There is a statue outside a courthouse in Kingston, Jamaica. Paul Bogle, a church deacon who fought in the slave rebellion of 1865 and was hung for his efforts, stands with his arms akimbo, a sword, like a cross, held flat against his chest. The figure, which towers some fifteen feet above the square, was created by Edna Manley.
Born on England’s cold and rocky Cornish coast, Edna Manley came to Jamaica in 1922. She travelled with her husband, Norman, her newborn son, a set of sculpting tools and an insatiable curiosity about the island of her mother’s birth. As the wife of a National Hero and mother to the island’s fifth prime minister, Edna’s life was inextricably linked with Jamaican politics. But she was destined to leave her own mark on her adopted country. Her legacy?much less easily defined, perhaps than either her husband’s or her son’s?can be seen and heard and read. It is firmly entrenched in the island’s art, in its sculpture and painting and poetry and prose. She was, some say, nothing less than the mother of Jamaica’s artistic soul.
In Horses in Her Hair, Rachel Manley?Edna’s granddaughter and an award-winning author?tells the remarkable story of her grandmother’s life. Completing the trilogy that began with Drumblair and Slipstream, Horses in Her hair is the story of both a family and a nation, an intimate and exquisitely crafted portrait of the woman who left such an indelible mark on each.

RACHEL MANLEY is the author of the memoir Drumblair: Memories of a Jamaican Childhood, which won the Governor General’s Award for Non-fiction in 1997, and Slipstream: A Daughter Remembers. She has also published three books of poetry and edited Edna Manley: The Diaries, a collection of her grandmother’s journals. Manley is a New York Public Library Fellow, a Pierre Berton Fellow, a Rockefeller Fellow (Bellagio), and a former Bunting Fellow for Literature at Radcliffe College. She serves on the creative writing faculty at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and has won Jamaica’s prestigious Centennial Medal for Poetry. Manley divides her time between Toronto and Jamaica. She has two sons, Drum and Luke.

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