“If you’re riding a bike along a highway and you get close to a truck, its slipstream will pull you along effortlessly. But if you try to cross its wake, the turbulence can upend you; it can destroy you.”
— Rachel Manley, explaining the title of her book, Slipstream, A Daughter Remembers
When Rachel Manley says she’s an unextraordinary person who was born into an extraordinary family, she’s being diffident in the extreme. She has published three books of poetry and was awarded the Governor Generals of Canada Award and a Bunting Fellowship for her first work of prose, Drumblair, a memoir of growing up with her grandparents in their Kingston home. Of her second prose work, Slipstream, reviewer Michael Prescod wrote: “More than any other Jamaican book I know, [it] will unquestionably still be being devoured a century from [now].”
The first time I met Rachel I was surprised by how tiny she was. Her sharp features, delicate fingers and slouching posture; the detail with which she recounted every story of her life; and her voice — at once assertive and plaintiff and demanding — suggested a woman of many contradictions. At that meeting she asked me if I loved her. I was 22, and no number of stories about this woman who was my godmother could have prepared me for that question. I know her better now, and can take wryly her insatiable need to be loved unconditionally. It’s the way only a parent can love; and the fact that her father Michael Manley was never that kind of parent, probably accounts for the perennially uprooted quality of Manley’s life (she has been married three times, and lived for extended periods in four countries), as well as for what seems at times her inconsolable grief.
A recurring subject in conversation with Manley — it’s the main theme of Slipstream, as, it would seem, of her life — is the agony of feeling herself belonging to a father who always belonged to someone or something else: the newspaper, the trade union, the country, the girlfriend, the wives. Rachel’s mother was the first, and when that marriage ended — the couple was living in England at the time — the two-year-old was shipped off to Jamaica, to her famous politically and culturally engaged grandparents. Of that time, Manley has said it was “Camelotian and magic . . . We lived in a world larger than life. It was a world lit by perpetual energy and wonder.”
In 1955, Norman W. Manley, Rachel’s grandfather, became Jamaica’s Chief Minister, her father Michael soon remarried, and Rachel was sent away to boarding school in Manchester, Jamaica. It was there, she says, that she discovered the solace of creative writing. “I learned to reach into my memory and pull out things that I loved and missed. I learned the art of patience and the second-thoughtedness of distance. I learned that from far away I could beam a long light.”
Drumblair is a charming and loving account of Rachel Manley’s years with her grandparents. It is the closest she would come to having a normal life. In her grandparents’ home, she found such shelter as she could from the intensity and dishevelment of her relationship with a father who came and went between marriages, “like the cadence of the swells between one giant wave and another.”
Manley early learnt to fear the appearance on the scene of the next rival for her father’s affections. The following episode from Slipstream sets the stage for what has been a lifetime of such perceived experiences. The child narrator is in the sea with her father.
“Oh, ho, ho,” he [Michael] shouts over my head, and I think this is because he’s proud of me, but then I see he’s calling to a woman on the shore. “Here we are,” as though she . . . whoever she is, is his city, and he the explorer who sets out on her behalf to conquer lands never dreamed of. He beckons her to come. And I am angry that he knows her; I hate her, and I hate the sea and I hate the sun, and in a flash I think I hate my father.”
Today, Manley says she never had a sense that her father was her island; and in Slipstream she described the different relationships with her grandparents and her father:
My heart had three cities: Pardi, Mardi and Daddy. Pardi and Mardi were interchangeable neighbours, cities in the same province, the secure heartland of grandparents. But Daddy was a lone city, a single culture with its own province; it was like a place one visited … One went to the city of Daddy like a tourist on a trip — at one’s own peril — and saw the sights.
At the same time,
In my life my father was always the band’s drummer; its heart. He determined my life’s rhythm from the very start.
Not long after her grandfather’s death, Manley married Englishman George Drummond and gave birth to her first son, Drum. When that marriage ended, Rachel returned to Jamaica, where she met and married businessman Paul Ennevor. There, her father, having become Prime Minister in 1972, was attempting to make radical and controversial changes to the class structure of the island, and during the 70s, much of middle-class Jamaica fled the Manley administration. Rachel then retreated with Paul, Drum and her second son Luke to Barbados. That marriage also ended, but Rachel remained in the eastern-most Caribbean isle until after her father was ejected from office in 1980, after which she returned to Jamaica. She alternated between there and Barbados, until she met her third husband, a Jewish Canadian journalist, Israel Cinman. They were married in the mid-80s and moved, first to Switzerland and then to Canada.
Manley’s account of the decades between her grandfather’s death and her father’s final illness feels inescapably brief. It’s as though her own raison d’être had to await her ancestors’ deaths, or, as in her father’s case, the threat of his death, before she could emerge.
When it was discovered that Michael Manley had developed prostate cancer, and the likelihood was that he would not recover, Rachel returned to Jamaica to help nurse him. One of the most painful scenes in Slipstream is set at Michael Manley’s sickbed just days before his death. Rachel had arrived from Canada to be at his side:
A million wraths opened their eyes from a million unanswered hurts and the presence of death so close had no power to dissuade me, nor grief to shroud my anger. “Michael,” I said, “look at me. Look at me!” He was already looking at me when I said it. “You are seeing me for the last time. I am going away, and though I love you dearly I am not coming back. Do you hear me?” I was showing him myself with my hands, indicating the length and breadth of me with incoherent gestures . . . as though all I would ever add up to was the extent to which he’d notice me.
It is clear that at 53 Manley sees herself as the soul memory of her father and grandparents, and that her two memoirs constitute a cry from memory, a cry to memory. From Slipstream, “I [have] heard all the old stories of our family history. They have since become one story and it is our story.”
