Waves of Sound, Gender, Fluidity and Shifting Kingships

Northwestern University Press
Chapter Title: Waves of Sound, Gender Fluidity, and Shifting Kinships in Jackie Kay’s
Trumpet
Book Title: Queer Tidalectics

Book Subtitle: Linguistic and Sexual Fluidity in Contemporary Black Diasporic Literature
Book Author(s): Emilio Amideo
Published by: Northwestern University Press. (2021)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1m9x337.6
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Chapter 2
Waves of Sound, Gender

Fluidity, and Shifting Kinships
in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet
Identity is a river—a process.

—Gloria Anzaldúa, “To(o) Queer the Writer”
His story, I told you, was the diaspora. Every story runs into the same river
and the same river runs into the sea.
—Jackie Kay, Trumpet
The necessity to find a new language capable of voicing the Black queer
experience, which characterized the previous chapter on James Bald-
win, is also at the basis of the work of the Scottish writer and Scotland’s
makar of mixed Scottish and Nigerian parentage Jackie Kay. Kay follows
in the footsteps of Baldwin’s genealogical work on the expression of a
more fluid conception of both gender and race through the idiom of the
queer tidalectics, and brings it further by drawing on the negotiations
of feminism and lesbian aesthetics with language, embodiment, and
authorship. If Baldwin partly struggled with the coarticulation of queer-
ness and Blackness in Giovanni’s Room—where water tropes are still
used in a more traditional way, that is, as metaphors for an unspeakable
condition (i.e., the absence of air, drowning, etc.)—and his reflection
on gender roles remains somehow limited to the possibility of concep-
tualizing alternative forms of masculinity, Kay further develops these
critical negotiations in her first novel Trumpet (1998), in which she
discusses, among other things, Blackness and trans* identity. In the
75
76 Chapter 2
novel, which traces the life story of the fictive Black trans* jazz player
Joss Moody, Kay in fact weaves a polyphonic narration, in Bakhtinian
terms, which does not settle for a monolithic account and confronts
both gender binarisms and essentialist notions of identity to reveal their
constructed nature.1 For her, as the two epigraphs to this chapter sug-
gest, identity expressed through gender, race, class, able-bodiedness,
and sexuality is characterized—just like bodies of water—by a constant
metamorphosis, and it is precisely a polyphonic approach to processes
of identity formation (i.e., the rivers flowing toward the same sea) that
represents the promise of a diasporic aesthetics. As it will become more
clear as my exploration of Kay’s text progresses, the fluidity of water
reverberates throughout the novel mainly through the semantic asso-
ciation of the sea waves with waves of sound, thus transferring to jazz
music as one of the pivotal aesthetic expressions of Black culture and
one bearing the same performative aspect of Black linguistic practices
highlighted in the introduction to this book. Here polyphony, impro-
visation, and variation on a theme, among the other features of jazz
music, enable the expression of the variability of identity affiliation
around gender, race, familial relationships, and so on.
At the beginning of the novel, we learn of the death of Joss, who was
known as “Britain’s legendary trumpet player,” and so his story is not
told in the first person but slowly emerges, piece by piece, through the
fragmented memories of the people who knew him.2 The only exception
is represented by the letter that Joss writes to his son, with the note “ ‘To
be opened after my death’ ” (Trumpet, 65), which constitutes Joss’s “last
word,” as the title of the penultimate chapter containing the content of
the letter suggests. It is precisely through the narrative’s organization
in fragmented segments recounted from multiple perspectives that Kay
creates a complex postmodernist montage that renders the narration
polyphonic both on a thematic and structural level. The story is told
mainly through the accounts of Joss’s wife Millicent MacFarlane (Mil-
lie), their adopted son Colman Moody, and the tabloid journalist Sophie
Stones, whose intention is to write a book about the “secret” concern-
ing the life of Joss Moody (i.e., to reveal his trans* identity). To a lesser
extent the narration advances as well through the account of a series of
minor characters: Dr. Krishnamurty, the registrar Mohammed Nassar
Sharif, the funeral director Albert Holding, the drummer Malcolm “Big
Red” McCall, the cleaner Maggie, Joss’s mother Edith Moore, Joss’s
old school friend May Hart, and different other people and groups
who contribute to the narrative with a number of letters. Almost all
Waves of Sound, Gender Fluidity, and Shifting Kinships 77
characters (the only exceptions are Dr. Krishnamurty and Maggie) have
both a name and a surname, which not only reflects the peculiarity of
Kay’s writing with her experienced crafting of complex characters but
also testifies to the importance that names and the process of naming
oneself and others assume not only in the Afro-diasporic tradition, as
already mentioned in the previous chapter, but also in the novel, as I
will explore in the last section of this chapter.
The polyphonic narrative structure enables the emergence and
recognition of a multiplicity of voices and perspectives that develop
individually and avoid a single, monolithic and appropriating dis-
course to dominate. While the vicissitudes and the introspection of the
minor characters are left to the voice of an external narrator, Millie
always tells her story in the first person, and the same is often true
for both Colman’s and Sophie’s accounts. First person and external
narration alternate within the novel: overall the chapters titled “House
and Home,” the ones dealing with Millie, are told in the first person,
whereas the chapters titled “People,” which deal with the accounts of
the minor characters, are narrated by an external voice. This alterna-
tion creates a structure made of echoes, calls and responses, repetitions
with change and returns (since the narration returns on some events
multiple times, each time enriching them with more details as a reflec-
tion of the experience and personal interpretation of the events by the
characters involved), thus reflecting both the pattern of jazz music and
the oscillating and elliptical movement of the sea waves, each time
returning with new material gathered from the sea.
If the effect of such a narrative is alienating at first (since the reader
feels disoriented by being surrounded by a “sea” of different versions of
the same story), this figurative naupathia is overcome once the reader
familiarizes with the recurrent (again the return movement) narrative
pattern and finally renounces the ideal of a single story.3 Similarly, at
the beginning of the novel, the reader does not know the gender of the
person narrating the story until a few pages into the novel and only
learns her name on page thirteen, when the narrating voice, while relat-
ing her first encounter with Joss Moody, recalls, “I say, ‘My name is
Millie McFarlane’ ” (Trumpet, 13).
The name and gender of the person narrating the story in the first
pages is not the only secret the narrative bears. In fact, the whole story
revolves around the revelation of a secret: the one that Joss has kept
for all his life and that, at the moment of his death, has been uncov-
ered, unleashing the obsession of Sophie Stones and a series of other
78 Chapter 2
journalists. The reader learns about Joss’s secret trans* identity at the
very beginning of the narrative, in a chapter titled “House and Home,”
which is narrated through Millie’s perspective. Although unexpected,
the revelation is nevertheless presented as an ordinary event. In this
chapter, the narrative follows Millie’s attempt to mourn the death of
Joss in the tranquility of her home, which is constantly frustrated by
countless journalists waiting outside her house with “cameras and
questions” (Trumpet, 2). This situation convinces her to leave her
house in Glasgow in the middle of the night to go to stay in Torr (a
Scottish fisherman village), where she has a small family cottage the
press does not know about. In that place connected with her memory
of all the important events she shared with Joss and with their adoptive
son Colman, almost as if healed by the sea that often reflects her state
of mind, Millie continues to remember her life with Joss. Her expe-
rience is reflected through a language that increasingly draws on an
aquatic, corporeal, and affective imagery that indicates the deep con-
nection between water, memory, and affective states highlighted in the
introduction to this book.
Alone in the Torr cottage, Millie feels like a hunted prey, her agitation
becomes palpable as she develops an acute awareness of hearing and
touch. Her focus on the background music playing in the room and on
the sensation provided by the handling of a book, however, facilitate her
drifting away in her memories. Her “descent” into her consciousness,
into the water of her memories, is rendered through a term pertaining
to the semantic field of liquidity: while she tries to read the book she
has in her hands, the words “spill” in front of her, inevitably evading
her (Trumpet, 10). The term “spilling” refers to the falling of some-
thing in a liquid form and emphasizes both her affective submersion in
her innermost self and the consequent blurring of temporal categories
enhanced by the connection with the materiality of water. Past and
present start to overlap and, in a sort of suspended time, Millie relives
her first encounter with Joss. The fact that she starts synchronizing her
own breathing with the background music brings her into contact with
a number of submerged memories affectively registered in her body,
which connect her, through forms of relational reorientation, to the
body of her lover Joss.4 In other words, the affective, corporeal memory
of the act of breathing transfers to Joss’s body, reminding Millie of how
Joss used to breath in and out while playing the trumpet and on how,
during the last moments of his life, his breath accelerated to then turn
shallow.
This bodily memory reflecting their strong relationship reminds Mil-

lie of how she met Joss while they were both donating blood at a hospital
in Glasgow in 1955 and of how, fascinated by him, she challenged soci-
ety’s conventions around gender roles and behaviors to ask him out: “It
is 1955. Women don’t do this sort of thing. I don’t care. I am certain
this man is going to be my lover” (Trumpet, 12). Millie’s “infringe-
ment” of societal norms of acceptable gender behavior constitutes the
prelude to Joss’s revelation of his own maneuvering around fixed and
prescribed forms of gender identity. Preoccupied by the fact that their
three-months courtship never evolved into a deeper physical contact
other than kissing, Millie invites Joss to her flat where she hopes he
would make love to her. In the face of Joss’s firm decision to stop seeing
each other and of his reticence in talking about something he should
have told her when they started dating, Millie begins to challenge him
demanding an explanation. Unable to find the words to tell his secret,
Joss decides instead to show her what is the matter. With a “challeng-
ing, almost aggressive” (Trumpet, 21) look on his face, he takes off his
tie, undoes his shirt, removes a first t-shirt, then a second, followed by
a vest, until layers of bandages wrapped around his chest are revealed.
When Millie, comforted by the thought of Joss being ashamed of some
kind of scars, moves toward him to embrace him, he continues:
“I’m not finished,” he says. He keeps unwrapping endless rolls

of bandage. I am still holding out my hands when the first of his
breasts reveals itself to me. Small, firm. (Trumpet, 21)
The revelation of Joss’s secret is startling, but uneventful, since the story
returns as an undertow to the present, as if nothing really happened,
and to the ordinariness of Millie’s life in the Torr cottage. Kay refuses
both to sensationalize Joss’s trans* identity through the ordinariness of
Millie’s memories of the event and of her life with Joss, and to fit it into
either gender category of belonging, by avoiding fixation into oppressive
and necessarily unsatisfactory terms (e.g., lesbian, transgender, trans-
sexual, etc.). To this performative and shifting conception of gender
identity, Kay opposes in the novel both the medicalized discourses that
focus on the female anatomy of Joss’s body (i.e., the doctor, the funeral
director, and the registrar), and Sophie Stones’s account that seeks to
pathologize Joss’s identity by constantly referring to it as a lie, a decep-
tion, or with the hate words: “freak” (Trumpet, 64), “transvestite” and
“pervy” (Trumpet, 126), “weird” (Trumpet, 127), “tranny” (Trumpet,
80 Chapter 2
128), or “phenomenon” (Trumpet, 212). Alternatively, as I contend in

the remainder of this chapter, Kay elaborates a fluid conception of iden-
tity belonging (variously linked to sexuality, gender, familial ties, and
race), which she expresses by crafting a peculiar use of language that
draws on the aquatic element in its connection with jazz music as par-
adigmatic expressions of the Black diaspora, hence contributing to the
delineation of a Black queer diasporic aesthetics.
Variations on a Theme: Water, Jazz, and Fluid Identity
Trumpet is inspired by the life story of Billy Tipton, a White Ameri-

can pianist and saxophonist who was born Dorothy Lucille Tipton in
Oklahoma City in 1914 and lived his life as a male jazz musician in
the Midwest and West Coast, and finally Washington, DC, where he
founded a trio. Tipton, who married five times and adopted three chil-
dren, was found to be biologically female only after his death. Little is
known about his gender identity and the catalyst for his decision to live
as a man, other than what was speculated in his biography Suits Me:
The Double Life of Billy Tipton (1998), written by Diane Middlebrook.5
In her book Middlebrook seems to link Tipton’s decision to live as a
man to his desire to become a jazz musician, since at the time the usual
role available (when at all) to women in jazz was that of singers.6
As Jack Halberstam maintains, the claim that Tipton’s decision rested
on his ambition is dangerous since it supports the assumption that his
relationships with the women of his life were only deceptions.7 Predict-
ably the biography was commissioned by Tipton’s last wife and thus partly
adjusts to her specific standpoint, which manifests itself through the
way the author describes Tipton, variously as a “magician” or a deceiver
who preyed on innocent women,8 something that is similarly reflected
in the subtitle chosen for the book: “The Double Life of Billy Tipton.”
In a 1999 interview Kay explains her rationale for choosing to tell a
story inspired by Tipton’s experience:
I just happened by chance to be reading in a newspaper . . .

about the death of a jazz musician called Billy Tipton. It was
just a couple of lines and it said that he’d died and that on
his death it was discovered that he was a woman. The impor-
tant thing for me was that his son was quoted saying “. . . he’ll
always be daddy to me.” It just really intrigued me, this idea of
someone actually not just dressing up as a man or woman or as

the opposite sex, but living their life like that.9
Intrigued by William Tipton’s response concerning his father and by the

experience of living one’s whole life as the opposite sex, Kay builds her
story around the perspectives of a series of people who did not know the
truth about Joss and the only one who did, his widow Millie. If Tipton’s
biography is mainly constructed around the idea of deception posed
on the claim that nobody (not even his wives nor sons) knew about his
anatomical sex, Kay’s fictionalized account in Trumpet restores a more
complex picture that avoids the sensationalism inherent in the gesture
of revealing a hidden truth, but rather celebrates the changing potential
of the ordinary in the possibility to perform one’s own identity as one
perceives it rather than as one’s biology states it.
As already anticipated, jazz music plays a significant role in the novel,
and not just because it tells the story of a jazz trumpeter, but through its
very structure and aesthetics, as Kay herself recognizes in an interview:
I wanted to tell a story, the same story, from several points of

view. I was interested in how a story can work like music and
how one note can contain the essence of the whole. I wanted
to write a novel whose structure was very close to jazz itself.10
Kay’s polyphonic narration thus follows the rhythm and structure of

jazz, since it offers the reader the same story (that of Joss) that is impro-
vised time and again and told through different perspectives, just like
jazz is made up of a refrain and improvised new melodic solo parts.11 As
such, it reflects also the relationality of a diasporic aesthetics that avoids
the prevailing of a single story and rather intends identity as something
built relationally, like Kay’s image of the several rivers running toward
the same sea used as an epigraph to this chapter. Indeed, music (espe-
cially in the form of jazz, blues, and Celtic folk songs) represents an
important influence in Kay’s writing, together with the form of Scottish
poetry, particularly in its dramatic and performative aspects.12 Both tra-
ditions are connected with her growing up in Glasgow with her White
adoptive parents Helen and John Kay: “I was very fortunate that I had a
dad who loved jazz and blues. He played it a lot when he was home.”13
Her exposure since she was a child to Scottish poetry events and to
jazz music deeply influenced Kay, who particularly remembers a turning
point in her life when, at the age of twelve, her father entrusted her
82 Chapter 2
with a Bessie Smith album. As she would recall in the singer’s biog-
raphy Bessie Smith which she wrote in 1997, for a Black girl of mixed
Nigerian and Scottish parentage growing up with a White family and
in a White neighborhood, being able to identify with Bessie Smith’s
skin color and her music came as an epiphany: “I am the same colour
as she is, I thought to myself, electrified. I am the same colour as Bes-
sie Smith . . . the shock of my own reflection came with the Blues.”14
Through Bessie Smith and a number of other Black people from around
the globe (including Nelson Mandela, Angela Davis, Louis Armstrong,
and Ella Fitzgerald), Kay is able to trace imaginative relationships with
other Black people, thus making up for the lack of such models in her
environment with whom she could identify. In doing so she appreciates
jazz’s fluidity, its capacity to constantly change to reinvent not only itself
but also identity in the process, something that is equally reflected in
the performative aspect of Black linguistic practices.15
As an evolution of hollers and slave songs performed by African slaves
in American plantations, jazz bears in its origin the cross-fertilization of
different cultural and musical traditions. It combines Christian and folk
songs from Europe, drumming from Africa, European diatonic and Afri-
can pentatonic scales and harmonic patterns, and so forth, hence being
inherently a hybrid, fluid genre that resists being fitted into either-or
categories or definitions. Kay maintains:
I have written a lot about jazz and jazz itself interests me because
it’s such a fluid form and it comes from the blues and I like the
idea that Black music has shifted and changed. It’s like identity
in that way, identity’s something that’s fluid, it’s not something
that’s static and fixed . . . I think the wonder part about certain
pieces of music is that when we’re listening to them we can lose
ourselves in them, but we can also find ourselves in them, that
music defines us, but it also help [sic] us to lose our definitions.16
The capacity to define and lose ourselves and our definitions in music,
already implied in the description of Millie’s remembering her past
life in the solitude of the Torr cottage, is explored by Kay especially in
the chapter titled “Music,” which is one of the two chapters reporting
Joss’s perspective and emblematically occupies the central part of the
novel. Here, the external narrator describes Joss’s relation to music as an
ecstatic experience through a language that is influenced by the features
of jazz. Repetitions, improvisation, variations on the theme, rhythm, and
semantic transposition of the language of jazz to express a fluid con-

ception of gender and race, are all part of Kay’s experimentation. She
writes: “When he [Joss] gets down, and he doesn’t always get down deep
enough, he loses his sex, his race, his memory. He strips himself bare,
takes everything off, till he’s barely human” (Trumpet, 131). As Joss gets
down, both bending while playing the trumpet and figuratively descend-
ing into the music, he is dragged to another place entirely.
His (en)trance into music happens, as a matter of fact, as a sort of
immersion into water, a reading corroborated by the expression “He
dives back down again” (Trumpet, 134) following in the text. The expe-
rience of entering music through an affective state comparable to a
trance and conveyed through a figurative submersion into music/water
recalls, in turn, Afro-diasporic practices connected with Haitian Vodou,
according to which priests and priestesses are believed to “spend time
‘under water’ . . . as part of their initiations,” from where they emerge
with the acquisition of a “sacred knowledge.”17 Joss’s experience of
music is thus inscribed as a revelation of a higher knowledge and
related to the blurring of gender categories of belonging, since water
deities in the tradition of Haitian Vodou (but also in West Africa and
across the African diaspora more in general) present hermaphroditic
traits, which demonstrate the possibility to “perform both masculinity
and femininity” as attributes that move across all bodies.18 Additionally,
the expression “takes everything off, till he’s barely human” (Trumpet,
131) seems to reflect Sylvia Wynter’s formulation regarding the neces-
sity to create new genres of the human through the abolition of “Man”:
neither a man nor a woman (intended as social constructs) Joss is able
to be barely, or just, human, but in a different way, since the act of
playing jazz enables him to undo old forms of humanism based on con-
temporary racialized heteropatriarchy and create new ones.19
While my aim is not to romanticize jazz or Black music in general,
since the latter even in its most recent formulations continues to be
interested by heterosexist practices,20 I do intend to demonstrate that,
despite its inevitable contradictions, it represents a space for transfor-
mation and freedom, especially when considering the negotiation of
space for the expression of “black female libidinality” and its use within
a masculine-dominated arena.21 An example in this sense is the expres-
sion of lesbian desire by blues singers of the 1920s, such as Gertrude
“Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Gladys Bentley, among others. In the
novel, jazz becomes precisely an affective language that draws on the
empowering potential of the erotic to open a space to rethink identity
84 Chapter 2
as fluid, as a form of becoming, capable of creating new modalities of

existence. As sound propagates through the ether in waves—a term that
parallels the movement of water in the form of sea waves—Joss experi-
ences, via his submersion into music/water, an alternative temporality.
This temporality, in reproducing the cyclical aspect of water, merges the
past, present, and future, thus resisting both closure and chrononorma-
tivity. As time collapses in this alternative spatiotemporal location, Joss
witnesses his own death, to then remember his “blue birth” (Trumpet,
132), since, as the “wee black girl” (Trumpet, 132) that he once was, he
had the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck, hence inhibiting her
capacity to breathe. The absence of air, in the cyanotic child as in water,
anticipates a sort of rebirth in music through the emblematic gesture
of blowing air into the trumpet/baby: “He gulps on the trumpet. The
music has no breath, no air” (Trumpet, 132). The reference here seems
to be to the metamorphic aspect, which involves death and rebirth
(both literally and metaphorically) of the Black Atlantic as the founda-
tional trope of Black diasporic aesthetics. It reflects the critical political
potential inherent in the capacity to change, which is characteristic of
water, jazz, and Black linguistic practices and is expressed as well in
fluid conceptions of gender and sexual identities. Interesting to notice
in this context is that the trumpet is also one of the symbols associated
with Lasirèn, which is one of the manifestations of the hermaphroditic
pantheon of African diasporic deities known as Mami Wata, who rep-
resent the multiple possibilities of gender identification not in terms of
binarisms but over a spectrum.
Subsequently, Joss sees himself first as a young girl skipping along
an old disused railway in a red dress, and then at the time of his death
in a coffin while the funeral director Albert Holding undresses him to
prepare his corpse for the funeral. In this context the reference to the
old disused “railway line” holds perhaps a hidden meaning, since in jazz
jargon a “train wreck” signals the “disagreement” of the musicians on
their exact location in the tune they are playing.22 In other words, in the
process of playing jazz instruments someone gets lost so that the chord
changes and the melody may get confused for several bars, but usually
there are no fatalities and the journey continues.23 As Joss, in the shape
of a little girl, runs along (read agrees) the railway line (which can be
interpreted as society’s expectations or institutionalized knowledge and
assumptions), she realizes that the track (the railway but also the musi-
cal tune or the recording) is not to be trusted. Therefore, the musical
improvisation, granted by the “train wreck,” enables Joss to think about
gender identity “off-beat” in a certain sense, which is following alterna-

tive temporalities and “paths” of expression. This reflects the separation
of music and speech from the body producing them (made possible
by the advent of sound-recording technologies), which enabled the
emergence of what Alexander Weheliye calls “sonic Afro-modernity” to
indicate new modalities of being and thinking employed by Black artists
and performers to rethink subjectivity and identity.24
Past and present, woman and man start merging, thus collapsing
temporal and gender categories as Joss keeps on painfully plunging
and resurfacing in music/water: “The body changes shape. From girl
to young woman to young man to old man to old woman” (Trumpet,
133). The descent into music, described as painful but regenerative,25
metaphorically represents Joss’s life journey as he sees people peering
down at his grave and “throwing mud on his face” (Trumpet, 134). Here
the dirt that is usually thrown over the coffin during burial is replaced
by mud, which not only refers to the discrediting of Joss’s memory that
followed his death and the revelation of his secret (as the expression
“to throw mud at somebody” suggests) but also implies a regeneration
through the allusion to the mixture of water and dirt in the composition
of mud; in fact, the next part of the sentence reads: “showering him
with blooms” (Trumpet, 134). The mud that is thrown at Joss enables
a regeneration (“blooms”), just as death permits a rebirth, destruction
a restoration, in a process of perpetual metamorphosis or (sea)change:
He can’t stop himself changing. Running changes. Changes

running. He is changing all the time. It falls off—bandages,
braces, cufflinks, watches, hair grease, suits, buttons, ties. He
is himself again, years ago, skipping along the railway line with
a long cord his mother had made into a rope. In a red dress. It is
liberating. To be a girl. To be a man. (Trumpet, 135)
As Joss keeps on changing all the time, language itself undergoes a

metamorphosis as the syntactic structure of the narrative is altered
through inversions (e.g., “Running changes. Changes running”), repe-
titions (e.g., “changing” and “changes” are repeated twice), alliteration
(e.g., “wound right round,” 132), semantic recontextualization (e.g., the
umbilical cord becomes a rope the young Joss uses to play, and even a
snake earlier on in the narrative; the reference to a “galloping piano”
is followed by the image of Joss sweating like a horse; the umbilical
cord swings, recalling a specific way of playing jazz notes known as
86 Chapter 2
swing), and paranomasia (i.e., when Joss’s corpse rests in the funeral
parlor among other corpses, the narrating voice comments: “This is
their meet. One last jam. Dead meat”; Trumpet, 133; emphasis added).26
The expression “O-bop-she-bam”—which refers to a jazz standard
by Dizzy Gillespie and represents the verbalization of the sound pro-
duced by the new music known as Bebop—is repeated twice in the
text (Trumpet, 131, 132), which, accordingly, assumes a syncopated
rhythm. Among “swirling and whirling,” “speeding” and “crashing,” as
Joss “swings” and goes down, the reader is confronted with an experi-
ence that does not simply represent an escape from linear time, but a
merging of the different temporal categories, and that, by refusing mere
ornaments and labeling, goes back to the body: “He is naked. This is
naked jazz. O-bop-she-bam. Never lying. Telling it like it is” (Trumpet,
132). When Joss reaches the furthest point of his descent, the expres-
sion “There is music in his blood” (Trumpet, 134) metamorphoses into
“The music is his blood” (Trumpet, 135), while the layers representing
the categories that people have imposed on him in their attempt to
understand him start an irrevocable undoing:
But the odd bit is that down at the bottom, the blood doesn’t
matter after all. None of the particulars count for much. True,
they are instrumental in getting him down there in the first
place, but after that they become incidental. All of his self
collapses—his idiosyncrasies, his personality, his ego, his sexu-
ality, even, finally, his memory. All of it falls away like layers of
skin unwrapping. He unwraps himself with the trumpet. Down
at the bottom, face to face with the fact that he is nobody. . . .
Playing the horn is not about being somebody coming from
something. It is about being nobody coming from nothing. The
horn ruthlessly strips him bare till he ends up with no body, no
past, nothing. (Trumpet, 135)
Joss symbolically unwraps himself of the different layers of his iden-

tity (as constructed by himself and by the people with whom he entered
in contact with), just like he unwrapped his chest in front of Millie,
dropping all his barriers and revealing the vulnerable naked skin under-
neath, finally free. This liberation in music follows the structure of the
Bebop, in which the musicians typically play the melody of a song,
followed by a section of improvised solos, to then return to the melody
at the end of the song. In fact it engenders the shattering of Joss’s self
and its recreation at the end of the chapter: “He tears himself apart.
He explodes. Then he brings himself back. Slowly, slowly, piecing him-
self together” (Trumpet, 136). This experience of descending into the
music and in its innermost self as if in a trance seems to reflect also the
unbounded diasporic belonging that Nadia Ellis traces in spirit posses-
sion across the Black diasporic tradition, when she writes: “the spirit’s
passing through the air, its passing through the body, shifts matter, bends
it in barely perceptible increments, producing infinitesimal shattering
and multiplication,”27 just as it happens with Joss whose subjectivity
“explodes,” belonging neither to himself, “nor to one particular moment
or place in time.”28 Additionally, the reference to blood in this passage
is particularly instructive: if, on one hand, the expression “down at the
bottom, the blood doesn’t matter after all” refers to the absence of a
factual blood relation between Joss and Colman (something that I will
explore in more detail in the last section of this chapter), on the other, it
evokes the presence, through absence, of another type of blood, that is
to say menstruation. The blood of menstruation is refused in Joss’s nar-
rative just as the possibility to give birth is renounced. This return to the
corporeal, to the female anatomy of Joss’s body, as well as the process
of undoing and redoing the subject through (musical) discourse, recalls
the practice of the écriture feminine, as theorized in the 1970s by theo-
rists such as Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, Monique Witting, Catherine
Clément, and Julia Kristeva in the context of so-called French Theory.29
The principle purported by the écriture feminine is that, since language
is not neutral but rather the expression of a patriarchal system, there is
a need to enable writing to evade the dominant discourse that regulates
a “phallocentric system” by both placing experience before language
and privileging nonlinearity in narrative expression. Écriture feminine
refuses the paralyzing, stiffening call of a patriarchal language system
dominated by a masculine sexuality gravitating around the penis (i.e.,
phallogocentrism) and proposes another language that is fluid, one that
recognizes complexity, mobility, openness, and, as such, is capable of
“overflow[ing] the subject,” that is, of undoing the common notion of
the unified and all-rationalist Western cogito by blurring its boundaries
through a discussion that, like fluids themselves, is “unstable,” uncon-
tainable, both “inside/outside of philosophical discourse.”30
In “The Laugh of the Medusa” (1976), Cixous writes:
If woman has always functioned “within” the discourse of man,

a signifier that has always referred back to the opposite signifier
88 Chapter 2
which annihilates its specific energy and diminishes or stifles its

very different sounds, it is time for her to dislocate this “within,”
to explode it, turn it around, and seize it; to make it hers, con-
taining it, taking it in her own mouth, biting that tongue with
her very own teeth to invent for herself a language to get inside
of. And you’ll see with what ease she will spring forth from that
“within”—the “within” where once she so drowsily crouched—to
overflow at the lips she will cover the foam.31
Female writing “explodes” the rigid mold of phallogocentrism just as

Joss “explodes” his self as constructed through the very language of the
racialized heteropatriarchy he lives in, to then piece it back together
anew, giving expression and voice to the possibility of new modalities
of existence.
While creating a language that is fluid, open to change, Kay empha-
sizes through Joss’s narrative how the need for social approval that
characterizes instead “masculine writing” stiffens the language. The
language becomes accordingly heavy, steady, and indifferent to change,
as visible through Kay’s criticism of socially constructed conceptions of
gender norms within the text. In fact, movement and fluidity represent
both a strength and a vulnerability. As Cixous explains with reference
to the woman writer:
She doesn’t hold still, she overflows. An outpouring that can be

agonizing, since she may fear, and make the other fear, endless
aberration and madness in her release. Yet, vertiginous, it can
also be . . . a “where-am-I,” a “who-enjoys-there” . . . : questions
that drive reason, the principle of unity, mad, and that are not
asked, that ask for no answer, that open up the space where
woman is wandering, roaming (a rogue wave), flying (thieving).
This power to be errant is strength; it is also what makes her
vulnerable to those who champion the Selfsame, acknowledge-
ment, and attribution.32
Joss, and like him Millie, and later on Colman (but also numerous other
characters like Giovanni in Giovanni’s Room and the ones whose nar-
ratives are explored in the subsequent chapters of this book) often find
themselves agonizing in this movement, as they keep on hitting against
the steady wall of social conventions, their complexity rendering them
vulnerable in a society where the unity of the subject and fixed identities
are the rules. Yet, their fluid maneuvering around Western society’s
impositions on race, gender, and sexuality shows, through their opposi-
tional choices, the strength of errancy in the very possibility of change.33
As a matter of fact, Colman is initially the one that is most trou-
bled by the idea of crossing the boundaries of stable binary identities
when facing the reality of his father’s female biology, something that
couples with his latent fear of rejection. With the blood of menstrua-
tion tainting, both literally and figuratively, the masculine image he has
of his father, Colman starts pondering: “What was his puberty like? I
mean he’d have got his periods, wouldn’t he? That’s disgusting, isn’t it?
There’s no way around it. The idea of my father getting periods makes
me want to throw up” (Trumpet, 67).
Only in music can Joss strip himself both of the strictly masculine
gender belonging dictated by his appearance and of the blood tie he
has with his female biology. There, he can free himself of the attributes
attached to his identity by the symbolic order and de-essentialize and
ungender himself to reach for the flesh, as the “zero degree of social
conceptualization.”34 He then can start creating himself anew, freely
choosing the elements he intends to retain and the ones he wants to dis-
card, untied from society’s judgment and imposition: “It is liberating. To
be a girl. To be a man” (Trumpet, 135). This process is facilitated by the
particular history connecting gender and race through practices such
as “passing,” but also of transness, in the different connotations of the
term. In his discussion of the racial history of trans identity, Riley Snor-
ton explains how Spillers’s notion of ungendered flesh (used to refer
to the reduction to pure matter, chattel, or flesh, of the Black slave’s
body under slavery) represents a critical genealogy for modern forms
of transness.35 The ungendering of the slave enabled the rearticulation
of practices reflecting mutable forms of gender belonging and of being
within the Black diasporic tradition. In his analysis of how forms of
cross-dressing and passing (that sometimes slaves used to escape captiv-
ity) enabled a rethinking of gender as “not fixed but fungible, which is to
say revisable within blackness, as a condition of possibility,”36 he writes:
blackness functioned as a site for an elaboration of gender in

which the fungible interchangeability of sex for chattel persons
revealed gender within blackness to be a polymorphous propo-
sition. The ungendering of blackness, then, opens onto a way
of thinking about black gender as an infinite set of proliferative,
constantly revisable reiterations figured “outside” of gender’s
90 Chapter 2
establishing symbolic order. Its symbolic order, which is simply

one articulation of the ordering of things, relies upon gendered
others to maintain an epistemological coherence.37
Jazz music as a fluid form that derives from the performative practices
of the Black diasporic tradition enables, despite its inherent contradic-
tions, the rearticulation of Joss’s gender identity as transient, unfixed,
and mutable. As Eckstein recognizes: “the epiphany of this moment,
placed at the very heart of the novel, not only represents a climax
in music; it also represents the climax of the novel’s thrust to de-
essentialize notions of being and identity beyond the purely musical.”38
In fact, it represents an important example of the movement toward
constant change and the gesture of recreating oneself, despite societal
conventions and impositions, that Kay traces in the whole novel and
that involves both gender and racial identity, respectively explored in
the following sections.
“He was a woman,” or On Linguistic Vulnerability
“The Truth!”
at which Orlando woke.
He stretched himself. He rose. He stood upright in complete nakedness
before us, and while the trumpets pealed Truth! Truth! Truth! we have no
choice left but confess—he was a woman.
—Virginia Woolf, Orlando: A Biography
His father must have had some nerve to sit in a barber’s shop full of black
men getting a man’s haircut all the time knowing he was a woman.
—Jackie Kay, Trumpet
First appearing in Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando: A Biography (1928), the

sentence “he was a woman” captures the reader’s attention both for
its “grammatical monstrosity,” created through a gender inflexion mis-
take,39 and paradoxically for the simplicity of the narrative it describes.
Just as candidly as Woolf revolutionized the burgeoning genre of life
writing, by claiming the importance of recognizing the interplay of
imagination and facts in the restitution of someone’s biography,40 so
after her metamorphosis Orlando nonchalantly “looked himself up and

down in a long looking-glass, without showing any signs of discompo-
sure, and went, presumably, to his bath.”41 Orlando’s sex change, like
the secret Joss and Millie share in Trumpet, is ordinary, and in fact
Woolf depicts it as a simple event that is part of the ever-changing pro-
cess of identity transformation. Lucas Crawford explains:
For Woolf, the “sex change” is a portion of the “continuous”

“transition” that Orlando undergoes as an affectively capacious
body. While trumpets blare and many people seek to make a
story of it, Orlando simply yawns and knows that her body will
continue to change.42
As Crawford suggests, the juxtaposition of trumpets pealing the truth

and Orlando’s placid reaction brings to the fore, while contesting them,
the typical representations of change within transgender narratives,
that is, the “shocking rupture” and the retrospective fulfilment of one’s
self through change,43 thus establishing Orlando as part of a genealogy
of trans* narratives.44 Similarly, Kay does not only use the same linguis-
tic expedient (as the expression “he was a woman” is repeated, and at
times transformed according to the practice of repetition with change
typical of Black diasporic aesthetics, several times in her novel) but
resists the usual spectacularization and attempt to rationalize “factual”
details typical of the biographical accounts or exposé concerning the
lives of trans* people, which often do not spare even autobiographical
material.
Jack Halberstam identifies three models of representation of trans-
gender narratives by nontrans* narrators: “stabilization,” which seeks
to temper the destabilizing effects of said narratives by presenting them
as strange or pathological; “rationalization,” which consists of find-
ing reasonable explanations for behaviors that appear as dangerous or
“strange”; and “trivialization,” which implies a dismissal of the lives of
trans* people as unimportant and nonrepresentative of any effective
change in gender normativity.45
While explaining a number of key terms in transgender theory, Julia
Serano seems to bring together Halberstam’s three models, with a partic-
ular focus on rationalization, in her definition of “trans-interrogation,”
which could be described as an obsession over the details concern-
ing the existence of transgenderism or transsexuality. With the wit that
characterizes her writing, Serano states:
92 Chapter 2
it occurred to me that, rather than simply removing the gen-

der identity disorder diagnosis from the DSM [Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders], we should perhaps con-
sider replacing it with transsexual etiology disorder, to describe
the unhealthy obsession cissexuals have with explaining the ori-
gin of transsexuality.46
The unhealthy obsession Serano refers to, not only with the origin of
transgenderism and transsexuality but also with the prurient interest in
the details of the (sexual) lives of trans* people, is reflected in the novel
through the experience of the tabloid journalist Sophie Stones.
Sophie is depicted as a terribly insecure person who does not only
need the attention of people but craves for rumors that might allow her
to displace the attention from her perceived faults and to project them
onto others to relieve herself. As a “little heavy girl,” with her weight
making her feel “silly and inferior” (Trumpet, 124), she recalls being
jealous of her sister Sarah and of her successes, and her fascination
for gossip stemming from hearing her parents maligning other people’s
lives (Trumpet, 125). This attitude transfers to the book she is writing
on the life of Joss Moody as she notes that “people are interested in
weirdos, sex-changes, all that stuff” (Trumpet, 125) and decides to set-
tle for the word “transvestite” to define Joss as it has “a nice pervy ring
to it” (Trumpet, 126), her prurience reflected not only in the tabloid-
like titles she ponders over—“The True Story of a Trumpet Transvestite.
Blow Her Trumpet. Daddy, You Blew It” (Trumpet, 125)—but also in
the details she sets herself to discover: “find out the exact cup size”
(Trumpet, 127).
As she variously defines Joss as a “transvestite,” “tranny,” “perv,”
“freak,” and declares her interest in “lesbians,” “dykes,” and “butches”—
shamelessly fetishizing such categories with a sound “the dirtier the
better” (Trumpet, 170)—Sophie is one of the few who keeps on address-
ing Joss with the feminine personal pronoun “she,” except when she
realizes it might be a good marketing strategy to use the male one “he”
as Joss’s son Colman does (Trumpet, 266). In fact, Sophie is the first
one in the novel who refers to Joss with the feminine personal pronoun
through a letter she addresses to Millie: “I’d like to talk to you about her
too” (Trumpet, 41; emphasis in the original).
In this context, it is interesting to notice that since English is con-
sidered a natural gender language as opposed to a grammatical gender
one (e.g., Italian, French, or Spanish)—that is, that English speakers
usually refer to nouns with the male or female pronoun based on their
being biologically male or female in the real world47—the pronoun
assumes a particularly important role in revealing the sex or gender of
both nouns and the invariable adjectives. Considering this aspect and
that Millie has been constantly referring to Joss with the male pronoun,
Sophie’s choice and sudden use of “her” (typographically emphasized
by the use of italics in the text) comes not only as an intrusion but
also as an unnecessarily violent act of naming. By refusing to comply
with the addressee’s perceived gender identity, it in facts represents an
example of hate or injurious speech: “To be hailed or addressed by a
social interpellation,” as Judith Butler maintains, “is to be constituted
discursively and socially at once.”48 She explains:
That one comes to “be” through a dependency on the Other—an

Hegelian and, indeed, Freudian postulation—must be recast in
linguistic terms to the extent that the terms by which recogni-
tion is regulated, allocated, and refused are part of larger social
rituals of interpellation. There is no way to protect against that
primary vulnerability and susceptibility to the call of recognition
that solicits existence, to that primary dependency on a language
we never made in order to acquire a tentative ontological status.49
Since, as Butler sustains, there is no protection possible against lan-

guage vulnerability or, in other words, against our dependency on the
recognition by others through language to acquire an ontological sta-
tus, the interpellation (even if in absentia) of Joss through the female
pronoun calls him into social existence through a gender identity with
which he does not publicly identify.
This act of violence, the same that trans* people are constantly sub-
jected to in numerous events of their daily lives, presents itself again in
the novel through the medicalized discourse connected with the doctor,
and acknowledged both by the registrar and the funeral director. When
Dr. Krishnamurty arrives to check Joss’s corpse and finishes unwrap-
ping the bandages around his chest, she is surprised to find female
breasts and, after a further inspection, female genitals. She then pulls
out her “emergency red pen” from her doctor’s bag and crosses out
“male” from the certificate:
She crossed “male” out and wrote “female” in her rather bad doc-
tor’s handwriting. She looked at the word “female” and thought
94 Chapter 2
it wasn’t quite clear enough. She crossed that out, tutting to her-
self, and printed “female” in large childish letters. (Trumpet, 44)
Dr. Krishnamurty, through a different linguistic register than Sophie’s,

attempts to rationalize the trans* narrative she is witnessing and, to
make it more legible, she does not only forcefully erase what she cannot
fully comprehend but symbolically recurs to an unambiguous “childish”
handwriting to “correct the wrong.” As she attempts to scientifically cat-
egorize what she has witnessed, she furthermore inevitably construes
Joss’s narrative as a “descent” from rationality into instinctiveness, thus
stabilizing (Halberstam) such a narrative by making it strange, with Joss
metamorphosing from man to woman, to animal, according to a process
that others him by abjecting him to the idea and ideal of the Western
cogito: “. . . it was not just a body to her. It was a man, a person. . . .
she . . . closed the door on the dead woman. The last thing she saw
before the door had closed completely was the bandage lying curled on
the bed like a snake” (Trumpet, 43–44; emphasis added).50
When the registrar Mohammed Nassar Sharif arrives and sets him-
self to issue the death certificate to Millie, he is dismayed by what he
sees on the certificate written by Dr. Krishnamurty:
But Mohammed Nassar Sharif had never in his life seen a med-
ical certificate where male was crossed out and female entered
in red. On the grounds of pure aesthetics, Mohammed found
the last minute change hurtful. The use of the red pen seemed
unnecessarily violent. (Trumpet, 77)
Still governed by a sort of aseptic medical (and as such institutionalized)

register, suggested by the emotional distance indicated by the expression
“on the ground of pure aesthetics,” Sharif recognizes nevertheless the
violence (which he deems unnecessary) of the use of the red pen and of
the crossing out of a term meant to define, and as such circumscribe,
only to replace it with another label representing yet another limiting
epistemic category. When Millie opens up to him, revealing that Joss
would have liked to be remembered in death the way he was in life,
he ticks the box “female,” but he writes down the name “Joss Moody,”
instead of Joss’s birth name Josephine Moore. Constrained by a jurid-
ical frame of reference, Sharif cannot state something that is (legally)
unrecognized, yet he empathizes with Joss’s story and that of his widow,
leaving, for what he can, a certain margin of maneuverability.
Finally, the red pen returns in the funeral director’s narrative. A spe-
cialist in disguise who has mastered the art of turning even the most
distressed looking dead person into a serene one, Albert Holding can-
not acknowledge, let alone accept, Joss’s corpse since there is nothing
that his craftsmanship can do to “fix it.” He thus wishes he had the
“satisfaction of brutally and violently obliterating ‘male’ and inserting
‘female’ in bold, unequivocal red, then at least he would have some-
thing to do” (Trumpet, 112–13). Again, the violence symbolized by the
red pen returns as unnecessary in the narrative, since it barely rep-
resents—as it is often the case with transphobic violence—a response
to an irrational fear and the failure to understand, which prompts the
need to “fix” things, to make them right, according to a logic satu-
rated with preconceived ideas of a gender duality and of “acceptable”
forms of behavior that leave uncompromised the ontological stability
and unity of the universal subject. Still incredulous, Holding tries to
understand the situation before disclosing the truth about Joss’s female
biology to Colman, who reacts with shock and anger. If, during the
whole process Holding refers to Joss with the male personal pronoun
and then switches to the female one once he discovers Joss’s ana-
tomical sex, he ends his narrative by returning to the male pronoun,
which perhaps indicates his eventual acknowledgement of Joss’s public
gender identity:
All of his working life he has assumed that what made a man a
man and a woman a woman was the differing sexual organs. Yet
today, he had a woman who persuaded him, even dead, that he
was a man, once he had his clothes on. (Trumpet, 115; empha-
sis added)
Dealing with material bodies throughout his career, Holding’s percep-

tion of gender identity has always been one stemming from the neat
distinction between anatomical sexes, yet Joss’s story deeply alters his
perspective. His idea that dead people are often interested by sudden
change at the moment of death finally enables him to recognize the
complexity of gender belonging as a fact not only of life but also of
death.
Throughout the novel the character who changes the most is Joss’s
son Colman. Shocked and angered at first by the view of his father’s
naked body in the funeral parlor, which gives him the impression that
his whole life has been based on a lie (again the construction of trans*
96 Chapter 2
life as a deception), he starts accepting Joss’s story and the message that
he entrusts to him only as the narrative progresses. Despite the trou-
bled father-son relationship, it is in fact to Colman that Joss leaves the
“final word” on his story because he recognizes him as the only one who
is capable of eventually putting the pieces back together: “I thought to
myself, who could make sense of all this? Then I thought of you. I am
leaving myself to you” (Trumpet, 277), writes Joss in a letter to Colman.
As I will explain in the last section, Joss and Colman share a history of
displacement and of shifting identity belonging through the change of
their names.
As the story evolves, the reader understands that the reason behind
their troubled relationship is, in reality, a shared yet misunderstood deep
love. If Joss always challenges his son because he wants him to find
what makes him feel passionate and eventually excel in life, thus proba-
bly burdening him with excessive expectations, Colman, who venerates
his father, always feels like he is never good enough for him: “I wanted
him to be proud of me as a man, as a black man. I fucking worshipped
him” (Trumpet, 49). The language of Colman’s narrative is the one that
most approximates the features of the spoken language (it is mostly a
result of a series of interviews and meetings he has with Sophie) and
encapsulates also a number of swear words representing his altered
state of mind as he struggles with anger in coping with the situation.
Additionally, Colman’s language may indicate his attempt to embody a
certain type of masculinity, of Black masculinity more precisely, which
performatively uses certain elements to corroborate itself (e.g., swear
words and a certain attitude meant to conform with the ideal of how
a masculine man should behave and, at times, sexist and homophobic
remarks).51 As a Black man adopted by an interracial couple (White Mil-
lie and Black Joss), Colman is portrayed as struggling with the question
of origins, feeling that, unlike his father who embraced a Scottish iden-
tity, he could not belong anywhere: “But I didn’t feel Scottish. Didn’t
feel English either. Didn’t feel anything. My heart is a fucking stone”
(Trumpet, 51).52 This perception, which I will explore in more details in
the last section, is exacerbated when Colman discovers the truth about
his father’s sexuality and starts questioning his own:
I never fancied boys; no. I’ve always been one hundred per cent
heterosexual, except for those times when I was about sixteen
and my mates and me would have a joint and a communal wank
. . . . It was just a phase. (Trumpet, 57)
Colman’s self-doubt about his sexuality is clear in his use of the reit-
eration “no” after the use of “never” when negating his presumed
homosexuality, and by the defensive statement that the communal
masturbation with his friends (that could be read as a homoerotic act)
was just a phase, thus endorsing the Freudian interpretation accord-
ing to which homosexual inclinations were acceptable as long as they
represented only a phase in the “natural” sexual development toward
heterosexuality.53
Since Colman elevated his father to the role model of Black mascu-
linity that he himself wants to embody, he is at a loss to discover Joss’s
female anatomical sex and experiences a sort of epistemological crisis.
In this context he subverts the typical assumption, rooted in cissexual
privilege, that only trans* people “pass” and that, for example, does not
make us consider as passing the daily attempts of cissexual men and
women to appear more masculine and feminine, respectively, by adopt-
ing specific behavior, choosing particular pieces of clothing, wearing
makeup, and so on.54 In what could be considered an attempt to pass as
masculine, to confirm his manhood in the momentary loss of stability
followed by the acknowledgment of having molded his own masculinity
on a trans* parent, Colman starts reflecting on how, after his father’s
death, his penis seems to be bigger and harder, and producing more
seminal fluid (Trumpet, 140). This perception occurs as he masturbates
thinking about having sex “full of cruelty and sleaze” (Trumpet, 140)
with Sophie, an act that represents not only a revenge against her but
also a reassurance of his own manhood, which in patriarchal and sexist
cultures is usually affirmed through the male domination of women.55
While he still mainly refers to his father with the masculine personal
pronoun “he,” Colman systematically switches to the feminine one
every time he thinks about his father’s body or his nakedness. Anatomic
details—“tits . . . dick . . . pussy . . . balls” (Trumpet, 61)—continue to
flash through his mind as he linguistically others his father, expelling
him further away from his self: “Imagine . . . a programme about fathers/
mothers, tranny parents or whatever the fuck you’d call them” (Trum-
pet, 61; emphasis added). Colman tries to find a label for his father to
make sense of him during the epistemological crisis he is undergoing,
while simultaneously othering him through a linguistic construction
based on an us-them dichotomy.
The focus on trans* people’s genitals or body parts serves as a form
of objectification—or “trans-objectification” in Serano’s terms—since
it not only reduces trans* people to the status of things but also keeps
98 Chapter 2
them fixed in their assigned sex, hence construing their identified gen-
der as something unachievable.56
Furthermore, the estrangement in language, most obvious in the
sentence “he was a woman” that confounds the very grammar of the
heteronormative narrative, is even stronger when Colman recalls the
exact time he saw the naked body of his father in the funeral parlor:
“But that look is still in my head now. . . . the image of my father in
a woman’s body. Like some pervert. Some psycho. I imagine him now
smearing lipstick on a mirror before he died. . . . ‘Freak’s the word’ ”
(Trumpet, 62–64). Stereotypical images of trans* people start flickering
through his mind as he trivializes (according to Halberstam’s terminol-
ogy) the image of his father in the act of smearing lipstick on a mirror.
Even when he thinks about the loving looks his parents exchanged
when he was a child, he cannot help but comment: “My mother got into
a double bed every night for the past thirty odd years and slept with my
father, a woman. . . . that’s completely out of order. . . . No man wants
a fucking lesbian for his father” (Trumpet, 66).
Colman’s language reflects the crumbling of his certainties as he
struggles with heteronormative categories fixed in language (i.e., mother
or father, woman or man, heterosexual woman or lesbian, etc.) to find
a language that could encapsulate his lived experience and that of his
family members. Later on, while he is telling Sophie about the shaving
brush he received from his father—who cherished the male ritual of
shaving so much as to pass it on to his son (a ritual that Colman associ-
ates with his father’s need to perform his masculinity to compensate for
the lack of a penis)—it dawns on Colman that reality was perhaps much
simpler than he thought: “He bought him a shaving brush because he
needed a shaving brush. Isn’t that all there was to it? Does he need to go
through his whole life working out his father’s motives for every fuck-
ing thing?” (Trumpet, 123). Still confused, he slowly starts appreciating
that masculine and feminine traits are not completely sealed off from
each other (something that reflects Baldwin’s conception of androgyny
as a fundamental component of every human being explored in the
previous chapter) and, in the process, he not only recognizes Sophie’s
plot, which he defines “Operation Transvestite” (Trumpet, 142), but
also acknowledges his father’s projected manhood, asking Sophie to
stop messing about with the “he/she” matter and start using the male
pronoun “he” instead.
In this context, a central episode is represented by the memory of a
conversation about sex he had with his father, when he was younger.
The memory of his inquisitive self continuously asking his father about
his sexual relationship with his mother and especially of the passionate
way his father used to talk about it, surprises Colman, who says:
My father never got a leg over. Had a hard-on. My father was

never tossed off. He never stuck it up, or rammed it in, never
split his seed, never had a blow job. What did he have down his
pants? A cunt—is that it? Or did he wear a dildo? Shit. If he
did, he would have rammed it in, I promise you. (Trumpet, 169)
If closer to the end of the novel Colman starts recognizing feminine

features in his father that he had not noticed before, thus acknowledg-
ing the impossibility to fix identity (even sexual identity) and fit it into
neatly separated boxes, the recognition of his father’s manhood as unre-
lated to the specific fact of having a penis remains a central part of his
narrative, recognizing that masculine and feminine traits and behaviors
reside and manifest themselves across all bodies.
Similarly, his mother Millie recognizes Joss’s projected masculinity
and throughout the novel refers to him with the male pronoun, except
for a dream she has in which both she and Joss cross dress, which
ends with the potential killing of a female young Joss by a male adult
Joss (Trumpet, 96), as if suggesting—in Millie’s mind (which, as I will
demonstrate in the next section, is partly attached to a desire for the
normative)— the definite passage from one gender embodiment to
the other.
Stranded Beyond (Straight) Time and Language
Millie’s narrative is the one keeping the “tempo” around which all the
other stories about Joss are weaved together, thus tracing the main tem-
poral shifts within the novel. Together with Joss’s (en)trance into music
and his consequent experience of a misaligned temporality, her narra-
tive is the one that most approximates the use of the queer tidalectics
paradigm. In fact, it does not follow a chronological order but is char-
acterized by a continuous washing on each other of past and present;
it mainly unravels following Joss’s perceived gender identity as opposed
to the one that a cissexist society would ascribe to him based on his
anatomical sex; and employs water and aquatic imagery as a way of
emphasizing a cyclical temporality, the continuous changes Millie and
100 Chapter 2
other characters go through, and her emotional response to the things

she does or conjures up, especially her relationship with Joss.
As the reader keeps on going back and forth through time following
the resurfacing of her memories and her present actions, s/he starts
noticing that, just like Joss “diving” into music, her memories and
emotions—especially, as I mentioned, the ones that are connected with
Joss—are expressed through aquatic connotations. While she ponders
over the transformations she has gone through and over her current
mourning the loss of her beloved, she narrates: “The girl I was has
been swept out to sea. She is another tide entirely” (Trumpet, 8). Her
memory of “combing” the beach in search of strange seashells as a
girl soon metamorphoses in that of “one of the few feminine things he
[Joss] did” (Trumpet, 8): combing her hair in downward strokes that, in
turn, reflects Millie’s actual physical descent as she is walking down a
path toward the sea in Torr. Again, her memories and her present action
mix and cross-fertilize each other, transporting her into an alternative
temporality made of echoes and returns that amplify her emotional
response to the events. In this context, the reference to the comb (as
in the expression “combing the beach”) represents another intertex-
tual reference to Lasirèn or Ezili of the Waters since, together with the
trumpet, it constitutes one of the attributes of the water spirit.57 This
symbol, through its association with the cyclical temporality and the
materiality of water, as well as with the fluidity of gender expression
pertaining to the water deities known as Mami Wata across the Atlantic
diasporic world, emphasizes both the shifts in memory and in gender
identity as it prepares the narrative for the account of Joss’s and Millie’s
life together and of their mutual (queer) desire.
In fact, when Millie remembers her lovemaking with Joss, she
describes it as a sort of submersion: “We go down into our other world,
till we are both drowning in each other, coming up suddenly gasping
for air and going back down again” (Trumpet, 31), somehow recalling
the underwater environment of Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room explored in
the previous chapter. The fluidity of water, and especially its changing
potential, is what characterizes the relationship between her and Joss
as they keep on “diving” in music and in love with each other, accepting
constant metamorphosis in their life and thriving on it. This memory of
their lovemaking occurs while Millie is walking down the path toward
the sea in Torr. The rain makes the path slippery and makes her wish
of stumbling and falling into the sea that appears to her as if “moaning
like a sick person” (Trumpet, 9), thus mirroring her pain and somehow
soothing it, reminding her of both her love for Joss and the capacity and
necessity to keep on changing and adapting as a survival strategy. Millie
recognizes that the process of mourning her beloved makes time strange
to her, as if it is on the other side of her, “out across the sea” (Trumpet,
3), not ruling her anymore. Similarly, in the last days of Joss’s life, she
remembers that their relationship with time (linear, chrononormative,
or “straight” time) had completely altered:
Time is strange for both of us. We have our time now . . . . He
can feel me and I can feel him. We don’t use words any more.
He can’t speak and I can’t either. We have gone beyond words.
Out there—stranded, beyond time and language. (Trumpet, 97–
98; emphasis added)
The lack of words, of a language with which to express themselves is,

again, rendered with an adjective pertaining to the semantic field of
water. Figuratively meaning to leave helpless, the term “stranded” ety-
mologically indicates the expression “to drive aground on a shore.”58
Kay’s decision to use the adjective “stranded” is thus instructive, since
on one hand it reflects the impossibility to render certain affective
experiences (both the depth of her love and her pain) linguistically,
which reduces, albeit for different reasons, both individuals to aphonia.
On the other hand, it suggests the articulation of those affects in an
alternative temporality and through a different code of communica-
tion, which results unintelligible (as aphonia) to those who, to draw
on Luce Irigaray’s words, have their ears “so clogged with meaning(s),
that they are closed to what does not in some way echo the already
heard.”59 Hence, when language fails and verbalization becomes impos-
sible, the turn to water, in its connection with deeply felt emotions,
represents a tool to establish a counterdiscourse. Beyond the violence
of language inherent both in its ability to categorize and in its potential
to disclose secrets, Joss and Millie turn as well to the sensory realm
(beyond language) that, just like “naked jazz,” cannot lie and thus
constitutes the promise of their relationship. It represents the oppor-
tunity to leave behind definitions and just feel, as when Joss makes
Millie feel “possessed” (Trumpet, 36) or when his hand rests “posses-
sive” on her hip (Trumpet, 196), expressions that, stratified and fixed
in language, would connote a masculine behavior (e.g., possession or
domination) but that can naturally interest everybody regardless of their
gender identity.
102 Chapter 2
As I mentioned earlier on, Millie is the one who always refers to Joss
with the masculine personal pronoun and, despite the persistent arrival
of letters sent by Sophie—in which the journalist continues to mis-
gender Joss—and her encounter both with the doctor and the registrar
(with the ensuing discourse around Joss’s anatomy), she cannot change
the image she has of Joss as her husband, her lover. Hence, when she
looks at some of his photographs, she ponders:
I find myself looking at these pictures trying to see him differ-

ently. But I can’t. Age made the biggest difference . . . . That’s
all I can see. I can’t stare at these pictures and force myself to
see “this person who is obviously a woman, once you know”—
according to some reports. I can’t see her. . . . I can’t change
him. I can see his lips . . . . Him leaning over me, kissing me
softly with his lips. All over my face. His dark full lips. (Trum-
pet, 100)
Millie wants to show, through her memories and her current reflec-
tions, the ordinariness of her life with Joss, its normalcy and beauty.
She refuses to define and categorize him into neatly separated boxes:
the only differences she can see are the inevitable signs of the passing
of time, and everything else pertains to a matter of mere standpoint,
depending on how people decide to look and feel. Her aim is to restore
the full picture of their life together untouched by sociocultural
influences: a life made of love, intimacy, complicit looks, but also of
arguments and misunderstandings, in short a life in all its complexity
and with all its contradictions. A life that is very much real and far from
being the lie or deception that Sophie and other journalists want peo-
ple to believe it is. With all the attention from the press, Millie craves
ordinariness, something that is particularly evident in the stroll she has
around Torr when she arrives there at the beginning of the novel. She
stops by an Italian café where the owner, Mrs. Dalsasso, is described
as being “. . . the first one to make me feel like an ordinary widow,
to give me respect not prurience” (Trumpet, 24).60 Then she visits the
butcher before stopping at the vegetable shop and, when a fisherman
waves at her, she ponders: “The simplicity of the gesture cheers me”
(Trumpet, 26). In contrast with this representation we keep on encoun-
tering Sophie’s attempts to construe the story as a lie, and portray it as
a spectacle: she tells Colman that with her book she is trying to explain
the “phenomenon” (Trumpet, 212) of his father. Hence, we see, on one

hand, Millie trying to mourn the death of her husband in her everyday
life in Torr and, on the other, the biased reconstruction of events in the
interviews Sophie is conducting for her book. When interviewing Joss’s
old schoolfriend May Hart, Sophie misinterprets the woman’s tears
(due to the fact that she was in love with Joss and missing him) and
writes in her notes, “May Hart was so upset at the deception of her old
schoolfriend that she burst into tears” (Trumpet, 252).
The attempt to construct trans* people’s lives as a lie or a decep-
tion by representing them as hidden secrets or as elaborated illusions
has been defined by Serano with the term “trans-mystification.”61 Sim-
ilarly Halberstam notes the abundance of terms, such as “eccentric,”
“double,” “duplicitous,” “deceptive,” “odd,” and “self-hating,” in the
narrativization of these stories, “as if other lives—gender normative
lives—were not odd, not duplicitous, not double and contradictory at
every turn.”62
In her novel Kay avoids rationalizing the story of Joss Moody and, in
order not to violate it, she rather offers it to the readers in the “glory
of all [its] contradictions,” to use Halberstam’s words.63 Well aware of
the “great danger in the business of labelling,”64 Kay refuses to pinpoint
identity and leaves it open and in flux. Millie’s reflections in the novel
are instructive in this sense:
My life is up for grabs. No doubt they will call me a lesbian. They

will find words to put on to me. Words that don’t fit me. Words
that don’t fit Joss. They will call him names. (Trumpet, 154)
Millie’s anxiety over being given a name is a concern about fixing

identity, about producing and freezing it in space and time. As Butler
sustains, the act of interpellation is not descriptive but inaugurative.65
Therefore, it does not simply tell us something about someone, but
brings that someone into social existence, both constituting that indi-
vidual as a subject (in space and time) and subjected (or subordinate)
to the person who proffers such interpellation in the process. In other
words, by being called a certain name we are given ontological status
(and Butler emphasizes how someone who is named, thus brought into
existence, acquires, in turn, the ability to name somebody else), but we
also become dependent on that interpellation, our identity sedimented
in time through reiteration.
104 Chapter 2
A conception of identity as a process, as something in flux, susceptible

to constant change is instead what Kay offers throughout her novel as
an antidote to linguistic vulnerability. In Trumpet, more specifically, Kay
provides a model to rethinking trans* narratives as “an aesthetic event
of transformation—as a mode of individuation that escapes the narra-
tive captures of subjectivity, autobiography, and various hermeneutics of
diagnosis and instead extends the body through time towards change.”66
Through her (Black) queer aesthetics, Kay shows us what happens if we
refuse to be ruled by a “straight time,” with reference not only to gender
identity but also to race, family, and reproduction, thus rejecting—or at
least working on and against it, thus disidentifying with—(hetero)nor-
mative patterns and de-essentialize ourselves.67
“Make it up and trace it back”: De-essentializing the Self
Trumpet begins and ends with an image connected with the sea. It
opens with an epigraph quoting the 1937 jazz song “They Can’t Take
That Away From Me”—written by George Gershwin and performed for
the first time by Fred Astaire in the film Shall We Dance (1937) on
the foggy deck of the ferry from New Jersey to Manhattan (US)—and
ends with the image of Millie about to meet her son Colman at the
Torr harbor in Scotland (Europe), “where the fishing boats pondered
on the water” (Trumpet, 278). If the first image represents a departure
with a promise of love despite the distance, the ending of the novel
portraits a reunion, as Millie is able to rekindle her relationship with
her son. By connecting both sides of the Atlantic through the reference
to New Jersey’s and Torr’s harbors and through the theme of departure
and reunion (which takes place over, or close to, the water), the novel
adopts a peculiar diasporic aesthetics that rejects essentializing concep-
tions of identity and forms of relationality based on origins and fixity
(what Glissant terms filiation), through the influence of the movement
and fluidity suggested by the aquatic element.68
When Colman insistently asks Joss about origins and expresses his
desire to hear the story of Joss’s father (hence his adoptive grandfather),
Joss tells him: “make up your own bloodline, Colman. Make it up and
trace it back. Design your family tree—what’s the matter with you? Hav-
en’t you got an imagination?” (Trumpet, 58). He then tells his son that
his grandfather could have come from Africa or from the Caribbean on
a boat, he could have been a Black American escaping segregation, a
soldier or a sailor, and that any of these stories might have been true.
Colman, frustrated by his father’s words, demands to know the truth:
It drove me mad. Which one? I said. Which one is the true?

Doesn’t matter a damn, he said. You pick. You pick the one you
like the best and that one is true. It doesn’t change me who
my father was or where he came from and it certainly doesn’t
change you, he said. (Trumpet, 59)
Joss tries to explain to his son the importance of considering identity as

an assemblage, as something that is contingent and changes over time.
His notion is deeply influenced by a diasporic aesthetics that is in line
with the widely used concept in the Black diasporic tradition of “usable
past,” which is the production, through narrative, of an otherwise irre-
trievable past, making up for the loss of history. Glissant uses the same
concept to define the last phase of Caribbean literary production: the
“passion for memory” (the other two being “acts of delusion” and “acts
of survival”) that is “compensatory and recuperative” of the loss of
history, and is characterized by the artistic imagination that counters
the common notion of history and resymbolizes it.69 As Derek Walcott
sustains:
In the Caribbean history is irrelevant, not because it is not

being created, or because it was sordid; but because it has never
mattered. What has mattered is the loss of history, the amnesia
of the races, what has become necessary is imagination, imagi-
nation as necessity, as invention.70
Imagination as invention represents a necessity both for millions of

enslaved West Africans who, transported across the Atlantic, could not
trace their roots back to their original places, and for father and son
with their stories of familial displacement. After all, Joss starts the letter
to his son telling him about his adoptive grandfather with the words:
“His story, I told you, was the diaspora. Every story runs into the same
river and the same river runs into the sea” (Trumpet, 271). Like Glis-
sant, who favors “expanse” over filiation—which is the problematic and
at times threatening relation with the other over the sacred and primor-
dial legitimacy of filial ties to the land—so Joss privileges other types
of kinships over reproductive relations of bloodlines: “My father always
told me he and I were related the way it mattered” (Trumpet, 58),
106 Chapter 2
remembers Colman. In other words, Joss uses his imagination to com-

pensate for the lack of a biological relationship between him and his
son, something that Colman can relate to and, as a consequence, can
help him understand the “missing link” between his father’s biological
sex and his gender identity. This same concept is expressed through-
out the novel through references to movement, fluidity, displacement,
diaspora, and music, the latter epitomized by the transformation of
the expression “There is music in his blood” (Trumpet, 134) into “The
music is his blood” (Trumpet, 135).
The reference to alternative familial relations is of course connected
with the issue of adoption,71 but also with nonheteronormative rela-
tionships since Millie and Joss with their son Colman manage to found
alternative queer relations that are regenerative as opposed to heter-
onormative or institutionalized reproductive ones. Despite the fact that
Millie aligns with Joss’s perceived gender identity throughout the novel,
in the early days of their marriage she accuses Joss of being unable to
give her a child, thus bringing to the fore the reproductive promise of
chrononormativity:72
I feel furious with him. Why can’t he give me a child? He can do

everything else. Walk like a man, talk like a man, blows his horn
like a man. Why can’t he get me pregnant. . . . I tell him I’m
sorry but none of it works. I have hurt his pride, I think I have
hurt his manhood. . . . I will have to let go of her, my imaginary
daughter. I feel like there is no tomorrow. I’ll be trapped in today
and never have a tomorrow. Joss doesn’t understand. He doesn’t
want a baby. He wants me. That’s all he wants. (Trumpet, 39)
In this confrontation Millie seems to be unable to accept the pos-

sibility of a life that completely diverges from chrononormative
patterns—just as David does with Giovanni in Baldwin’s Giovanni’s
Room73—and, as such, refuses to comply with regulated life rhythms
that include reproductivity; something that is clear in her association
of the lack of a biological child with the absence of a future, which
couples queer people’s lives with “waste.”74 This idea is rejected by Joss
who perceives social and familial relations in a more fluid, less institu-
tionalized way, as when he tells his son that they are related the “way it
matters” and when he even describes the guys in his bands as being part
of a big family (Trumpet, 58). Joss, nevertheless, recognizes his son’s
need to locate himself in a familial continuum and therefore decides to

tell him about his adoptive grandfather in the letter that constitutes the
chapter “Last Word.”
Joss writes to his son about how, at the turn of the century, the six-
year-old boy who would later be named John Moore arrived on the HMS
Spiteful, a ship sailing from Africa to Greenock (next to Port Glasgow in
Scotland), thanks to his father who persuaded the Scottish captain of
the ship to take the young John on board.75 The name of the ship reflects
the impression that the young boy has upon his arrival in foggy Scotland:
“The air was damp and eerie on his skin and he was freezing. Ghost coun-
try. The people and the weather shrouded in uncertainty. Shadow people,
he thought, insubstantial, no color” (Trumpet, 271). Confronted with the
white skin of Scottish people, which appeared as the “translucent skin of
a ghost” (Trumpet, 273) and with the mist all about him that prevented
him from seeing his own limbs, John thinks he has also become disem-
bodied. This transformation deeply affects him since for the rest of his life
he is unable to remember anything but fog and the taste of wet air, thus
clearly resounding with the experience of displacement through slavery:
“My own country is lost to me now,” he would say to Joss “. . . drowned at
sea in the dead of a dark, dark night” (Trumpet, 273).
The impossibility to re-member—both through memory and embod-
iment (thus recalling the Middle Passage as a process of mutilation,
dismemberment, exile, disembodiment, and even ungendering)76—
produces the necessity to create a “usable past,” something that Joss
does with his first big hit titled “Fantasy Africa,” because “every black
person has a fantasy Africa, he’d [Joss] say” (Trumpet, 34). Colman
learns that his father’s ability to play the trumpet is probably something
that he inherited from his own father John who, as a child working as a
servant for the Duncan-Brae family in Scotland, demonstrated a special
ear for music and developed a beautiful singing voice:
Mr Duncan-Brae helped my father up the steps to the carriage

and my father fell asleep to the sound of the horse’s hoof-beat
on the road. It was like percussion. It was like music he already
knew. . . . My father had a wonderful singing voice and could
sing from memory just about any folk song I wanted. Every time
he sang a Scottish folk song, he’d have this far-away look on his
face. Heil Ya Ho, boys, Let her go, boys, Swing her head round,
And all together. (Trumpet, 275)
108 Chapter 2
Although memory would somehow fail John as an adult, the music that
“is his blood” enables him to make a visceral connection with his lost
history, something that he passes on to his child. If the experience of
the Atlantic crossing and that of the life in the plantations in America
was meant as an annihilating enterprise aimed at depriving millions
of West Africans of their history, languages, and gender, music repre-
sented an opportunity to re-member what was lost.
In the plantation, as Gilroy explains, slaves were denied access not
only to literacy but also to various other forms of individual autonomy,
being allowed only few cultural opportunities as a surrogate, among
which figured music.77 In this context, and considering that linguistic
groups were usually divided to foreclose communication, thus prevent-
ing them from organizing revolts against their masters (divide et impera),
music emerged as a response to language’s loss of “referentiality and
its privileged relationship to concepts.”78 Thus, in the Black diasporic
tradition, music developed as an instrument to make connections, as a
form of relationality, in which antiphony (or call-and-response) became
one of the main features. Black vernacular cultures are hence char-
acterized by an “ethics of antiphony,” which refuses modernity’s neat
separation of knowledge into separate spheres and conceives musical
and other performances as modulated in response to the audience’s
reception. In this way, the boundary between artist and audience is
completely removed, enabling them to “collaborate in a creative process
governed by formal and informal, democratic rules.”79
What Gilroy defines as an “ethics of antiphony” is present through-
out the novel, since not only Joss’s story is modulated through the
responses offered by the people who knew him but also Kay’s own writ-
ing process is always careful to the readers’ own responses: “I make a lot
of room for my readers. When I write, I actually think about . . . creat-
ing a space that the reader can come in with their life, their experiences
. . . . I want it to be like the call and response of the blues.”80 Joss’s “last
word” to Colman through his letter follows the ethics of antiphony in
that it leaves to his son the task of making sense of his own story, thus
modulating once again the story through his son’s response to it:
Maybe you will understand, maybe you won’t. I knew you’d

come here. I knew you would come looking for stuff. I’ve left it
all for you, my letters, photographs, records, documents, certif-
icates. It is all here. Mine and your own. I sat down here this
morning all set to destroy all of this. Burn the lot. I stopped
myself. If I do that I’d literally be burning myself. I couldn’t

do that to myself, to my music. But most of all, I couldn’t do it
to you. I thought to myself, who could make sense of all this?
Then I thought of you. I am leaving myself to you. . . . It is quite
simple: all of this is my past, this is the sum of my parts; you
are my future. I will be your son now in a strange way. You will
be my father telling or not telling my story. (Trumpet, 276–77;
emphasis added)
As the ultimate act of love, Joss leaves his story to his son, thus allowing
for yet another interpretation, as he knows that meaning and identity
are created relationally. Among the documents he leaves behind for his
son, there is a portrait of John titled “Mumbo Jumbo.” The title deeply
angers Joss who sees this renaming as another act of violence against
the memory of his father whose original name was not even John Moore:
That’s the thing with us: we keep changing names. We’ve got all
that in common. We’ve changed names, you, me, my father. All
for different reasons. Maybe one day you’ll understand mine.
(Trumpet, 276)
When Josephine Moore renamed herself Joss Moody, he changed his

life, and the same happened to Colman Moody when his birth name
William Dunsmore was changed after his adoption. In fact, as a child
Colman often fantasized about how his life would have been had he kept
his original name (Trumpet, 56). This brings us back to the special place
the issue of naming and renaming occupies in Afro-diasporic cultures.
During the colonial period, colonizers used to rename the territo-
ries they occupied to signal European possession over them and their
inhabitants, and in a similar way plantation owners were accustomed
to rename their slaves with ironically pretentious names, highlighting
how “to Name is to Possess,” as Jamaica Kincaid reminds us in My
Garden (Book).81 Analogously, yet in a different context, Kay returns on
this issue in Trumpet when she describes the moment Joss and Millie
decide the name for their son. As the two are pondering over a possible
name, Millie starts making jokes about jazz musicians’ names causing
Joss’s angered reaction, who slaps her across the face and admonishes:
“ ‘That’s enough’ . . . . ‘White people always laugh at black names’ ”
(Trumpet, 5). Against the imposition of a name or identity, within the
Black diasporic tradition of nommo represents the spiritual-physical
110 Chapter 2
energy that the word has to conjure being through naming.82 Therefore,
the naming process assumes a transformative potential, the same that
Hawkins recognizes in jazz as a trope in African American literary and
vernacular culture. Reflected in the action of “naming or nommo, self-
definition, and self-identification,” Hawkins sees how jazz musicians or
singers possess the capacity to revert the negative feeling encapsulated
in the blues they created into a positive one.83
Used widely within the Black diaspora, the concept of nommo denotes
also ancestral aquatic spirits or deities worshipped by the Dogon peo-
ple of Mali. Western African Nommo are hybrid creatures who are
described as amphibious and hermaphroditic, possessing a humanoid
upper torso with a fishlike or water snakelike tail, representing another
version of water deities also known as Mami Wata across the African
diaspora. Their story is passed on orally and performatively by the elders
through the “power of the word,” music, and dance. The Dogon elder
Ogotemmêli, for example, in conversation with the ethnologist Marcel
Griaule, describes how the Nommo are believed to be immortal, since
in their passage from death to rebirth—portrayed with the image of a
snake shedding its skin—they remember their previous existence.84
The importance of naming oneself and others is constantly reaffirmed
in Trumpet, in which the references to water, music, and orality, the
combination of male and female components, not to mention the asso-
ciation of Joss’s unwrapping his chest from the bandages with a snake
shedding its skin (which hauntingly parallels the story of the Nommo),
or the other symbols associated with Lasirèn, such as the comb and
the trumpet itself, all point to processes of transformation and fluid
conceptions of identity.
In the novel Kay celebrates the fluidity of identity as an ordinary fact
of life and marks a refusal of labeling since “once you categorise people
and define them you stop them from having the same kind of experi-
ences as so-called ‘ordinary’ people,”85 they become sorts of freaks who
are expected to live life differently according to our own projections.
In the final part of his letter to Colman, Joss evokes this ordinary
aspect of life by quoting again the verse of a song he, as a child, used
to hear his father sing: “Heil Ya Ho, boys, Let her go, boys” (Trumpet,
277)— a Gaelic song from the 1930s titled “Mingulay Boat Song,”
which describes the collective work of sailors to pull the boat around
and sail it back home to Mingulay. A combination of music and aquatic
imagery, the song presents Joss’s final departure in death as a return,
with the image of the circular and constant return of the sea waves
denoting tidalectically the simultaneity of past, present, and future in a

cyclical conception of time. As I already mentioned, the closing lines of
the book, present both a return and a reunion for Millie and Colman:
The woman walked down the hill and into the harbour. . . . Just
as she turned the bend, where the fishing boats pondered on
the water, she saw him. He was walking towards her. He moved
so like his father. A bird startled her by flying close to her head.
It seemed the bird had come right out of her. She watched it
soar right up into the sky, its wings dipping, faltering and rising
again, heard it calling and scatting in the wind. (Trumpet, 278)
As Millie and Colman see each other from a distance and are about to
meet each other by the Torr harbor, Millie is surprised by a bird that
proceeds “scatting” in the wind. If, on one hand, the word “scatting”
denotes the expression “to go away hastily, to leave at once,” on the
other it refers to an old jazz term used to describe a form of improvis-
ing sounds, as the jazz singer pronounces random words or phrases of
nonsensical words.86 Again, through the fluid idiom of jazz, both impro-
visation and variation on the theme are reintroduced in the narrative,
anticipating yet another change in Joss’s story and in its legacy not only
to Colman and Millie but also to the reader. By drawing on the fluidity
of jazz and the aquatic imagery recalling the Black diaspora, Kay crafts
a language that constantly establishes difference and avoids fixation
in a process of continuous creation and recreation of individual and
collective identities that transcend biological, social, gender, racial, and
sexual boundaries. As Jacqui Alexander reminds us:
We have recognized each other before. Blood flows, making a

mockery of biology, of boundaries—within individuals, within
families, within neighborhoods. One drop of blood is not suf-
ficient to mark where one line begins and the other ends.
Boundaries are never discrete.87
In refusing to be bounded, the language of Trumpet rejects the violence

inherent in monolithic, truth claiming, and appropriating accounts, to
celebrate, through a polyphonic narration, the multiplicity, ambiguity,
and contradiction that are part and parcel of our lives.

Waves of Sound, Gender, Fluidity and Shifting Kingships

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Waves of Sound, Gender, Fluidity and Shifting Kingships

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Northwestern University Press

Book Title: Queer Tidalectics

Waves of Sound, Gender

Identity is a river—­a process.

This bodily memory reflecting their strong relationship reminds Mil-

“I’m not finished,” he says. He keeps unwrapping endless rolls

128), or “phenomenon” (Trumpet, 212). Alternatively, as I contend in

Variations on a Theme: Water, Jazz, and Fluid Identity

Trumpet is inspired by the life story of Billy Tipton, a White Ameri-

I just happened by chance to be reading in a newspaper . . .

someone actually not just dressing up as a man or woman or as

Intrigued by William Tipton’s response concerning his father and by the

I wanted to tell a story, the same story, from several points of

Kay’s polyphonic narration thus follows the rhythm and structure of

semantic transposition of the language of jazz to express a fluid con-

as fluid, as a form of becoming, capable of creating new modalities of

gender identity “off-­beat” in a certain sense, which is following alterna-

He can’t stop himself changing. Running changes. Changes

As Joss keeps on changing all the time, language itself undergoes a

Joss symbolically unwraps himself of the different layers of his iden-

If woman has always functioned “within” the discourse of man,

which annihilates its specific energy and diminishes or stifles its

Female writing “explodes” the rigid mold of phallogocentrism just as

She doesn’t hold still, she overflows. An outpouring that can be

blackness functioned as a site for an elaboration of gender in

establishing symbolic order. Its symbolic order, which is simply

“He was a woman,” or On Linguistic Vulnerability

First appearing in Virginia Woolf ’s Orlando: A Biography (1928), the

after her metamorphosis Orlando nonchalantly “looked himself up and

For Woolf, the “sex change” is a portion of the “continuous”

As Crawford suggests, the juxtaposition of trumpets pealing the truth

it occurred to me that, rather than simply removing the gen-

That one comes to “be” through a dependency on the Other—­an

Since, as Butler sustains, there is no protection possible against lan-

Dr. Krishnamurty, through a different linguistic register than Sophie’s,

Still governed by a sort of aseptic medical (and as such institutionalized)

Dealing with material bodies throughout his career, Holding’s percep-

My father never got a leg over. Had a hard-­on. My father was

If closer to the end of the novel Colman starts recognizing feminine

Stranded Beyond (Straight) Time and Language

other characters go through, and her emotional response to the things

The lack of words, of a language with which to express themselves is,

I find myself looking at these pictures trying to see him differ-

the “phenomenon” (Trumpet, 212) of his father. Hence, we see, on one

My life is up for grabs. No doubt they will call me a lesbian. They

Millie’s anxiety over being given a name is a concern about fixing

A conception of identity as a process, as something in flux, susceptible

“Make it up and trace it back”: De-­essentializing the Self

It drove me mad. Which one? I said. Which one is the true?

Joss tries to explain to his son the importance of considering identity as

In the Caribbean history is irrelevant, not because it is not

Imagination as invention represents a necessity both for millions of

remembers Colman. In other words, Joss uses his imagination to com-

I feel furious with him. Why can’t he give me a child? He can do

In this confrontation Millie seems to be unable to accept the pos-

need to locate himself in a familial continuum and therefore decides to

Mr Duncan-­Brae helped my father up the steps to the carriage

Maybe you will understand, maybe you won’t. I knew you’d

myself. If I do that I’d literally be burning myself. I couldn’t

When Josephine Moore renamed herself Joss Moody, he changed his

denoting tidalectically the simultaneity of past, present, and future in a

We have recognized each other before. Blood flows, making a

Identity is a river—a process.

gender identity “off-beat” in a certain sense, which is following alterna-

That one comes to “be” through a dependency on the Other—an

My father never got a leg over. Had a hard-on. My father was

“Make it up and trace it back”: De-essentializing the Self

Mr Duncan-Brae helped my father up the steps to the carriage