NARRATIVE ANALYSIS

Narrative Analysis



Narrative Analysis

Introduction

Jackie Kay is a versatile writer whose oeuvre encompasses plays, poems, novels, short fiction, screenplays, poetic documentary, and biography. She has written for both adults and children. Regardless of Kay's choice of genre and audience, however, a concern with identity is at the heart of all her work. For her, identity has never been something to take for granted. Being a black child adopted by white parents, being black in Scotland, being gay in a predominantly heterosexual society, being a woman writer in a male-dominated literary tradition--all these borderline experiences have generated Kay's sense of otherness as well as her need to write into existence her supposedly impossible identity as a "black," Scottish, lesbian woman writer. But Kay constantly transcends this autobiographical impact, which has fueled and shaped much of her writing, using her own experiences as a starting point from which to explore the ambiguities of racial, cultural, social, gendered, and sexual identities. In doing so, she constantly challenges exclusive, essentialist, and normative views. Kay's insistence on the multiplicity and hybridity of her own identity--and identity in general--is mirrored by her interest in genre boundaries. In her work, she disrupts generic conventions, experimenting with dramatic, narrative, and lyrical elements as well as with combinations of autobiography and fiction.

Born in Edinburgh on 9 November 1961 to a white Scottish mother and a Nigerian father, Jacqueline Margaret was adopted at birth by Helen and John Kay, a white Scottish couple who raised her in Bishopbriggs, a suburban area in the north of Glasgow. Her mother was a primary-school teacher, and her father worked as an industrial organizer for the Communist Party. The home they provided for her loved, open-minded, and politically aware: her parents took her to peace rallies and civil rights marches as well as introduced her to the blues, an epiphanic experience with a far-reaching effect on both Jackie Kay's life and her literary work. At the same time, as she recalls in the autobiographical essay "Let It Be Told," published in Into the Nineties: Post-Colonial Women's Writings (1994), she was "brought up on Burns Suppers social gatherings, including poetry readings, celebrating the life of Robert Burns and kailies traditional Scottish dances" and thus "steeped in Scottish tradition." Despite such uplifting experiences of communal conviviality and traditional Scottish culture, growing up in an almost exclusively white environment in which the black girl with the Glaswegian accent was "treated as a kind of anomaly" inevitably fostered a sense of isolation.

Story Beat

In “My daughter the Fox” Kay recalls instances of everyday racism she encountered as a child, being called names by other children or having to endure a teacher's racist remarks. However, she also recalls her own, as well as her parents', refusal to put up with such racism. These experiences produced an early need in her to find black role models and to create "positive black images." Since, apart from her brother Maxwell, two years her senior and also adopted, Kay was the only ...