"Celtic-Afro.Caribbean...how kin ye be both?": Jackie Kay's Re-definitions of Identity

In Jackie Kay’s fiction and poetry, differences of race, nationality, gender, sexuality, and class are interwoven, and reveal the complex and intricate fabric of identity, seen as a site of personal and social contestation. The life narratives of the daughter confronting her biological mother and her adoptive parents ("The Adoption Papers," 1991), or of a jazz man (member of an interracial couple and adoptive father of a black boy), who, after his death, is revealed to be a woman ("Trumpet," 1998), expose a major issue of contemporary postcolonial literature – the hybrid nature of identity – and represent it not as a mere source of fragmentation and confusion, but as the starting point of a journey backwards and inwards. By tracing their origins and recollecting their personal stories, Kay’s fictional voices reject normative ideas of racial, national, and sexual identity, and explore and re-create their past and identity.