 |
 |
 |
|
March 2014
|
Her experiences have taken her from England to Jamaica, to the United States and to Canada in numerous crossings and re-crossings. Where is home? I begin by asking her. “Home is where I live. My address”. She’s adamant about that. Having to move often has given her the ability to make wherever she is at the moment “home”. She continues, “but if home means familiar, then Jamaica is what is familiar to me…I don’t usually find it changed… it doesn’t matter what government’s in, it just seems the same.” What then has been her source of inspiration- her muse? That question makes her smile. “My grandparents”, she says simply. “After three books dealing with them and history, you kind of need a new muse or else you end up writing the same things. But they are the force that inspires me …” The conversation turns to her current project – a work of fiction. “I can promise you with absolute certainty, I will never write another!” She claims to be overwhelmed by the “huge prairie of possibility of fiction”! “In memoir”, she explains, “you are guided by the simple truths of what are - it’s kind of a roadmap for you that keeps you safe. You don’t have to make too many moral decisions because you know you have to tell the truth. You are guided by what is the truth, but with fiction anything you write, could be anything you want it to be. It’s just endless possibility… I get seasick with it… I guess it’s the difference between memory and imagination…my memory is exercised, it’s fit; my imagination ….is kind of squashed….when I gave up writing poetry …and went for non-fiction prose I had kind of said no to imagination and now to ask it to wake up again, it does not want to wake.” But is there any other aspect of memory still left to be explored? “I plan to do a book of short stories...I do have other stories…some are more to do with me, not the family...but in themselves are entities that are worth writing”. To young writers starting out, her advice is to “remember the background you are coming from always…the rich oral tradition, the responsibility…to tell the stories of your own generation and the ones before that might not have been comfortably literate”. Also important is “a social message that shines light on the things in our society… even if the overall purpose might be to entertain.” Fifty years from now what would she want people to remember about her writing? “I would like them to remember through Drumblair, and Slipstream and Horses, my grandparents and my father, and the huge, imaginative strides they made for Jamaica – that’s what I want them to remember.” |
Rachel Manley is in town as this year’s writer-in-residence for Campus Literature Week, an annual event of the Faculty of Humanities and Education’s MFA Creative Writing Programme. Though perhaps best known for her trilogy of her famous family: Drumblair-Memoirs of a Jamaican Childhood (1996); Slipstream: A Daughter Remembers (2000) and Horses in Her Hair (2008), few may recall that she is also a published poet. She’s graciously spared some time to answer some questions about her writing and life.