words by J.A.G. Mabbutt | photo of Jackie Kay by Caroline Forbes, 2007

The absence of ‘blackness’ in both cinema and classic literature is unquestionable. While arts and cultures have yearned to craft and nurture a reflection of an authentic reality or context, gaps and disparities in representation have often emerged. Alongside the concealment of blackness, the submergence of black femininity has also raised some alarm bells. 

Scottish poet Jackie Kay is a titanic uprooter of colonial and racial legacies. She has a history of confronting this absence. Through her poetry, she has disassembled the obsolete ways of the bloody and brutal past, prospecting for representation and voices that have long been ignored. Her poem ‘Would Jane Eyre Come to the Information Desk’ packs a punch and refuses to apologise for the bruises it lends. 

While the poem isn’t as violent as I have suggested, it does unapologetically invite the reader into a reality where violence is evident in the suppression of voice and recognition, in the racial reality where whiteness is privileged and blackness is brutalised, and in a reality where being a woman is extraordinarily challenging and dangerous, particularly being a black woman, which is beyond the scope of understanding. In its aims, Kay’s poem deals with a great tonnage of trials and tests as she seeks to amplify the experiences of black women when faced with the whiteness of the world. 

Jane Eyre is a fascinating choice of reference in Kay’s poem, but it is an apt choice when you begin to dissect the poem itself. The intertextual echo of Brontë’s novel mounts more than just a ‘name-drop,’ and instead is used to displace the differing fortunes of Jane and Bertha from the original text into the modern era. The character of Bertha is more than simply a muted, mentally ill remnant of Rochester’s past and, fearfully enough, Jane’s future. Yes, she does represent the incarceration of women who fail to fit the mould of convention, and even more so, a stark example of men’s gendered violence in both action and inaction. 

Brontë was never explicit about Bertha’s race, but beyond these lenses, Bertha represents colonial anxieties existing at the time. Coming from Britain’s colonies in the Caribbean as evidence of the darker sides of Jane’s society, Bertha is a reflection of all that society did not want to acknowledge — and therefore the one thing that Jane didn’t want to be — ignored and rejected. These are indeed the reasons behind Kay’s  employment of their names and significance in her text. Kay’s poem isn’t a homage to Brontë’s novel, but instead a reshaping of it to illuminate the horrors of today.

This week, I again bask beneath the light of Celine Song’s modern cinematic study of dating and materialism — Materialists (2025). Whereas I did harbour some fond and impressed feelings towards the film, I did refer to some problematic areas in my previous text, and it is this week that some of these criticisms find themselves under scrutiny. To put it bluntly, Song’s film fails to reflect any racial reality that exists in the world today, and like Brontë’s novel, is a text that territorialises its attention by looking solely at the experience of white, middle to upper-class women. Song shouldn’t be rebuked for this, but it is surprising when one looks at her first film, Past Lives (2023), and its depiction of the lives of South Korean immigrants in the United States. She evidently can detect the nuances and reality of non-white characters. Past Lives confirms this, but in Materialists, this evidence is dismissed and rendered disastrous. Lucy, the protagonist, is white, John, her eventual boyfriend, is white, and her clients and colleagues are mostly white. Is this a realistic reflection of the diverse metropolis of New York City? Not at all. Harry Castillo, John’s rival in battling it out for Lucy’s affection, is truly the only example of a non-white character. Yet, even this attempt at diversity is slightly demolished by Harry’s name. Yes, Castillo is of Spanish origin, but the name Harry is of Germanic white origin. Is Harry a candidate for decoy diversity? Does his presence interrupt or reassert the white-centric romance narrative? These aren’t easy questions to answer, but the fact that they surface tells us that something is odd about his characterisation.

Like Jane Eyre (1847), Song’s film is stuck in the quagmire of telling the same story, about the same kind of people and the same problems, just in a different era. Both the film and the novel are important for a multitude of reasons, and do harness the qualities of forensically investigating issues that impact women in a patriarchal society; however, in terms of racial inclusion and representation of the impacts of both colonialism and racial inequality, they are without comment.

Kay’s poem is satirical and sardonic. In a context where we have seen the deportation of those from the Windrush generation and a breadth of concerning statistics that relay the abuses suffered by women of colour, Kay’s poem ignores any pleasantry. As the narrator, or if not, a ventriloquist of the narrator’s voice, the criticism is hard-boiled and discomforting. It is clear that the narrator is herself a black woman, and in positioning the audience in the hands of a black female, Kay assimilates our reading of the poem with the rage and tension that exists in the second-hand account of seeing someone suffer, someone who is like the narrator themselves. The presence of a clear-cut, Afro-Caribbean dialect augments this experience and authenticates how we can understand Bertha’s plight, simply because the narrator also does. These crumbs of vernacular-related lexis are absorbent, with examples such as “Ting,” “She say,” and “Hinformation.” Kay’s narrative voice is distinct and involved in the critique she explores.

The free-verse, collision of voices and persons throughout the poem’s narrative reflects the confusion and chaos that exist in the disparity between the perceptions of white women and black women. Kay’s decision to italicise Bertha’s voice introduces her differences before we hear the content of her argument. This is the case in a society where skin colour is apparent before a person’s character, and therefore, Bertha’s dialogue is made to be ‘different’ — a purposeful measure that reminds the reader of Bertha’s marginalisation. She has a voice, but it is still trumped by what others do to her and think of her. Like Brontë’s Bertha, she too is locked away and brutalised by the structure of colonialism, and in this case, the structure of syntax and font type. Kay’s use of oppositional, juxtaposing semantic fields emphasises Bertha’s position too. Words such as “handcuffs,” “holding,” “disappear,” and “ensnares” are utilised for two purposes: to not only make physical and real the predicament Bertha experiences, but also to examine the place of black women in artistic and literary representation.

Parallel to this, the words “dignity,” “free,” “independent,” and “liberty” pepper the poem to corporealise what Bertha deserves, despite the contrary actions of the establishment. For Bertha Mason (Jane Eyre), these two contrasting semantic fields are of importance too. In choosing to resource Bertha’s name and her experience in the novel, and therefore repurpose it, Kay forces her readers to examine not just the conditions of the current world but also of the colonial Regency era, where the human rights of women like Bertha were ignored and instead replaced by systemic violence and incarceration in both a material and emotional sense.

Here, when we bisect these two experiences, Michel Foucault and Achille Mbembe’s theories on biopower become explicit enough to be considered. Biopower relates to the systemic control and power exhibited over people’s bodies in society, and with this, we can identify how both Berthas are victims of this exact issue. Yes, on a material and physical plane, both women are forcibly controlled and influenced by a white patriarchy, yet it is in the finer areas that we find something more worrying. Brontë’s positioning of Bertha as a ‘savage/animalistic,’ quasi-warning to the white protagonist Jane is also an action of systemic control where literature erases humanity from black individuals. Bertha’s death is used as a narrative tool, whereupon, like a ‘deus ex machina’, it solves Rochester and Jane’s inability to marry. This establishes Bertha as an obstacle that ultimately infringes upon the happiness and futures of the white protagonist.

Whilst you might be able to argue that black femininity is included in the novel, its presence is malignant and made sinister, positioning it as a rival to the ‘purity’ of white womanhood. In the poem, the removal of Bertha and the influence of biopower upon her are protested against and exhibited for all to witness. Whereas Kay doesn’t salvage Bertha entirely, she gifts her a voice and resistance that saves her from being vacated, and in doing so robes her in a martyrdom that is on par with the efforts of Rosa Parks.

This opportunity of asserting racial presence was not adopted in Song’s film, unfortunately. While there was an opportunity to reflect the racial reality and diversity of New York City, and an opportunity to revisit the tropes of novels like Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice with a black female character, Song’s film does not challenge the stereotype. Because of the Marxist undertone and application of economic material theory, the film does promise something special in terms of being bound up in the romance genre. Yet, this is the limit of its scope. We can debate and discuss how Song’s narrative might have changed or been ‘improved’ by including further diversity, but the value of this conversation rests in locating the reason ‘why’.

In choosing to omit a black female protagonist, or even a representation of black femininity, the film’s intentions of trying to reflect reality or even say something profound are usurped. Can Song offer up anything truly meaningful about romance, dating, and financial disparity without acknowledging racial diversity? Can she critique social constructs without involving non-white demographics? Is the film too safe and reliant on popular actors and the desires of a white audience? Does the film really expose anything, if not the reality that a vast majority of romance films are representative of white happy endings for white audiences? In attempting to answer any of these questions, it can be easy to ignore the film’s many merits. Yet, the existence of these questions does expose some flaws in the vision of the film and even the scope of its outreach. Where the film seeks to explore the notion of ‘desirable qualities’ in the dating market, it avoids referring to how race exists in these parameters, rather than simply the class-bound ones found in Song’s vision. 

In the same breath, Song’s critique of ‘broke man propaganda,’ via John’s character, is interesting, yet safe in its approach. Do we as a society employ the same grace for black individuals who experience poverty? Or does John’s character simply fit into the safety net of society’s shaping of racial standards?

It is okay to admit that Song’s film fails in some senses, not because of its intentions of examining desire and material value within dating, and therefore the experiences of women within that context, but because it fails to involve non-white experiences within this environment. By decoupling blackness from the experiences of women in dating, and by absenting blackness from the debate on desirable qualities in dating markets, Song dismisses blackness from a reality that exists. Like Brontë, Song imagines fairy-tale romances and the rough mechanics of dating as a predominantly white experience, abdicating blackness from these narratives and therefore neglecting the role of black individuals in these horizons. Kay’s poem doesn’t fix these issues either, but instead reminds us of the reasons why these issues exist, and more importantly, how they impact the lives of those who are forced to endure erasure and elimination from the canonical narratives.

Celine Song’s Materialists, like Brontë’s Jane Eyre, presents itself as a study of love, power, and desire, but both texts fall into the familiar trap of centering whiteness while marginalising or erasing black femininity. In contrast, Jackie Kay’s ‘Would Jane Eyre Come to the Information Desk’ exposes this erasure, reclaiming voice and visibility for Black women in literature and culture,historically silenced. Where Kay interrogates and reshapes the canon, Song’s film retreats into it. Despite its contemporary setting and critiques of materialism, Materialists offers little that is new about race, gender, or desirability.

Without acknowledging the realities of racial difference, particularly the experiences of Black women, its vision of romance remains incomplete. Kay reminds us that representation is not just aesthetic; it is political. And silence, especially when it comes to Black lives and Black love, speaks volumes.