"A Place Where the Defiant Lived”
Agency, power and “personal freedom” in Ian Strachan’s Blind Days
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15362/ijbs.v32i1.605Keywords:
Bahamian literature, Black Jezebel trope, Slavery - Bahamas - History - 19th centuryAbstract
Using the rape, imprisonment and torture of Kate, the central character in Ian Strachan’s Blind Days, and scholarship examining slavery’s destruction of Black kinship ties, this essay critiques power dynamics on the Great Hope Plantation in Crooked Island, Bahamas. Examined through Orlando Patterson’s classification of freedom and Epictetus’s notion of human will, Kate’s imprisonment is framed as a liberating act. Her rebellion is linked to John Boy’s repeated escapes and Harriet’s attempted infanticide to posit that such subversive acts allowed these characters to retain their personhood and achieve psychological freedom despite their enslavement. This paper further examines how stereotypes regarding Black hypersexuality and the trope of the Black Jezebel were employed to justify the rape of enslaved girls like Kate, arguing that since the law refused to protect them from sexual exploitation, while also making them responsible for their own violation, it enacted a double violence on such women.
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