Ulrike Zimmermann

Out of the Ordinary – and Back? Jackie Kay’s Recent Short Fiction

Since the year 2002, Jackie Kay has published two collections of short stories. Many of them concern themselves with the issue of identity. This paper offers an analysis of Kay’s ‘Why Don’t You Stop Talking’, ‘Out of Hand’, and ‘Trout Friday’. All three texts have female protagonists, who are beset with questions about themselves, their qualities as individuals and their position in contemporary British society. Loneliness, loss, and the feeling of being an outsider belong to the burden Kay’s characters carry. They have to face discrimination on the grounds of ethnicity and gender, and they struggle against the persistent tendency of being put in firm and often pointless social categories. Their exploration routes are rendered by Kay with empathy and depth. Kay’s short stories may be seen as construction sites of identity. How genealogical and individual ideas of identity are investigated in the stories will be the focus of this paper, while Kay’s literary language will also be examined.

1. Introduction Jackie Kay, who belongs to a younger generation of Scottish writers, is maybe best known for her widely acclaimed novel Trumpet1 and for the polyphonic poetry sequence The Adoption Papers.2 Her two collections of short stories, Why Don’t You Stop Talking and Wish I Was Here, were published in 2002 and 2006 respectively.3 The short stories address a variety of subjects, amongst which issues of identity, love relationships, and the ex- perience of loss, death, and dying seem to figure prominently. Indeed, Kay’s ability to portray what is frequently seen as ‘contemporary’ relationships, with apparently arbitrary separations and the protagonists’ unending search for romantic love, and the inclusion of homosexual love, has led writers of reviews to rather overstate the importance of the theme in her short fiction. This is especially true of her second collection.4 Kay, the daughter of a white Scottish mother and a Nigerian father, was given up for adoption as a baby and grew up in with her white adoptive parents. ‘Kay’s concern with identity is hardly surprising [...]; she is

1 Jackie Kay, (New York: Vintage, 2000 [1998]). 2 Jackie Kay, The Adoption Papers (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1991). 3 Jackie Kay, Why Don’t You Stop Talking (London: Picador 2003 [2002]), and Jackie Kay, Wish I Was Here (London: Picador, 2006). 4 The online review ‘A Book for the Broken-Hearted’ is a case in point. Anne Enright, ‘A Book for the Broken-Hearted’, Online, 17 June 2006 (15 August 2007). 124 Ulrike Zimmermann uniquely placed to comment on the interface between personal and cultural identity’.5 As a lesbian and single mother, she could easily be labelled an ‘identity politics poster child’.6 Her own experiences as a black woman with a distinctive Scottish accent can be reckoned as a factor for her interest in identity questions. Since the beginning of her career as a writer, she has constantly been asked in interviews how she feels about herself, her origins, her position in (Scottish as well as British) society. Her usual answer is that she sees herself as a Black Scottish woman writer. She acknowledges difficulty with being called British, but will accept the label if it is used as a kind of umbrella term.7 She certainly will not accept the label ‘black’ if this is connected to fixed ideas of how to behave and what to produce in terms of her art. When asked for a contribution to the 200th anniversary of abolition, she notes that she was hesitant at first, ‘[...] I replied that I thought enough had been written about slavery, and that I didn’t want to be pigeonholed as a black writer. Black writers are often expected to write about slavery and race’.8 However, Kay did contribute in the end, her argument being that she herself learned a lot about forgotten and repressed parts of Scottish history in the process and wanted to share this experience. She does not lay claim to any particular right to speak from a more authentic position than others. The problems connected with the denominator ‘black’ in terminological constructs like ‘Black British Literature’ have been addressed by Mark Stein and Helge Nowak among others.9 Nowak draws attention to the cultural and political implications of ‘black’, which does not only convey certain assumptions about writers, but has come to include for instance Caribbean and Asian writers as well. In this sense, ‘black’ refers to a political stance, but must be suspected to veil the heterogeneity of the writers and the cultural production concerned. 10 This is Kay’s point in the above-quoted remark. In

5 Alison Lumsden, ‘Jackie Kay’s Poetry and Prose: Constructing Identity’, in Contemporary Scottish Women Writers, ed. by Aileen Christianson and Alison Lumsden (: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), pp.79-91 (p.79). 6 David Ian Paddy, ‘Jackie Kay’, The Literary Encylopedia, (The Literary Dictionary Company, 2002) (15 August 2007). 7 Laura Severin, ‘Interview with Jackie Kay’, Free Verse, 2001/2002 (15 August 2007). 8 Jackie Kay, ‘Missing Faces’, The Guardian Online, 24 March 2007 (15 August 2007). 9 Helge Nowak, ‘Black British Literature – Unity or Diversity?’, in Unity in Diversity Revisited? British Literature and Culture in the 1990s, ed. by Barbara Korte and Klaus-Peter Müller (Tübingen: Narr, 1998), pp.71-87, and Mark Stein, ‘The Black British Bildungsroman and the Transformation of Britain’, in Korte and Müller, pp.89-105. 10 See Nowak, pp.74ff. Mark Stein, however, argues that the term ‘black’ per se consciously includes the idea of heterogeneity and diversity and is therefore applicable and helpful, cf.