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 Glasgow with her white adoptive parents. ‘Kay’s concern with identity is hardly surprising [...]; she is
1 Jackie Kay, Trumpet (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’, The Guardian Online, 17 June 2006
5 Alison Lumsden, ‘Jackie Kay’s Poetry and Prose: Constructing Identity’, in Contemporary Scottish Women Writers, ed. by Aileen Christianson and Alison Lumsden (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), pp.79-91 (p.79). 6 David Ian Paddy, ‘Jackie Kay’, The Literary Encylopedia, (The Literary Dictionary Company, 2002)