Reminiscences of Home in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet

Abstract

Jackie Kay’s first novel, Trumpet, centres around Joss Moody, a Black jazz trumpeter, whose life is intensely scrutinized once the reporting of his death reveals he was born a woman. What makes this novel a fruitful site of investigation into how identities and identifications forming a sense of self (gender, sexuality, and race) are imagined, perceived, acquired, expressed, challenged, dissolved, and performed is the fact that Joss’s identity is filtered through multiple perspectives. His wife Millie and adopted son Colman initiate a memory discourse to discover ways to exist after Joss’s death (Lumsden, 2000, as cited in Hartner, 2015, p. 52). As they attempt to reconstruct Joss as a husband, lover, father, and famous trumpeter, they ‘de and re-construct themselves’ (Lumsden, 2000, as cited in Hartner, 2015, p. 52), questioning the relationship between home, gender, and sexuality in the process. Trumpet adapts, challenges, and reshapes the conventions of homemaking. It shows that the concept of home expands to encompass everything from a physical place, a site of hybridization and improvisation, to a point from which to reexamine, negotiate and critique feelings, practices, and states of being generally associated with traditional narratives of home.