ABSTRACT
Jackie Kay's idea about writing from border country has some affinity with Victor Turner's broad definition of liminality in The Ritual Process. In a more fundamental sense, Kay's stories argue against all boundaries and binarisms that fix people in social categories. Kay's conviction that identities are complex and its factors are fluid goes hand in hand with her versatile use of voice and perspective. Kay also uses the bottle-bank metaphor in one of her stories with a "two-tone" character, but without any idea of separating by colour. The characters in Kay's three story collections are a "mixed" community: black and white, male and female, straight and gay, young and old, poor and financially comfortable, Scottish and English, beautiful and ugly – all in different combinations. In "Out of Hand", from her first collection, Kay deals with a collective "black" experience. She wrote the story in the context of the fiftieth Windrush anniversary in 1998.
