She also makes use of the reverse to confluence, dislocation, and uses literary genres in order to create her own territory and language of hybridity. (2011, p. 57)ĢLike Phillips, Kay enrols the power of words, of storytelling to go over her own dual, confluent identity, but also to render the complexity, the fluidity of our notion of ourselves. Words cohering into language form the bedrock of our identity, and to explain our human condition, our first port of call is generally words. There is a directness about storytelling, involving as it does human beings as the central players, which means that we often look first to our writers for news of who and what we are. Caryl Phillips, the English writer of Carribean descent, emphasises the primacy of storytelling when it comes to understanding who we are as individuals, but also as a society: Looking more precisely at her latest collection of short stories Reality, Reality (2012), in connection with her memoir Red Dust Road (2010) and the poetry book Fiere (2011), this article will look at the way Kay reflects on how we define ourselves, but also at the way she transforms the tools that we use to define ourselves. This paper examines how her later writing reflects this position as a racial, cultural and social hybrid. In her literary output, Kay, who was made Scottish Makar earlier this year taking over from Liz Lochhead, also works across boundaries by being a writer of poetry, short stories, a novel (to date, with a second novel in preparation), several plays and a memoir. And indeed, Kay’s writing is about confluence in many ways: as a Scottish writer with a Nigerian father, who often gets asked where she is from by people who “look at her face rather than listening to her voice”, as a lesbian poet challenging heteronormative standards on sexuality, as an adopted child who, like the girl in her story, bears two names, 1 she is situated at the crossroads of our cultural, societal and racial landmarks.
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