Governor General’s Award–winning memoirist and poet Rachel Manley elegantly describes her late grandmother Edna as “between the lines of life.” That elusiveness has already been suggested in Manley’s other, acclaimed memoirs about her famous family: Drumblair, about her grandfather, Jamaica’s first premier, Norman Manley; and Slipstream, about her father, Jamaica’s fourth prime minister and leftist force-of-nature, Michael Manley. It follows that bringing sculptor-activist Edna to centre stage for Horses in Her Hair, Rachel Manley’s forthcoming book from which she reads at Harbourfront this weekend as part of the Island Soul festival, was no easy task.

“I’m very close to her,” she explains, pointing out that the works were always intended as a trilogy, but in a different order, with her grandmother coming before her father. “I thought hers would be the easiest and it wasn’t at all. I would write and write and the next day I would go and read it, and she wasn’t on the page; she had disappeared. I can’t to this day tell you exactly why. There was the confusion of trying to write this as a novel first; she just refused to be made into a fiction. I could almost feel her fighting me.”

 Edna Manley effectively raised Rachel in the titular home of her first memoir. From that work, through Slipstream, one gets a powerful, attractive vision of the woman who is, in some senses, in stark contrast to the leading men in her life. Indelible, for instance, is Manley’s description in Slipstream of her grandmother’s studio — “we’d hear the room slowly rise, like an old sleepy dog we’d interrupted who was stretching and shaking himself awake” — and of her subsequent anointing as a “poet” by the woman. Edna would later send young Rachel’s poems to Michael as proof of his daughter’s talent, a habit Manley claims “got on [his] nerves.”

Yet Manley asserts that Michael and Norman were hardly apart from the Edna-esque characteristics she so eagerly imbibed, regardless of how close she had actually been with both of them (Norman passed away when she was a teenager; Michael, as Slipstream declares, was fairly distant from her for most of his life). “I got my habit of metaphor from my grandmother and my grandfather and my father,” she says. “Just to hear them talk around the dining table: nothing was ever simple; everything was ‘as if’ or ‘as though’ or ‘like this.’ They constantly painted what they were saying, in order for you to visualize it.”

The picture painted by Manley’s memoirs is of a family that itself stands figuratively — of a mythic dynasty that shaped 20th-century Jamaica in astounding ways, just as it, at the same time, shaped the heart and mind of a young woman who became one of its key chroniclers.
“This is my problem with the world today,” says Manley. “These people, my ancestors, seem normal to me. And now that they’re gone, I really miss them. I don’t find this kind of magic anywhere else. I keep hoping I’m going to run into some odd person who’s just like them again. But they were extraordinary. They gave me all my stories.”