Horses in Her Hair: A Granddaughter's Story.

John Walker is a professor of Spanish at Queen’s University.

Rachel Manley, who was born in Cornwall and now lives between Jamaica and Toronto, belongs to a very influential West Indian family. Her father, Maurice, was premier of Jamaica three times between 1972 and 1992. Since he was married five times, Rachel spent a large part of her young life at her grandparents’ estate, Drumblair. Her grandfather Norman was a key figure in the colonial island’s struggle for independence from Britain, and became the first prime minister of the free state in 1962. Founder of the People’s National Party, Norman married his cousin Edna Swithenbank, the protagonist of Horses in her Hair, a well-known painter and sculptor, and an important figure in the cultural and political life of Jamaica in the 20th century.

Although this memoir purports to be a granddaughter’s story, it is much more than a biography of Edna Manley (known affectionately as Mardi). In a sense, this third volume of Rachel Manley’s memoirs is also a family record, and a very full history of the life and times of the Manleys, but also a very informative document that captures the social, cultural, and political history of her beloved island. As well as the Governor-General Award-winning Drumblair: Memoirs of a Jamaican Childhood (1996), she also produced a second volume, Slipstream: A Daughter Remembers (2000), a cathartic expose of her ambivalent relations with her elusive father, Michael. Her very close relations with her grandmother are pictured in her valuable edition of Edna Manley: The Diaries (1989), which provides much of the stuff and the memorable quotations of this third memoir, Horses in her Hair.

Rachel Manley is a fine writer whose beautiful, sensitive prose style captures the personal relations between her grandparents, as well as recording the politics and culture of the nation to which Edna dedicated her life. Although not a political figure, she supported her husband’s anti-racist and emancipation views, whilst devoting her life to her own art and making her mark through her sculpting and painting. She was also no mean writer, as can be deduced from the numerous quotations from the edited diaries by her granddaughter. If Norman was the father of Jamaican independence, Edna was the spiritual mother, the guardian of the soul of her adopted country

Horses in her Hair is a beautifully written intimate book which captures the essence of a person, a family, a people. It also tells a lot about the author. Although she has the diaries of Edna to support the factual elements of her book, Rachel’s own personal dealings with her grandmother, rooted in daily intimate intercourse and later in memory, make this a profoundly moving memoir, eminently readable, stylistically attractive, and entertaining beyond words. If the Manley men left their mark on the politics of Jamaica, the women will be remembered for their cultural legacy, in sculpting, painting, poetry, and prose.