Windward Family

LoveReading Says

Beautifully personable, Alexis Keir’s Windward Family is a moving memoir with broad-stroke historic scope, painterly personal detail, and timely resonance as it shares the experiences of a Black British family of our times, alongside presenting accounts of historic figures. One of the author’s intentions was to “give voice to the ghosts of my ancestors”, and Windward Family does that with warmth and flair.

Born on the Caribbean island of St Vincent, and brought up in Luton, Keir didn’t return to his homeland for twenty years. This return was largely driven by a seminal period in New Zealand, where he witnessed “bi- and multi-culturalism supported in a way that did not chime with my Black British experience. I saw genuine attempts to achieve the empowerment of minority communities”. He left New Zealand feeling “ready to visit St Vincent again for the first time in twenty years”. In short, “It was time to go home”, though Keir was acutely aware that returning to St Vincent would be “a journey of fear and trepidation that also promised discovery”.

Traversing St Vincent, Luton, Texas, New Zealand and London (with St Vincent always having bone-deep presence), the author’s autobiographical narrative is interspersed with accounts of historic figures whose stories relate to the theme of identity, and to what it means to be of both the Caribbean and Britain. These include the boy who sparked this book, George Alexander Gratton. He was taken from St Vincent as a one-year-old and presented as a money-making sideshow attraction, with his vitiligo skin condition giving rise to him being known as the “Beautiful Spotted Boy”.

Fittingly and movingly, the “usual Vincentian way of saying goodbye” is “We coming back”, just as Windward Family shares the author’s enthralling journey to finding home, with a wonderful, pertinent story about the glorious, endangered St Vincent parrot leaving a lasting impression.

Joanne Owen

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