Book review: When We Were Birds by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo

By Simon Demetriou 

I liked When We Were Birds so much that I find it very difficult to review. Once I had finished reading the book, it was like being on the receiving end of a completely unexpected act of kindness by a stranger, one that that you know you will never be able to repay. So, all there is to do is be grateful.

Still, that doesn’t help you very much. You probably want an actual review.

This is a book that effortlessly creates touching moments that resonate with any reader despite being set in a fictional Trinidad nudged into the realm of fantasy. Yejide is the youngest in a line of women whose job it is to contain death within themselves and ‘make sure that it is nothing more than a good, long sleep’. Emmanuel was consecrated as a Nazarite by his mother and sworn to never go near a dead body. Both children struggle with the duties imposed on them by blood and tradition. It is Emmanuel’s heart-rending departure from his mother’s house to go to Port Angeles, the city from which his own father never returned and where he has been given work in the country’s largest cemetery, which first displays Ayanna Lloyd Banwo’s gift for moving her reader. It is the first of several moments that brought me to tears. At the same time, when Yejide takes stock of the mental boxes of stored resentment she has gathered from a lifetime of sharing her mother with the dead and with Geraldine, her mother’s twin, it is hard not to be reminded of the bitter feelings of injustice that litter every childhood.

Fidelis, the cemetery, forms the central landscape of the novel, and it is here that the two protagonists are brought together, against a backdrop of crime and bereavement. In seeking not to be destroyed by the criminal world into which he is unwittingly placed, Emmanuel learns truths that shed new light on his obscure past. In coming to terms with her new position as matriarch of the St Bernard family and the clamouring voices of the dead that accompany that role, Yejide learns to understand herself and her ancestors. In their own ways, Yejide and Emmanuel also save each other in a climax that is thrilling and, of course, deeply touching.

The only way to end this review is to say that it is a failure. The review, that is. I have failed to do When We Were Birds justice, so all I can do is urge you to read it. You’ll be glad you did.