A common theme in Jackie Kay’s work is the right claimed by her characters and literary voices to interrogate the culture imposed on them. By stressing the power of a personally-constructed genealogy of cultural influences, Kay’s texts highlight the benefits of occupying a hybrid space, an interstice that has not very frequently been examined in contemporary Scottish literature. The aim of this paper is to study the complex representation of such standpoints in The Adoption Papers (1991), Other Lovers (1993), Bessie Smith (1997), Off Colour (1998), Trumpet (1998) and some of the short stories included in Why Don’t You Stop Talking (2002) and Wish I Was Here (2006). Her portrayal of relational selves will serve to explore the different polyphonic Scottish identities, with echoes from the African diaspora, she constructs in the subjective “black Atlantic” that recurs in her texts.
The paper argues that the freedom to reconstruct cultural genealogies as a psychological strategy developed in a hostile context can be traced from her first collection of poems The Adoption Papers to the novel Trumpet and some of her most recent short stories, where traditional assumptions about the nature of family bonds are interrogated. It also examines how it adopts a more subversive tone when cultural icons such as Bessie Smith, Angela Carter, or Bette Davis participate in a consciously-artificial genealogy of emotions in Other Lover’s, Bessie Smith and Off Colour.