News at Eleven: [Jackie] Kay's dilemma (if any),

unlike [Derek] Walcott's, is not in what direction to turn. She has turned her back on the path of ambivalence; choosing instead to embrace her twin "bloods." The first hint of this is to be found in the title of the collection. "Fiere," we are told, is a Scottish word that means "a companion, a mate, a spouse, an equal." The next hint is in the epigraphs that open the collection. Two lines from the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, (who, like Kay's birth father, is Igbo)--"Wherever someone stands,/something else will stand beside it"--sum the collection up. (The other epigraph, introducing the word "fiere", is by the Scottish poet Robert Burns)

from Next: Both Igbo and Scottish

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