"The Plantation Owner is Never Wearing a Kilt": Historical Memory and True Tales in Jackie Kay’s The Lamplighter

In "The Discourse of Slavery. Aphra Behn to Toni Morrison" (1994), Isobel Armstrong suggests that “the discourses on slavery, both in attack and in defence, are a matter of living debate as well as the object of historical analysis”. This is one of the assumptions at the centre of Jackie Kay’s "The Lamplighter", a dramatic poem and radio play she wrote under commission to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade. The personal experience of Kay, born in Edinburgh in 1961 to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father but adopted by a white couple and brought up in Glasgow, is particularly significant in relation to the issues of dislocation and identity crisis that she confronts in this work. In "The Lamplighter" five different voices, one male and four female, deliver from their own point of view the story of the slave fort, the ship transportation, the plantations and the impact of slavery on British economy and culture. This historical narrative is interlaced with the life stories of the four women slaves, individual narratives about violent separation, marginalisation, subjugation, loss and sexual abuse, as well as the incessant need to keep them alive through memory. Through The Lamplighter, Kay turns literature into a privileged means of perpetuating a living memory, allowing man to revisit and reconsider past experiences that may have been consciously or unconsciously overlooked. The essay therefore aims to show how Kay voices the subaltern within the still controversial discourse of Scotland’s involvement in Atlantic slavery by means of multiperspectivism, and how she advocates a ‘creative’ historiographical approach in the face of (post)colonial erasure and silencing.