ABSTRACT
In Trumpet, Jackie Kay takes Toni Morrison in as Kay’s fictive mother by adopting and adapting the formal and ethical patterns of Morrison’s Jazz. Kay opens up and connects questions of gender transition, migration and (cultural) adoption by replaying variations of Morrison’s project on an ethics of unknowing, cognitive improvement and transformative adoption. Formal innovations—such as narratorial unreliability, gaps and disjunctions of perspective—are indissociable from Kay’s and Morrison’s respective ethical and reconstructive projects. Starting with protagonists in tabloid-press scandals, Kay and Morrison endow them with a groundlessness that promises cognitive and ethical perplexity and complexity—a singular, atypical perspective that is, surprisingly, the very condition of possibility for transformed connection. Trumpet and Jazz share a concentric form: revolving around a middle section, they radiate outward from a formulaic riff toward waves of variations—and from the seemingly singular and atypical toward implicating other characters and readers in call-and-response. Turning to Kay and Morrison is particularly fruitful in addressing renewed public anxiety around the seemingly unrelated issues of trans identity, immigration and belonging.
