“Daft naff Scottish things”: Stuff, Waste and Memory Objects in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet

Abstract

Guided by new materialist approaches to the memory of loss, this reading of Jackie Kay’s 1998 novel Trumpet surveys the affective permutations registered by different objects of remembrance in the Scottish-Nigerian writer’s fictional account of mourning. Exploring several material figurations of Black Scottishness in Kay’s writings, the essay derives its main theoretical framework from studies on blended subject-object ontologies, including Bill Brown’s critique of thingness, Maurizia Boscagli’s notion of the disruptive agency of stuff, and Mel Y Chen’s view of matter’s animacy, and discusses how the novel latches onto the role of things in anchoring memory and in helping humans work through bereavement.