“My Face is a Map”

Jackie Kay’s writing for children often contains maps and directions, or otherwise gestures to landscapes and physical environments through references to maps, directions and borders. Kay complicates these ideas about space and borders, however, when her protagonists literally become maps, borders, and bridges. It is a technique that Kay uses throughout her work for children to interrogate larger questions, including ideas about truth and identity. Through use of language connected to maps and borders, Kay ultimately argues that the individual – even as a child – can and indeed must draw the map of their own face, and determine the borders of their own identity.