Crossing Racial Frontiers in the Quest for Cultural Acceptance as Seen Through Selected Works by Jackie Kay

Abstract

Jackie Kay, born in Edinburgh in 1961 of Scottish-Nigerian descent, was brought up by a white couple in Glasgow. Her first poetic work, a collection entitled The Adoption Papers (1991), is not only autobiographical in nature but also explores cultural identity and genetic origin. The highly expressive and telling story she recounts is presented from three different points of view: that of the birth mother, the daughter and the adoptive mother, three different voices additionally signalled by three different type-faces. Being black and also Scottish, as well as growing up in a predominantly white Glasgow, Kay knows only too well what a lack of acceptance actually feels like, and in a country that, through birth and upbringing, she felt she naturally belonged to. I would like to confront these two situations referring to such works as the above mentioned Adoption Papers, four poems from her 1993 collection Other Lovers: ‘Gastarbeiter’, ‘In my country’, ‘Compound Fracture’ and ‘Colouring In’, ‘Old Tongue’ from Life Mask (2005), as well as a very relevant piece of prose ‘Why don’t you stop talking’ (2002). Another work addressed to young readers, Strawgirl (2002), completes the image. Writing consistently from her own experience and with her own subjectivity always coming to the foreground, Kay confronts the issue of race and the lack of acceptance of otherness, the feeling of being within as well as outwith a certain society or community.