Whilst Leila Sleeps by Jackie Kay

Whilst Leila Sleeps is a topical poem by Jackie Kay about a mother who is forced to flee her home with her daughter in the middle of the night.

• It is suggested that the mother is an immigrant woman perhaps facing deportation. Kay deliberately holds back details so that the situation becomes universal.
• The poem could be set anywhere and in any modern time period. It does have particular resonance in our current political climate.
• Kay uses the first-person narrative throughout to make it immediate. The reader is thrust into this woman's experience.
• The relationship between mother and daughter is central to this poem.

The poem deals with themes of motherhood and displacement and identity.

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You can read Whilst Leila Sleeps on the Scottish Poetry Library website.

Jackie Kay discusses her poem Whilst Leila Sleeps with Zara Janjua. You can listen to episodes on all of the National 5 set text poems by Jackie Kay on BBC Sounds.

Whilst Leila Sleeps by Jackie Kay is written in six stanzas, each of five lines and relatively equal length. It is a dramatic monologue. This form allows the reader to access the speaker's thoughts. Kay writes in first person using the present tense, which makes this insight more powerful and vivid. The situation may be alien to most readers but by putting us in the woman’s position Kay helps us empathise with anyone in these circumstances. The poem charts the journey of the mother and daughter as they move from the house to the car to having to go with the men.

Although Kay does not use a tight rhyme scheme, but there are examples of half rhyme

• "appeared" and "fear"
• "suits" and "soothe"

This works to hold each stanza together. There is also rhythm created by lines such as "packing things, turning out lights" which works with the sound to give the poem a sense of pace and action, mimicking the mother's hurry, her fear and anxiety and the fact they are travelling.

I am moving in the dead of night, packing things, turning out lights.

The poem ends with the mother trying to soothe her child to sleep again, despite her own feelings of terror, which brings the poem back to the title. This reminds us that the whole ordeal is perhaps an effort to save her child.

I whisper her cradle song and she holds on.

Whilst Leila Sleeps opens with the mother getting ready to leave their home.

I am moving in the dead of night.

There is a contrast between her "moving" and the expression "dead of night", which implies that she is doing something furtive that she shouldn't be doing. Kay creates a rhythm to her actions with the repetition of present participles: "moving", "packing", "turning." This emphasises the pace of her activity and evokes a sense of urgency.

My fingers tie knots like fish nets

This simile suggests she is pulling together all her possessions, arranging her things in her effort not to leave anything behind. It might also suggest a past life that the woman has come from, where she may have been involved in mending real nets. The idea of fingers knotting and moving creates an image of the woman’s anxiety reflected in her hands fidgeting.

I want to be in my mother’s house

The speaker craves security. This in turn links her to her daughter. The speaker herself wants her mother to protect her, just as she wants to keep her daughter safe. The idea that this security is to be found among women runs throughout the poem. Her mother, however, is far away from her. This distance which is highlighted by the enjambment between stanzas one and two.

Boxes; / I can't see out of the back window.

From the great distance between daughter and mother, we suddenly move to an almost claustrophobic atmosphere created in stanza two. We get the impression that the inside of the car is piled high with all their belongings. The fact that she "can't see" what is behind her suggests there is no going back.

Leila is a bundle in her car seat.

The first mention of Leila suggests that she is wrapped up and protected by her mother. It could also suggest she is a thing – just a “bundle” like the other belongings that have been crammed into the car. Perhaps Kay is suggesting that this child (and her mother) are not being treated as people.

The line break between stanzas two and three moves from the idea that the child is sleeping innocently to the mother's worry that the child might be dead ("the sleep of oblivion"). This establishes the mood of paranoia that pervades the rest of the poem. It also asks another question about how Leila is viewed.

• If she is not innocent, is she seen as guilty of something?
• Is this child being treated as if a criminal?

My headlights are paranoic eyes

In this line, Jackie Kay uses personification to suggest that the speaker is alert and afraid that she will be caught. This fear is justified when she is apprehended.

Kay turns questions "What is that fear. / Does it have a name." into statements as if the answers simply don’t exist. She is unable to express in words the extent of her fear.

The word "name" is repeated, reminding us that it is the speaker who is being denied her rights to her own freedom and identity. She and her daughter are powerless. This is confirmed by the repetition of "they" – the pronoun for the men who have the control.

"They want" and "They take" until there is nothing left. The minor sentence "Their faces." gives them a sense of detachment and anonymity as they appear to be all the same to the woman.

Now there is nothing left / but to go with the men in plain suits.

Kay uses enjambment to end the stanza on a bleak note – the woman has been stripped of everything.

The "men in plain suits" begin stanza five of Whilst Leila Sleeps, which makes us think of cold authority figures or businessmen. The situation causes Leila to wake up and her sudden fear is conveyed by the expression "opens her eyes wide" as she wonders what is going on. Eyes that are “wide open” could also suggest that she sees the reality of what is going on.

My voice is a house with the roof/ blown off.

The mother attempts to comfort and “soothe” the child, but her voice cannot. The metaphor evokes a state of sheer exposure. A house without a roof has no protection and is open to the elements. Kay links this to the mother's voice, which suggests she is struggling to conceal her fear from her child. It also conjures images of war-torn cities from which inhabitants might flee. This may be the woman’s background – the world that she left, like her mother, “over the other side of the world”.

What do I tell my daughter –

The stanza ends with this statement (rather than question), which implies that the girl will find it difficult to live in a world like the one in the poem, where men have power over women

There is a need to worry.

Instead of the usual phrases a mother uses to comfort her child (There is no need to worry) Kay begins the final stanza with the opposite. This is unexpected and sounds awkward, mimicking the speaker's anxiety. She says she "cannot lie" to her daughter. Perhaps this is because the "terror" is too great, but it might also be because she wants their relationship to be a truthful one. This contrasts to the men in the poem who are covering up their harsh actions with disingenuous "smiles".

a slow light tails the fast car.

The paranoia continues in the line and the sense of things being the opposite of what they seem, or what they should be. Here the opposites "slow" and "fast" imply that however speedily she tries to get away, she will always be followed; "they" will be in the background gradually getting closer.

In response to this, Leila "tugs at her coat", wanting reassurance. Her mother "whispers/ her cradle song" which is a song from childhood imbued with security. As a result, she "holds on". Holding on could be taken to mean both literally holding on to her mother but also holding on meaning to endure difficult circumstances. The half rhyme between "song" and "on" emphasises the connection between the mother's gift of hope and the child's survival. Kay ends the poem by suggesting that whatever the terrible circumstances they are in, Leila and her mother will be there for each other.

The mother’s role in Whilst Leila Sleeps is to protect the child. She waits until the child is asleep so that the act of leaving their home is less upsetting for her. When she is apprehended by the men, she comforts her child and sings to her in an effort to keep her going. The mother in the poem also thinks of her own mother who is over "the other side of the world". Despite the distance, there is a connection between the women as they are united in their desire for freedom and security.

Whilst Leila Sleeps begins with the mother and child leaving their home, a place that should be one of belonging and security. The mother is afraid they will be caught and tries to protect her daughter, but to no avail. When they are apprehended, the men want her name, her papers, her licence – anything that identifies her. The implication is that once they have her name, they have more power over her.

Whilst Leila Sleeps shares a theme of mother-child relationships with Jackie Kay's poems Gap Year and Keeping Orchids. Whilst Gap Year and Keeping Orchids deal with different kinds of separation in that relationship, in Whilst Leila Sleeps the mother is protecting her daughter and keeping her close. Mothers are the speakers in Whilst Leila Sleeps, Gap Year and Maw Broon Visits a Therapist. All three of these speakers have motherhood at the heart of their identity.

Communication is also an interesting point of comparison - there are so many silences or points of stilted communication in these poems. In Maw Broon, the speaker "canny think whit tae say"; in Keeping Orchids the buds "remain closed as secrets"; and here in Whilst Leila Sleeps, the mother says "I bite my tongue, hard". She also "cannot lie" and reveal the truth of the situation to her daughter. In contrast, the mother in Gap Year talks to her son before he is born, and talks to him on webcams from across the world.

The "cradle song" that the mother in Whilst Leila Sleeps soothes her daughter with is also similar to the use of the Mingulay Boat Song in Darling, where the speaker sings to her dying friend. There is also song in Gap Year where the mother plays "Emma Kirkby/singing Pergolesi" to her bump, and reminisces later in the poem with an Ella Fitzgerald lyric: "A tisket A tasket".

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