish culture should submit to nostalgia and hoard its relics, or cut tethers and dispose of outdated customs, traditions, and objects.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. v 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 vi 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 vii 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.