The Romance of Scottish Communism

Jackie Kay’s May Day (2024) takes its title from the International Workers’ Day marches she attended with her Communist Party parents in Glasgow during the 1970s and 80s. Despite this overt political setting, her book comprises a series of intimate portraits of her parents in the wake of their passing, serving as a series of elegies which retrace the network of affinities and family ties that made up the vibrantly political world of her upbringing. Drawing on Hannah Proctor’s Burnout and Vivian Gornick’s work on the American Communist Party, this chapter explores how a Party upbringing has been characterised by intense emotion, powerful feelings of collectivity, and a distinct ability to anchor its members with world-historical meaning. In Kay’s poetry, this context led to what she terms a domestic ‘love-affair’ with her parents which coloured her life with an enduring moral and political content. Tracing Kay’s writing about her family from The Adoption Papers to the present, I argue that her Communist Party upbringing is a crucial determination of Kay’s aesthetic, political and ethical sensibilities. Kay’s blending of the affective and the political constitutes a powerful component of her poetic vision which demands a continuing relation to a political world now largely seen as anachronistic. Addressing mourning, nostalgia, intergenerational dialogue and enduring political commitment, Kay’s poetry draws on a largely lost Communist past to anticipate new forms of political collectivity in the present.