Editor’s Note: More Black Diaspora Literature of the 20th Century can be found here: [ https://KaleidoscopeSoup.com/Black-Diaspora-Literature ]

Within Jackie Kay’s collection of poetry The Adoption Papers she presents a text that utilizes three different fonts to represent the three dominant voices; each voice is represented by a font, each font assuming the voice of one of the three females (in addition to a few other social voices, including an adoption agent and a desk clerk). The predominant voices within the text are a “birth mother,” an “adoptive mother” and an “adopted daughter.” The voices are “distinguished” through variations in typography; for the daughter, Kay adopts a Palatino typeface; for the adoptive mother she issues a Gill typeface, and for the birth mother Kay distinguishes her by using a Bodoni typeface (Kay 8). The fonts that the poet uses separate the voices in a way that Chris Dobbish describes as “egalitarian” in nature, suggesting that while the fonts are visibly different, one font is not greater than the other fonts. (It is not my intention to enter into a discussion about the multifaceted and intersecting histories of fonts at this point in time). The visual similarities that exist between the adoptive mother’s typeface and the Birth mother’s typeface are, at some points within Kay’s text, indistinguishable from one another.