When We Were Birds|Ayanna Lloyd Banwo
One part magical realism, one part crime thriller, and one part romance, When We Were Birds is a genre-blending tale rendered entirely in patois. Ayanna Lloyd Banwo sets her debut novel in a fictional Trinidad, following Emmanuel Darwin and Yejide St Bernard on separate paths to self-discovery that eventually lead them to each other, thanks to their disparate connection to death.
Darwin, a phlegmatic, good-natured Rastafarian from the countryside, reluctantly takes a job as a gravedigger in the city of Port Angeles, a place known to “swallow a man whole,” in a bid to help Janaya, his ageing, single mother. His decision to relocate to the same city that did indeed swallow his estranged father, alongside the prospect of mingling with dead bodies—verboten in their Rastafarian faith—ruptures the close bond between mother and son.
“I make you. You is mine. But if you leave this house to go and live in town, you not coming back,” she warns.
But even as the line of separation deepens, with Darwin chopping off the dreadlocks he has grown since childhood, Janaya still leaves out a coconut bake for him, “still warm and smelling of her hands,” before he sets off to the city, demonstrating how the roots of her love run deeper than their irreconcilable differences.
In Port Angeles, in the sprawling house begotten from the ashes of a former plantation perched on a hill, Yejide’s mother is on the cusp of death. Unlike Darwin and Janaya, Yejide and Petronella have never been close. But like Janaya, Petronella has sought to shield her child from death, even though they are descended from a line of female necromancers tasked with maintaining the balance between the living and the dead. In the end, Fate does what it must, and Yejide’s initiation into her family’s mystical vocation proceeds—but not without resistance.
In the interim, Darwin tries to bond with his colleagues at Fidelis, the decrepit graveyard aptly described as a “city of bone.” But when it dawns on him that the clique’s friendly ringleader might have a hand in the disappearance of a despondent widower, the camaraderie he once shared with the group dissolves. Amid the mysterious happenings in Fidelis, Darwin meets Yejide, first in a dramatic vision, and then in person when she visits the cemetery’s administrative office to plan her mother’s burial, charging the rest of the plot with the electrifying impulses of a love-at-first-sight romance.
“He wonder what it would smell like, feel like under his fingers, but same time he glad he can’t see it. Without it there was just her face, bare and clean like river water. And in her face – she couldn’t hide it. He know she recognise him too.”
Between them resides a revelation of loss, a desire to blaze their own trail, and the emotional cost of contravening expectations. For Darwin, this means conniving with his alienated mother’s best friend to ensure his mother doesn’t spurn the money he sends her. For Yejide—whose supernatural gift feels like a suffocating curse given she now sees others in their duality, with Death trailing the living like a shadow and “with every single dead in Fidelis, across Port Angeles, all over the island, pissed as hell and want her to know it” for resisting her calling—it means running away from everything, including her grieving close-knit family. The decision prompts a stern reproach from her best friend, who admonishes her to honour her ancestors and assume her responsibilities of ushering souls to “a good, long sleep.”
In choosing patois to relate the story, Banwo follows in the long tradition of African writers and those of African descent deconstructing and transforming English—a colonial language—into a lemonade of local variants, as capable of introspection, powerful imagery and zesty plays on words as the so-called standard form, if not more so.
When We Were Birds shines in its tender portrait of the love between Darwin and his mother, as well as its lush, potent descriptions, such as the anger that comes off Petronella “like silver spikes,” or the crosses reaching out “like rotten fingers from the ground.” However, the narrative falters in its flat characterisations and occasionally overwrought exposition. Darwin is a predictable goody-two-shoes type whose only flaws lie in the disagreement with his mother and his getting drunk at his coworkers’ behest, while Yejide lacks a strong defining trait beyond her powers, a blandness that also afflicts other members of her household. Her world compared to Darwin’s is tepid and heavy going, weighed down with details about her paranormal heritage.
And even when viewed through that acceptable trope of the illogical but instantaneous attraction for a stranger, the romance between Darwin and Yejide feels too rushed and contrived to be realistic, and may have benefitted from a deeper, more complex exploration of the protagonists’ relationship with each other, a shortcoming perhaps arising from the novel’s relative brevity.
That said, Banwo makes compelling work of how a world in which the living and the dead coexist in an enduring, if uneasy, harmony. As Petronella says, “Fair don’t always mean good. Exchange don’t always mean peace. Power don’t always mean free.”
This review originally appeared in The Johannesburg Review of Books.
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