The Roots of a Life and the Routes of a Cartography in Jackie Kay’s Red Dust Road

Abstract

Considering the aspects of narrative space, temporality, and the narrator’s perspective in Jackie Kay’s Red Dust Road: An Autobiographical Journey, this article proposes a cartographical reading in which the book may be seen as a collection of maps (or rather an atlas) that encompasses a metaphorization of the author’s search for her roots in both the United Kingdom and Africa. Moreover, to strengthen the reading of this work as a transnational map, I translate Kay’s text into an actual map that shows the routes taken by the author to meet her biological parents and that ultimately broaden her identity. Each strand that constitutes Kay’s life atlas demonstrates that a map is not static. Instead, it is evolutionary, and this happens because each strand and each geographic location gets more complex as the author acquires more knowledge and insight into her past. In this way, I use the term intersemiotic transposition to create a visuo-textual bridge in which the detailed descriptions and enumerations in the text, when transported to a visual level, show the complexities of the formation and search for the cultural and personal identity of a woman whose nationality spans the international by having both Scottish and Nigerian roots.