Transracial Negotiation of the Self in the Poetry of Jackie Kay

Applying some notions formulated by the cultural critic Stuart Hall about identity formation in contemporary Britain, this paper tries to show how the contemporary British poet Jackie Kay (b.1961) negotiates a sense of the self from the perspective of mixed parentage—a black child born to a Nigerian father and a white Scottish mother, and adopted by white Scottish parents. Though her autobiographical verse The Adoption Papers (1991) largely examines her adopted identity, it contains references to her black identity, enlarged on in her next two volumes, Other Lovers (1993) and Off Color (1998). Although she writes as poet whose original culture and language are British—her accent and idioms are Scottish—her identity is questioned due to the fact of her mixed parentage. Color—also blood and health—becomes a mark of difference, a difference which she tries to get over. It is rather this politicized sense of identity whish she challenges. She constructs her identity in relation to a white majority that has the power to decide who should and who should not claim a true British identity. In order to construct a "positive" image of her, she has to get recognition from that other, to go through the eye of his "needle, according to Hall. But the eye of that "needle" has narrowed down because of racial discrimination that reached its peak with Thatcher's Nationality Act (1981), which denied people of color a claim for a British national identity. This attitude created different forms of resistance on the part of all Black writers. On Kay's part, the present researcher detects physical violence, verbal irony, identification with other blacks who achieved "cultural visibility" and imaginative border crossings. All these emphasize her search for an identity, based not on ethnic, but on social and cultural identification, a national identity that includes a local sense of belonging and extends also beyond it, in short one that reconciles her blackness and Britishness. For her, poetry becomes a site of representation, resisting a gaze that ignores her voice and focuses only on her face.