Themes Of Belonging And Citizenship In A Woman Without A Country

My thesis project will look at themes of belonging and citizenship in the poetry of Jackie Kay and Eavan Boland, a Scottish and Irish poet, respectively. I plan to examine those themes in terms of race, gender, and nationality. I plan to look closely at the poems within A Woman Without a Country to discuss the ways Boland grapples with concepts of identity, belonging, and citizenship, and how those are affected by gender and nationality. Kay’s collection, The Adoption Papers, explores what it means to be Scottish, what it means to be a lesbian, and what it means to be a woman, and how those identities work with and conflict with her identity as a poet.
There is scholarly work that examines nationality, belonging, and citizenship in an Irish