engleski

Questioning a Hyphenated Identity in Jackie Kay’s 'The Adoption Papers'

In the semi-autobiographical sequence of poems The Adoption Papers (1991), Jackie Kay, a contemporary black Scottish writer, re-visits imaginatively what her own adoption process might have been like and addresses the formation of the highly complex identity of a black adoptee in a predominantly white community in the course of the sixties and seventies. Born to mixed race parents (Nigerian father and white Scottish mother), and adopted by a white Scottish couple, Kay here draws heavily on her own personal experiences. She employs three different perspectives blending together three distinctive voices, those of the birth mother, the adoptive mother, and the daughter who has been given up for adoption. The black biological father who is only briefly mentioned by the birth mother seems to be (just like Kay’s father in real life) a short-term immigrant in Britain, and is completely absent both from his daughter’s life and the story. Although this paper does not directly focus on the issue of migration, it is nevertheless argued that the identity/identities that in any way result from the ‘zone of contact’ raise a plethora of questions concerning race, class, gender, ethnicity, and sexuality. Kay’s sequence clearly demonstrates that the three women, especially the daughter, who as black and Scottish represents a contradiction by traditional definitions (Novy, 185), are each in their own way affected by these pressing concerns. This paper will therefore attempt to explore ways in which this multi-voice representation tackles identity formation which has been directly influenced by migration.

Jackie Kay ; The Adoption Papers ; hyphenated identity ; Scottish ; black

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