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Issue # 125
| Robert
Edison Sandiford
Slipstream: A Daughter Remembers by Rachel Manley. Alfred
A. Knopf Canada (Random House). $32.95 and is 304 pp.
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| Daddy
Dearest |
Fathers, absent or otherwise, are rarely irrelevant to the lives of their children. "In the final six months of his illness, I felt a great need to be near my father," writes Rachel Manley in Slipstream: A Daughter Remembers (Knopf, 304 pp., hardcover), her second memoir following the Governor General's Award-winning Drumblair. And when your father is Michael Manley the impact may be even more marked: "After a lifetime of chasing my father's attention like a fleeting phantasm, I needed to be with him now."
When parents or even grandparents die, their children often face a crisis of continuity: their sense of immortality may be supplanted by an awareness that they, too, will be next; that a whole world or way of life is ending. This was very true in Manley's case: her father was, of course, Jamaica's fourth prime minister (1972-1980), charismatic and controversial. (He was an ardent socialist who believed in regional integration). Re-elected in 1989, he held office again until his retirement three years later at the age of 67 due to cancer.
Michael Manley died in 1997. His daughter starts her chronicle with his last days. Despite the point of entry, her narrative begins slowly. Though she knows her father, an admittedly very prolific figure at one point in time, she takes for granted the reader's familiarity with him.
Another difficulty is that Manley, also a published poet, can get caught up in her own words. Slipstream is exquisitely written. Manley's language is metaphoric, filled with precious observations and rich detail - sometimes, too self-consciously rich.
It is easy, given the circumstances of this "creative memoir" (Manley uses journals and letters as well as keen memory to recreate her dialogue, of which there is much) to imagine it is something of a reverie. What we are meant to trust, however, is the truth of the sentiments it conveys; not really the magic in the words, rather the atmosphere they conjure. "I have no memory of the time we sat there," she admits of one of the many quiet moments shared with her sick father, "only of a sense of heaviness pouring down and hardening into an unwelcome new reality."
What Michael Manley was to his daughter was ineffable, hence fundamentally inexpressible. In Slipstream, you feel Manley, 53, still striving for her father's approval - just as she did when she was 11 and at boarding school, and her father (who would marry five times) took her out for a Sunday lunch and seemed more interested in a former Miss Jamaica at an adjoining table. "But then the young couple rose...and left. My father looked sadly at the door after them, and immediately started glancing at his watch. I wished I were a beauty queen."
For everyone, there is someone who was so much of everything to our lives - both good and not so good - he or she defies us, even in death. To Manley, her father was a god. "Or so it seemed to me," she notes early on. This doubt is healthy. It also yields much insight.
Manley's is also an insider's account of the making and breaking of the Jamaica most of us have come to know and which she left in 1975. (She currently divides her time between Canada and Jamaica.) Recalling the Jamaica Labour Party's politically motivated, post-independence raising of the Back O'Wall district in Kingston, which was built by the rival People's National Party, her father's party, she laments: "It was the prelude to an island divided against itself...."
Like her father - some would say because of him - Jamaica, its people and their family increasingly found themselves caught in the slipstream of the book's title, fighting wildly, powerfully divergent post-colonial currents. Political independence, achieved in 1962, was "a sham" without financial independence, Michael Manley was forced to conclude, particularly in the Caribbean.
"If you're going to write about somebody, tell the truth or don't bother to write," her father advised her. Manley tries not to be an apologist for his life, whether private or political. She knew the man too well for that. But as his daughter, his first-born, his loving, dutiful, dependent "Suck-Up," she holds on to his every word and action, even the ones she can't explain. Not that Manley is ever less than honest; she isn't. Only that, in writing this book, she honoured another bit of his fatherly wisdom: "I think, if we were meant to know everything, nature would have given us the imagination and the brains to figure it all out. Let there be mystery, I say!"
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