No Woman, No Cry: Rita Marley’s Feminist Fable

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. 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. 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.  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.

In a remarkably shameless manoeuvre, the publishers of the book opportunistically represent Rita’s autobiography in this way:

Full 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.  It is also a moving and inspiring story of a marriage that survived both poverty and then the strains of celebrity.

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. 

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.  But from the very “Prologue” Rita insistently attempts to right the balance.  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.  Because you do really hear his voice wherever you go.  All over the world” (1-2). 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.

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.  But I hear more, because I’m on almost all of the songs.  So I also hear my voice, I also hear me” (2).  The power of Rita Marley’s autobiography is manifested in this very capacity to “hear more”.  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. 

Disavowing 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.  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:

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.  Because when the light is on you, and you’re on that stage, and they’re clapping, you know it’s still happening.  Sometimes I’ve said to myself, hey, it’s unbelievable that I still have the strength.  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.  Just ready.  And with my focus on giving, it’s good to receive too, to accept that standing ovation and that smile (207).  

In an early chapter of her autobiography, proverbially entitled, “Who Feels It, Knows It,” Rita Marley confesses her love of the stage, linking the power of performance to economic independence:  “I loved performing live, under the bright lights and inside the music, being onstage. And it was a thrill to be earning a little money independently” (22).  This quest for economic independence and the concomitant emotional freedom it affords is a recurring motif in the narrative.  For though Rita does concede the bonds of almost sisterly affiliation that bind her to Bob, she also comes to fully understand the urgent need to disengage from a debilitating relationship in which she is reduced to the liminal status of celebrity victim.  Her struggle to come to terms with the many female groupies in Bob’s life is expressed in this way:  “I tried to train myself to think of Bob as a good loving brother more so than a real husband, and made my peace with the situation.  I asked God for help with the things I couldn’t change.  Maybe because there were so many women they grew less and less threatening . . .” (104).

But before the threat there was the fleeting sense of security in the sympathy Rita felt for her Robbie, her teenage love.  As she puts it, “And poor Bob, you looked at him and you just felt sorry for him!  And I keep feeling this way about him even now.  My love for him is deep, true, lasting love, of course – but there was something about sorrying [sic] for him that is still in me” (46).  Indeed, Rita testifies to the accuracy of the account of young love given in the song, “No Woman, No Cry”:

When we started to date, he’d introduced me to his friend Georgie.  Anything you want, Bob said, anything you need, just ask Georgie. . . .

Georgie did indeed make the fire light, and it was true that it would burn ‘through the night.’  Bob always wrote about real things, about his feelings.  They would be playing guitar and all of us singing and drinking cornmeal porridge or sharing whatever was cooked for the day.  All the rest of that song turned out to be true, too.  And because Bob was so real, so true to himself, I feel that I need to insist on that here.  Aunty always said, ‘Don’t tell no stories,’ by which she meant lies.  So this is not a ‘story,’ this is my life  (32-33).

  The distinction Rita Marley underscores between “story” and “life” authorises my reading of her life-story as a calculated contestation of the seemingly transparent meaning of Bob Marley’s song.  For though his lyrics and Rita’s own testimony about the “truth” of the song do give the partial assurance that “everythings gonna be alright,” the autobiography in full tells a quite different story.  I use lyrics here in the colloquial Jamaican sense to signify the language of sexual propositioning – or putting question to – in the Jamaican vernacular.  Despite his lyrical prowess, Bob Marley is emotionally impotent at the very moment in which he attempts to persuade the anonymous woman of the song, whom one is tempted to identify as Rita, to dry her eyes. For Rita’s autobiography craftily documents the way in which she first cries her heart out and then achieves a dry-eyed wisdom that transcends the narrow ambit of her husband’s duplicitous consolation.

Though the text of “No Woman, No Cry” cunningly memorialises familiar rituals in a distant time of shared pleasure, the sub-text documents the heart-rending emotional fissures that provoke the tears of a woman who will not be seduced by memories of lost affection.  The past, however romanticised, cannot erase the daily betrayals of the present. After all, Bob himself admits that he has “got to push on through.”  Deliberately replicating the title of the song, the book decidedly undermines its assumptions of compliant femininity.  Similarly, the sub-title, My Life With Bob Marley, ironically acknowledges the fact that Rita Marley’s full freedom is enabled by extricating herself from the bondage of paternalistic affiliation:  her life without Bob Marley. 

Rita Marley’s autobiography is a “fable” in the familiar sense of “an allegorical story intended to convey some useful lesson,” to cite the Oxford English Dictionary definition.  And, indeed, there are profound lessons to be learnt from Rita’s life-story.  As my domestic helper, Miss Joyce Walters, put it so eloquently, “If she can mek it, me can mek it.”  Rita’s story is a compelling tale of absolute determination to escape the confines of the narrow “place” that was deemed appropriate for a poor, black woman in Jamaica of the 1940’s:  “Because I know how I feel about myself.  I know what I’m gonna try in life, I know this Trench Town thing is not gonna be my last days.  Sometime, somehow, I’m getting’ out of here” (28).

But one must also take into account the negative connotations of fable as “a narrative or statement not founded on fact; a myth or legend.”  The construction of Rita’s autobiography as her husband’s biography is a perverse fable – an act of patriarchal mythologising that reproduces the very politics of marginalisation that requires an authoritative feminist response.  Claiming the power to define for herself the meaning of her life-story – despite the best intentions of the marketing gurus at Sidgwick & Jackson, her publisher, Rita Marley narrates an archetypal feminist tale that both gestures to Bob Marley’s seminal/ovular role in her life and, simultaneously, undermines his dominance.

The final meaning of fable that is pertinent here is disclosed by the etymology of the word.  The English fable comes from the Latin noun fabula meaning discourse, from the verb fari to speak.  So I also read Rita Marley’s autobiography as a fable in this sense – as a speaking of the self into being. Giving voice to her own distinctive experience, Rita asserts the right to speak in the singular.  Not I & I. But the I.  I also playfully suggest a trilingual Latin/English/Jamaican pun on fari, to speak, with a phonological shift to foreground the ‘I’:  from fari to far-I, Rasta-fari.  Rita Marley does learn to speak in Rasta, the dread language of resistance to downpression in all its pernicious variety.

At the Jamaican launch of No Woman, No Cry in August 2004, Rita’s amanuensis, Hettie Jones, recalled the process of crafting the manuscript.   Each morning Rita would tell her story which was recorded and Hettie would produce an edited transcript that would be vetted by Rita.  The transformation of the oral text into scribal document is thus a process of fictive reconstruction in the best sense of that word fictive – “imaginatively creative.” Like those classic narratives of freedom, historically conceived as “slave” narratives, that are the product of feminist collaboration across racial lines, Rita Marley’s autobiography speaks to a politics of affiliation that transcends conventional barriers of identity and identification.

Nevertheless, there are occasional uncertainties in the text that betray the controlling hand of the amanuensis.  The language of Rita’s story does not always ring true.  Her Jamaican Creole voice is somewhat muffled by the American diction and syntax of her sympathetic scribe:  “I missed Ziggy whom I was able to see only on my weekend off” (83).  That “whom,” though grammatically correct, seems unlikely in Rita’s emotional account of separation from his son. Similarly, there appear to be false notes in the following passage: “Bob had a little Capri then, and if the kids were out in the yard playing and heard the car coming and recognized its distinctive sound, they’d start yelling, ‘Daddy’s coming, Daddy’s coming!’” (111).  My intuition is that the children would ‘bawl out’, not yell and that they would say, “Daddy a come.” In addition, the clause “and recognized it distinctive sound” seems rather formal for oral discourse. 

Sensitive to the largely non-Jamaican readership of the book, Jones ensures that unfamiliar Jamaican words (or usage) are translated within the text itself, rather than placed in a self-conscious glossary.  But in some instances the translations are inaccurate.  For example, the word “partner” is glossed as “a lottery where everyone gave her money and then got to draw at the end of the week” (6).  The partner is not a lottery though some unscrupulous bankers do gamble with the money of their clients.  There are also occasional misspellings of Jamaican words:  the ackee in the national dish is spelt as “akee” (126).  These minor errors aside, No Woman, No Cry, is a remarkable accomplishment, demonstrating the compelling power of cross-cultural, sisterly collaboration.

Rita’s fable is quintessentially feminist for it charts a journey of self-discovery that is premised on a rejection of patriarchy in all its oppressive forms.  Rita’s growth to feminist consciousness is manifested in the geographical, emotional, ideological and aesthetic journeys she makes.  Her feet are her only carriage in the early days as she journeys from Trench Town to Nine Miles and back; and then to Bull Bay of which she says, “I still feel that this is where my life, my own independent life started” (105).  The little house she built there becomes emblematic of a deep-rooted conviction:  “So when people say to me, why don’t you just sell it, get rid of it, you don’t need it, I say no, no, no.  This was my beginning – how could you want to sell your beginning?” (109). 

It is this same sense of rootedness that is articulated in “No Woman, No Cry:” “In this great future you can’t forget your past.”  This line, deployed as one of the epigraphs to Rita’s autobiography, is inaccurately reproduced as “this bright future” demonstrating yet again how easy it is for well-intentioned non-Jamaicans to enthusiastically misunderstand the nuances of language.  Many German reggae fans, for instance, assumed that “No Woman, No Cry” meant that if you didn’t have a woman you wouldn’t cry.  A song of explicitly heterosexual intimacy becomes an almost misogynist affirmation of the doubtful pleasures of exclusivist homosociality.   

Virginia Woolf had long affirmed the need of the female writer to claim a room of her own in which to enjoy the solitude of the intellectual life and artistic creativity.  For Rita, a room was not enough.  She needed a home of her own to escape her emotional and economic dependence on her promiscuous husband.  The early signs had been clear:  “The young man I still knew as Robbie had other girls in his life, girls with whom he had intimate relationships; I knew he kept them away from me out of respect” (24).  It is this very dubious respect that later enables Rita to tolerate Bob’s many infidelities:

Because, despite everything – all the rumors as well as what I could see with my own eyes – most of them still came with an explanation:  ‘This one is happening because she does my pictures’, of ‘Island sent her to do this or that,’ or ‘Yvette Anderson is here because she’s an American, she can have my publishing work done properly.’  So there was always a reason for each of them – especially when they came to Jamaica to stay with him at Hope Road while the children and I were living in Bull Bay, in what he spoke of as ‘the family house’ (110).

Gradually rejecting the fictions of Bob’s seemingly reasonable explanations, Rita moves out of emotional dependency and across class boundaries, manifested in spatial terms.  She buys a house in suburban Jacks Hill which Bob considered “too small for his children” (155).  But it certainly was large enough for his wife who conceived it as a symbolic space that reified her emancipation.  Though she parenthetically observes that the fairy-tale carriage that transports her to the hills is a conciliatory bribe, she, nevertheless, disdains complicity in Bob’s domestic webs of deceit. Furthermore, the trope of driving recurs in the autobiography as a sign of upward social mobility and escape from the constraints of walk-foot economic control and subservience to the whims of patriarchy:  “But I realized I couldn’t be fully independent until I learned to drive.  I had been trying – maybe I should say I’d been dreaming of driving, but it wasn’t until I got to Bull Bay that driving became a real necessity” (106).

It is her own talent as a singer that enables Rita to purchase her house, independent of Bob Marley:

The day after I had decided to buy the house on the hill, I drove up there (in the BMW Bob had bought me – I guess as a consolation – when he became more friendly with Cindy).  I looked around and said to myself, wow, I’m taking a chance.  But, hey, it’s a positively savvy chance, I told myself, when you consider you have to do it, you just have to do it.  Buy yourself a home that you love.  Girl, if you don’t make it happen, nobody’s gonna do it for you.  Make up your mind; Bob seems to be on a different trip.  Something felt strange, I could feel a different vibe.  But I’d been through all that.  There were enemies, and it was an easy thing to have enemies.  And I had friends.  Just a few.  Real friends were few.

So I took the advance money for the tour and I told the manager, ‘Don’t pay me on the road, just send the money straight to this lawyer in Jamaica.’ Because, after all, that was for me.  I’m not gonna live in the darkness, I told myself, I have to be where the light shines.  And I’m gonna live in the house on the hill. (156-57)

   The landscape of the home Rita Marley has now made for herself in the hills of Aburi in Ghana is reminiscent of the topography of Jacks Hill.  Yet again, this house on the continent of Africa assumes symbolic meaning, highlighting the aesthetic and ideological journeys Rita Marley makes from derided outcast to Rastafari royalty.  In the very first chapter of the autobiography, “Trench Town Rock,” Rita recalls the cruel insecurities of childhood:  “Because I was very dark-skinned, the kids in school called me ‘blackie tootus’ (black and shiny with very white teeth).  I learned discrimination early and underestimated my own value because of my color.  Jamaica has a long history of color consciousness and racial struggle” (3).  The Dictionary of Jamaican English defines tutus as “a darling, a pet.”  But in the yoking of “blackie” and “tootus” it is not the sense of “darling” that prevails; the term is decidedly pejorative.

Rita Marley journeys through Rastafari to a continental African consciousness that redeems the “blackie” in “blackie tootus.”  She recalls the widespread alarm her uncharacteristic behaviour elicits when she first sights Rastafari:  “Then I started to wear my nurse’s uniform, and tied a rope of red, gold, and green (the Rasta colours) around my waist, and people began to whisper, ‘You know she’s crazy, she’s getting crazy, what a shame after all the money her aunty spend on her’ (40).  But, for Rita, the appeal of Rastafari is the sanity of its revisionist reading of colonialist narratives of alienation:  “The whole thing seemed intelligent to me; it wasn’t just about smoking herb, it was more a philosophy that carried a history with it.  That’s what pulled my interest, the powerful history that hadn’t been taught to me in school” (40).    

It is the pull of this history that requires the recovery of ancestral homelands:  “Africa has come like a new life to me, with an ancient background, because it’s so black; and because of this I feel at home – that fight you face against blackness in other places does not exist here.  I want the freedom to be what I am, and what I’m supposed to be, without having to fight anybody to be that” (194).  Of course, there are other battles to be fought on the African continent but, for the moment, what Rita Marley celebrates here is the recuperation of the meaning of blackness, conceived in explicitly aesthetic terms:  not ‘black and ugly,’ but ‘black and beautiful.’

But the politics of racialised identity are complicated by sexual sub-texts.  Bob Marley first encourages Rita to accept black-conscious, Rastafari aesthetics:  “‘You’re a queen, a black queen,’ he said.  You’re pretty just as you are, you don’t need to do anything else.  You don’t have to straighten your hair, you can wear it natural” (38).  But when Bob Marley later returns to Jamaica from his brief stay in Delaware, he surprisingly asks Rita, on his way home from the airport, “‘Why yu no fix up yourself, what happened to your hair?’

(I was wearing it natural).  He seemed puzzled more than critical, and I guess, after American women, I looked different” (46).

Much later, in the US, it is Johnny Nash’s wife, Margaret, who helps Rita to look less different than these American women.  She gives her the ultimate Cinderella makeover:

In the course of the afternoon she dressed me from top to bottom, including a coat, stockings, and shoes.  Then she took me somewhere else, where a woman taught me about makeup and shaped my Afro.  Then we went back to Margaret’s apartment, and she prettied me up some more.  I think she was just as excited as I was, because I remember her saying, at one point, ‘You know, we gonna really show them something!’  Then we went to the studio, and Bob was astonished!  ‘Ah, Margaret!’ he said, accusingly.  ‘What have you done to Rita?’  Not only was I wearing different clothes, I even had on eyebrow pencil. Something I’d never worn before (and seldom have since)!

So I had a new look, and even after three children I had a new interest too from Mr. Marley.  Later, when we were alone, he took a long look at me and said, ‘Wow, so you went and got yourself a fresh face!’

It’s many years since then, but I’m still thanking Margaret for that face (72).

If this were a fairy tale and not a black feminist fable, the story would have ended there; Rita’s fresh face would have been enough to eclipse the jaded beauties who once hung around her husband:  “So to them Bob was sooo attractive and they were sooo attracted” (94).  But Rita Marley’s autobiography goes on for another one hundred and thirty pages.  It is, in the end, a triumphant fable minus Prince Charming who is struck down at an early age by the grim reaper.  But even if Bob Marley had survived cancer, his marriage to Rita could not have long withstood the “strains of celebrity” – despite the happy fictions of our blurb writer.  For Rita herself, seeing far beyond the illusions of stardom, would always remember Robbie, the caring youth for whom she felt sorry and was now was irretrievably lost to her.  And she would have found the courage to surrender the illusion of respect.

Rita deploys evocative domestic images of mutual nurturance to memorialise the distant days of shared affection:

While I was gone Bob would clean the house and cook a meal so we’d have something to eat when we arrived.  And there he’d be when the bus pulled up, just as he always said:  ‘Rita, you look out for me when the bus come, I’ll be standing waiting for you.’  Years later, when he was called the ‘first Third World Superstar’ and the ‘Negus’ of reggae (meaning the ‘semidivine Ultimate’), I always wanted to remind people what led there.  In St. Ann he had one pair of underpants, which I washed out every night.  And if he cared enough to have a meal waiting for me when I came back home from Kingston, I wanted to be back in time to care for him (58).

The trope of the one underpants wickedly recurs and Rita deploys it not so much as a metonym for Bob Marley’s privates and his very public private life but rather to signify the fundamental “reality” of their shared origins. Her triumph, ultimately, is that none of Marley’s many lovers could ever erase that history or know him as completely as she does:  “I loved him as much as any of them, or more, and he knew he could count on me and depended on that loyalty, on my being his sister.  But he also knew I wasn’t there for the glamour, the fantasy, or the fame.  That I would bring him up to reality, because I was there from the beginning, from one underpants, and those were my hands, every night, washing them out” (130).  That consolation is Rita Marley’s own incontestable version of “No Woman, No Cry.”