Cal Revely-Calder
In the Trinidad of Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, the departed are never gone. When We Were Birds, her debut novel, written in patois, is suffused with magic and myth. Set in a fictional city, Port Angeles, it tracks the converging paths of a bereaved young woman and a beleaguered young man: the latter buries the dead, while the former can see and speak to them.
Darwin, a young Rastafarian, leaves his mother’s house for a job in a graveyard. Just as he fears that his fellow gravediggers are harbouring criminal designs, he begins to glimpse strange figures in the cemetery after dark. Meanwhile, Yejide is losing her mother, Petronella, shortly after the death of her aunt Geraldine: she’ll soon be paying another visit to Darwin’s necropolis. In a typically eerie scene, Yejide sees those two sisters – one dead, one barely alive – knitting together on the porch: “The twins move in unison like always… But nothing spill from Geraldine fingers.”
At points, the central plot can seem too Romeo and Juliet – less momentum than predestination – and the air of sexual heat is too often tamped down. But the telling is enchanting: as we toggle back and forth between Yejide’s and Darwin’s minds, we bask in all manner of longing, for the living and dead alike. The atmosphere is intensely conjured, with squalling storms, luscious food and sinister acts by night. As Darwin thinks, half-awed and half-scared, about the depths of Trinidad: “What else it have in the world in front of his eyes that he don’t see?”