The Manley Memoirs - Softcover

Beverly Manley is former Jamaican model, and popular media personality in Jamaica, hosting highly respected talk shows discussing issues of national, regional and international importance.

With grace, balance, and wonderful candour, Beverley Manley tells the story of her childhood, adolescence, and adulthood as the wife of Jamaicaıs charismatic leader in the 1970s, Michael Manley. The articulateness and intimacy of her recounting the years both before meeting Michael Manley and afterward, of their life together as leading figures in the Peopleıs National Party, are a compelling contribution to literature as well as government studies. Beverley Manley reports with the aplomb of a seasoned interviewer on television and radio. She speaks with an authoritative yet friendly voice and records the political and the personal as one who is committed to feminist issues. Manley tells of her struggle to escape the confinement of her relationship with an argumentative and domineering mother and of her success both before and after marriage with working in the media. She is a fine scholar and architect of womenıs rights in Jamaica, and she holds nothing back in touching on all the issues that were of such consequence in the era of cataclysmic change in Jamaican society under her husbandıs leadership. Beverley Manley speaks with a gentle and winning voice from her own commitment to a leftist positioning in politics. She need make no apology for this for it is after all her own memoirs that she is articulating with such clarity and force. Her accounting of her growing up as the stationmasterıs daughter is an interesting record of a time when girls still had to wear the Oblood clothı. She recounts the caring for (washing) and difficulty of this awkward garment and this candour previews the openness with which she will discuss her marriage in later chapters. Manley has a zest for life and a love of femininity that pervades the otherwise serious text of the rise of the PNP and its ultimate fall with the elections of 1980. In between those years is the story of the growth of a dream for a more equitable Jamaica than the one that existed at that time. Beverley Manley is able to articulate the growth of the structures of government with clarity and vision. She was after all a young black woman who was coming into her own as a scholar and First Lady. Her ability to recall and recount these turbulent years with vivid aplomb is a boon for the reader who is interested in reliving them Ĵ revisiting them through her point of view. Her early days as First Lady are summarised in the following statement: ³There was no doubt some in the party regarded me with a certain amount of suspicion. I collaborated with many members of parliament in their constituencies Ĵ and not only at election time. I was a hard and committed worker who was never interested in representative politics. People did not understand this.² Manley worked as hard to establish herself within the family. She became a wife that was on good terms with Mardi and Pardi (Edna and Norman W Manley) as well as with Michaelıs children by his former marriages. She recalls that she showed her manuscript to Rachel at a difficult time in the writing and it was Rachelıs encouragement that helped her move through to completion. It would have been a great loss to social history and to feminist studies otherwise. Manleyıs memoirs are replete with information that encourages all women, especially in the island where machismo is still so dominant. Manley says: ³During another conversation with Fidel, as we talked about the workersı struggle, he told me that, as difficult as it was, it would triumph long before the struggle for womenıs rights. I was upset at the time by his words, but have since come to understand how correct he was about the intransigence of the movement for equality between women and men.² Throughout this fine text are such thoughts and asides that help to centre the narrative in wo --The Jamaica Observer