A Scottish Metamorphosis: Jackie Kay's Trumpet

Abstract

As an adopted, black, lesbian, Scottish, poet, Jackie Kay’s uncommon personal particulars have been the main source of inspiration for her literary career. In her first novel, Trumpet, awarded with the 1998 Guardian fiction prize, Kay raises issues concerning the racial, sexual, social and national construction of an identity, as jazz-trumpeter Joss Moody’s adopted son, Colman, tries to cope with the shocking postmortem revelation that his father was in fact a woman. The novelistic account of Joss Moody is based on the real story of the American jazz pianist Billy Tipton. Kay transfers Tipton’s story to a Scottish context, changing in the process the racial colour of the musician, and adding autobiographical elements related with race, sexuality and Scottishness. Joss Moody and Colman are the two main characters through whom Kay explores her own unconventional profile. This paper aims at analysing Jackie Kay’s fictional articulation of her own specificity in connection with Scottish subjects. The notion of hybridity and issues relevant in deconstruction and queer theory have been used in the discussion. In Trumpet, Kay celebrates the creative energy of hybridity, and therefore, suggests a revision of Scottishness, based not on fixed abstract categories or stereotypes, but on personal experience and actual response.