From Great White Mothers to Black Sisters

Jackie Kay’s writing, as it has developed across more than four decades, is founded in the 1980s politics of Black feminism. While themes of national and ethnic identity, adoption, and sexuality have been powerfully addressed by Kay’s literary critics, the influence of a specifically Black feminist politics on her work is less explored. This chapter explores Kay’s early writing from the 1980s, which first circulated in the realms of feminist production and publishing. By returning to her formative engagements with Black feminism in poems such as ‘So you think I am a Mule?’ and ‘We are not all sisters under the same moon’ (1984), the now out-of-print short story ‘Blacker and Blacker’ (1984), and the poetic drama, Chiaroscuro (1987), we gain a clearer sense of the trajectory of Kay’s commitment to an intersectional feminist politics of equality.