Backadabush : Journey Within as "Rattling the Cage" in Ian Strachan's God's Angry Babies

Certainly, I feel that my personal, political, social, even religious views and ideas would frighten and shock many Bahamians. I try to be true to those ideas and principles. But many probably see me as a rebel without a clue. I try to speak the truth. That message has not reached the majority of my people yet. I anticipate that when it does, then perhaps there will be some rattling of the cage.

—Ian Strachan (interview with Niyi Afolabi)

A brave postcolonial voice has just emerged from the Bahamas. And the above quote, taken from my personal interview with the author on that fascinating Island where everyone seems to know each other, reveals the complexity and urgency of this voice. It is a culturally rooted voice whose "discovery" needs to be contextualized. In December of 1997, I was attending the Modern Language Association meeting in Toronto when I suddenly ran into a modest young man whom I had never met before. In fact, it was my first spiritual connection with the Caribbean side of our cultural patrimony. It was a chance encounter that turned out to be destined, somehow. Just looking at Ian Strachan's enigmatic and smiling face made me feel some magical connection, perhaps just sheer kinship, but it was more than that. I felt as if I had met him before somewhere in Africa, in the nameless streets that he describes in his brave new book, God's Angry Babies. Ian passed me a copy of the advance information of his forthcoming book and the title struck me very emotionally. I wondered who these God's children are and why they could be angry? I pondered who could dare to make God's children angry and why? And what are God's angry babies doing about their plight? I could not wait to get my hand on the book when it finally came out, and the rest is history. I not only included the book on my list for a new course I taught in the fall semester of 1998 on Africana autobiography; I also presented a paper based on the book at the First International Conference on Caribbean literature at the author's graceful Island where I also had the opportunity to interview him. This article is an offshoot of that paper; it is both a celebration of that chance encounter through the analysis of God's Angry Babies as well as a transcription of my interview(s) with Ian Strachan.

Insularity, identity, and hybridity are some of the recurrent concerns of the Caribbean discourse. While these issues combine to address the poetics of "Caribbeanness," they often remain at the level of theorizing or discursive visions of difference, multiculturalism, and alienation. In this reality of marginality, the "voice," be it authorial or narrative, tends to be conditioned by the contextual specificity and paradoxes of the Caribbean experience as Edouard Glissant postulates in Caribbean Discourse. Bahamian literature especially has remained little known outside of the Island. It is a booming literature that combines resiliency with humor, preservation of African oral traditions and cultural practices through revival of folktales and proverbial use of language, as well as a concern for the Bahamian identity and future through political satire and self-representation; thus it is puzzling why such a rich window into the Caribbean experience remains marginalized in the Caribbean literary canon as a whole.

This study argues that the autobiographical text is a viable alternative to historical narratives in that it subverts the Caribbean cultural specificity while offering awindow onto the complex world of individual and collective experiences from the viewpoint of a witness of conscience. Strachan's God's Angry Babies is a "journey within" in both a personal and political sense. In following the rites of passage of Tree Bodie, Strachan provides the reader with the internal struggles...