Improper Identification Required: Passports, Papers, and Identity Formation in Jackie Kay's The Adoption Papers

What makes you youand me me?

What makes us usand them them?

Is it the anthemthat rouses to attention?

Is it the flagwe wave on occasion?

Is it the passportthat punctuates a border?

John Agard, "Encounter"

In his study Passport Photos, Amitava Kumar observes: "The passport chooses to tell its story about you. Is that story one of your own making? Can it ever be?" (ix). While Kumar presents his response to these questions from within a sociological framework, his notion of the "storytelling" passport has interdisciplinary relevance. His idea is especially compelling from a literary perspective: after all, passports may tell stories about us, but we also tell stories about our passports. Literature provides a space for the artist to document her documents, a place to inscribe her account of passports and identification papers that are acquired, lost, stolen, forged, stamped, marked, and/or surrendered. Perhaps most importantly, the writer who includes a passport in her poem, play, or prose has the opportunity to interrogate the categories contained in her passport booklet. As texts, passports firmly deny cultural hybridity; they force us into gender binaries; they affirm the idea that identity must have an origin in time and space; and they reduce us to state-produced images by freezing our bodies in photo form. Lesley Higgins and Marie-Christine Leps, Martin Lloyd, and John Torpey have all commented upon the passport's Foucauldian relevance: the passport, Higgins and Leps aver, is "a matrix in which specific relations of power . . . and domains of knowledge . . . are articulated, and from which other relations are excluded (subjectivity, cultural hybridization)" (95). To excavate the literary history of the passport, then, is to explore how artists apprehend this matrix and to determine if and how literature might countermand the exclusions and essentialisms that result from such processes of identification. Moreover, given that we inhabit an era of increased "vigilance" at our borders, an era in which many passport-holders endure frequent, humiliating, and largely unjustified scrutiny because of their names and/or complexions, the notion that passports are mechanisms of state control is profoundly salient, not to mention sobering.

These matters constitute a provocative backdrop for examining identity in the writings of Afro-Scottish poet Jackie Kay. Kay, an artist for whom homeland, according to Sarah McClellan, is seldom "knowable or writable" (117), often presents her texts in contradistinction to printed, state-issued forms of identification: passports, birth certificates, ID cards, and of course, adoption papers. By incorporating fragments of these official papers into her works, Kay records the rifts between legal nationality and informal national identity in postcolonial Britain. Consequently, her writing not only explores how forms of identification acquire social and political value but imagines a literary space wherein an individual never has a single place of birth, a single place of origin.¹ One might say that she envisions her writing much in the same way that Kumar envisions his treatise on passports— as a productive "forgery" that alters the form and content of official identification papers. Consider Kumar's description of such "forgery":

Forgeries work only when they recall what is accepted as real . . . forgery is most apparent in places where the information does not fit on the dotted line. Where the individual takes on the shape of a collective. . . . Where the rich ambiguities of a personal or cultural history perhaps resist a plain reply or, in still other cases, demand a complex though unequivocal response.

(xi)²

Situating government-issued markers of "proper" identification within her narratives of "improper" identification enables Kay to interrogate the project of postcolonial identity-making. Her texts merit further examination because they mark the historical schism between legally sanctioned identification and other forms of identity construction in Britain, thereby opening up the borders of what Homi Bhabha has called "the third space" —a literary and cultural zone for the articulation of multiple selves.³

Identification Papers in Britain: A History

The narrative of the modern passport age commences with World War I. Initially a "temporary...