And with my focus on giving, it’s good to receive too, to accept that standing ovation and that smile (207). When I was forty I thought that when I reached fifty I wouldn’t be able to go on performing, but then fifty came and went and I’m still at it. Sometimes I’ve said to myself, hey, it’s unbelievable that I still have the strength.

Because when the light is on you, and you’re on that stage, and they’re clapping, you know it’s still happening. That first solo flight after such a long break was a sign, a moment of “Oh my god, I’m really gonna do it!” Ever since – and that was a while ago – I’ve taken my measure from that moment. In the final chapter of her story, “Sunshine After Rain,” Rita recalls the first time she “went out as a solo” and revels in her power to attract the gaze: Deploying the trope of the back-up singer/harmoniser as a sign of her marginalisation, Rita Marley seems to here affirm that like Marcia Griffiths and Judy Mowatt, the other two members of the I-Three, she does possess the requisite talent to launch her solo career, independent of star-boy Bob.ĭisavowing the role of back-up singer and mere accessory in Bob Marley’s putative biography, Alfarita Constantia Anderson asserts the authority of her own voice. The power of Rita Marley’s autobiography is manifested in this very capacity to “hear more”. So I also hear my voice, I also hear me” (2). But I hear more, because I’m on almost all of the songs. Having conceded Bob Marley’s overwhelming auditory presence, Rita immediately insists that her seemingly plaintive voice must be heard as well: “And one interesting thing about it, to me, is that most people only hear him. Bob Marley’s arrogant threat, “Yu a go tired fi see mi face,”b transmutes here into Rita’s somewhat ambiguous response, which I articulate in this way: she a go tired fi hear him voice. Because you do really hear his voice wherever you go. She first acknowledges Bob Marley’s overpowering voice: “So if I hear his voice now, it’s only confirming that he’s always around, everywhere. But from the very “Prologue” Rita insistently attempts to right the balance. Indeed, the sub-title of the book, My Life With Bob Marley, clearly a marketing strategy to exploit the Bob Marley brand, pointedly signifies the publisher’s attempt to suppress Rita Marley’s own story, her own voice. The anonymous writer of that dust-jacket blurb ought to have added the ‘s’ word, sexism, to “racism” and generic “prejudice.” For in this sentence – and I do intend a pun on “sentence,” Rita Marley becomes an unnamed “someone” whose presence as a witness in this narrative is intended primarily to illuminate the meaning of Bob Marley’s life. It is also a moving and inspiring story of a marriage that survived both poverty and then the strains of celebrity. In a remarkably shameless manoeuvre, the publishers of the book opportunistically represent Rita’s autobiography in this way:įull of new information, ‘No Woman, No Cry’ is an insightful biography of Marley by someone who understands what it meant to grow up in poverty in Jamaica, to battle racism and prejudice. Even more problematic, Rita Marley is positioned in her own autobiography as a mere foil destined to reflect the greater glory of her superstar husband.

Rita’s autobiography, published in 2004, more than two decades after Bob Marley’s death, nevertheless is marketed primarily as a fiction of marital bliss. The deployment of Bob Marley’s song as the title of Rita Marley’s autobiography is intended, it would appear, to bind the couple in an emotional knot that cannot be easily disentangled. Bob Marley’s nostalgic song of domestic intimacy and communal survival in fabled Trench Town, “No Woman, No Cry,” functions, I propose, as a decidedly ironic frame for Rita Marley’s iconoclastic autobiography.

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