A MILLION AUNTIES By Alecia McKenzie

During a discussion of my own novel, These Ghosts Are Family, at a private book club, a group of Caribbean women told me that the one aspect of the story which teems with the supernatural that theyd found the most unbelievable was when a character dies and has his identity stolen because he has no family except for an aging grandmother to come looking for him. That would never happen in the Caribbean, one participant said. He would have cousins, he would have neighbors, uncles he would have aunties! The Commonwealth Prize-winning, Jamaican-born author Alecia McKenzies tender new novel an emotionally resonant ode to adopted families and community resilience fills this gap.

A Million Aunties is a polyphonic narrative with a cast of characters who have experienced betrayal, disaster and loss at different stages of life. Chris, a young Black painter from New York, has just arrived in the fictional village of Port Segovia in rural Jamaica, searching for beauty and solitude after his wifes death in a terrorist attack. Its his first time visiting the island without his Jamaican mother, who died from cancer years before. At the advice of his agent and friend, Stephen, he has come to board with Miss Della, Stephens auntie, a term that transcends blood relation. Once Stephen had mumbled something about his aunt getting him from a place called Anfields Childrens Home in Kingston, Chris recalls. Shed taken him to the country to help her grow plants and told everyone he was her nephew, and it had gone from being a lie to being true.

The novel moves between faraway settings of Jamaica, New York and France (where McKenzie herself lives), and though supporting characters momentarily take center stage, its Chris, Stephen and Della around whom all the others seem to orbit. Stephen serves as a connector, determined to bring people together so they can experience the same healing and warmth that Miss Della and her community gave him as a child. In his most morbid moments, McKenzie writes, he sometimes thought: Lose a mother, gain a million aunties.

Like Chris and Stephen, the broader community within this novel is also transnational. While most of the characters are Jamaican artists and their loved ones, McKenzie brings in others from different countries throughout the African diaspora, such as Fliciane, a French and West African installation artist caught in a love triangle between Stephen and her new boyfriend on the island. Of course no family exists without conflict. In a moving monologue, Chriss father, an African-American Vietnam veteran in failing health, laments Chriss late mothers dismissive attitude toward American racism as the arrogance and confidence of growing up as a majority.

Read more:

In the Caribbean and Beyond, Aunties Are So Much More Than Just Family - The New York Times