When Barbados-born Cecil Foster wrote on the meaning of being black in Canada, he won praise from his community and a Writer’s Development Trust award for non-fiction. Yet in a prickly review of his most recent novel he was deemed a “hack.” His latest work, Island Wings: A Memoir elicits just such a mixed response. It is useful for its depiction of the pre-immigration conditions of certain Caribbeans living in Canada. But it is badly written.

In the 1950s, Foster’s parents abandoned their three boys to seek success in England and to “escap[e] the clutches of want” in Barbados. His parents married and had five more children abroad, while Foster grew up in the dubious care of grandmothers – one violent and poor, the other adamant about academic achievement. A record of a difficult boyhood, Island Wings also sets the drive for Barbados national independence – achieved in 1966 – alongside Foster’s own political maturation, a process which releases him from the clutches of want to find meaning and recognition in journalism.

Foster says that as a journalist he was “following the age old professional credo of unbiased reporting and independence of thought.” Yet when recounting events in Guyana under president Forbes Burnham he writes, “And in one of its most dastardly deeds, the Burnham regime was suspected as killing one of its main foes, Dr. Walter Rodney when a bomb exploded in his car.” Such lapses in logic and objectivity, together with clichés and awkward sentences, weaken Foster’s credibility.

He wrote this book, in part, to explore the “atrophied relationship” with his parents. In exploring his own pain, though, Foster only skims his father, Freddie Goddard, who was once Barbados’ hottest musician. Goddard joined the British army and was stationed in newly post-colonial nations to maintain order. He became a Jehovah’s Witness after rejecting music as being too simple. When Foster discovers him in London, he is broken and floundering in a rooming house in search of “vindication.” Foster is bewildered by their meeting and, instead of mining Goddard for details and symbols, he packages him in clichés: “My father, true to this military training but more so still a victim of the Caribbean male tradition, suggests emotion is a luxury we cannot afford.” Goddard’s story seems more worthy of a book than Foster’s.

Foster’s memories are sketchy, his analysis often too simple. He grapples with sentences and doesn’t suggest the richness of the characters who populate his childhood. Focused too closely on his own heroism, Foster misses the small, large, and resonant moments in the lives of others.