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Fluid Identity of the Daughter in Jackie Kay's The Adoption Papers
Abstract
This paper deals with the issue of fluid identity in the Scottish poet, novelist and dramatist Jackie Kay’s first poetry collection The Adoption Papers (1991). Having African roots and being adopted by a white Scottish family lead Kay to employ some elements from her real life in creating a sequence of poems that fictionalizes different manifestations of identity and shows their interplay and apparent contradictions at the same time. Kay views identity as a fluid flux that does not take a fixed form and that distances itself from any preconceptions because it is a continuous and changing formation. She negotiates, questions, fantasizes, reinvents, modifies, imagines, fictionalizes, synthesizes, and even lyricizes her different and multi-faceted identities in an open-ended poetic presentation.
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.4n.4p.125
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