By Larissa Page
Ayanna Lloyd Banwo is bursting onto the scene with this electric and beautiful debut novel When We Were Birds. Set in Trinidad and Tobago, bursting with culture and a crossover of reality and mythical planes, this novel follows two characters who come from wildly different backgrounds and are inexplicably linked.
Yejide comes from Morne Marie, the newest of a long line of women who are connected to the dead to help them manage their time on the other side. Due to a fraught relationship with her mother, she hasn’t been taught how to use or manage this gift and needs to learn it on her own. Darwin, a Rastafarian from the country, is new to the city as he looks to find work to send money home to his mother. However, the only work he’s been offered is in a graveyard and this goes against all he’s ever known and been taught by his devout mother. It goes against their religion to interact with the dead. Having never been to a funeral or seen a dead body, working in a graveyard is a moral adjustment that he must work through even as he learns there may be more at play. The story tells us of Darwin and Yejide separately until they meet, lives intertwining, toward the end.
I did not know what to expect going into this story, so all of it was a new experience. It is written in a dialect that makes it so you can almost hear the characters and narrator talking as you’re reading it. This took a minute to get into the flow of reading, but it ultimately became one of my favourite parts of the novel as a whole. Once I got into the flow of reading this style of writing, I found it went quickly and was engaging.
The imagery was another of my favourite parts of this story. Much of Yejide’s story takes place with aspects of magical realism or mythological crossover and the imagery in the writing is vivid and beautiful. At points, I did find it to be a bit confusing, but I attribute that to being unfamiliar with much of that culture, stories, lore, etc., so by taking a minute and giving my brain a chance to form the images the writing was giving me, I felt like I was connecting to the story.
This is the type of book that takes a little bit of work to read and understand, but you are ultimately rewarded with a beautiful, new, original story that you are happy you devoted time to. It may not be a novel you pick up when you want a quick and easy read, but don’t pass it over if that’s what you usually read. This debut is worth your time.
Thank you, Penguin Random House Canada, for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review.