Listed below are excerpts from “’When We Have been Birds’ by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo overview–a deeply satisfying debut,” by Hephzibah Anderson (The Guardian), who calls the e book a “spirited Trinidadian love story a few gravedigger and a medium has echoes of Dickens.” [Many thanks to peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention. See previous post Trinbagonian author releases debut novel.]
A love story, a ghost story, a thriller: Ayanna Lloyd Banwo’s radiant first novel embraces parts of a number of genres, binding them by way of incantatory language steeped within the rhythms, fables and spirituality of her Trinidadian homeland.
At its centre are two younger individuals wrestling with their destinies. Yejide St Bernard belongs to a protracted line of girls duty-bound to commune with the useless. Her distant mom, Petronella, has railed towards this spectral legacy, however now that she is dying it’s incumbent upon her to induct Yejide into powers that may shortly turn out to be hers, remaking her from the within out.
In the meantime, Emmanuel Darwin, a rustic boy, should purchase medication for Janaya, the mom who has raised him single-handedly. The one job he’s capable of finding is in Port Angeles, a spot that “may swallow a person complete”, she warns, believing that is precisely what occurred to Darwin’s father. Worse but, the job is in an unlimited cemetery known as Fidelis, and their Rastafari religion prohibits contact with the deceased. Shaving off his locks in preparation, Darwin turns into unrecognisable even to himself.
It’s at Fidelis that Darwin and Yejide meet, first throughout a wild storm from which she materialises, wearing white and shaking its locked gates earlier than vanishing into skinny air, and later when she arrives to debate her mom’s funeral. Their connection is instantaneous, electrical. However how can they forge a shared future from such radically totally different pasts?
All through, the supernatural is rendered in visceral phrases. As Yejide comes into her powers, she registers the change first as a ache deep inside, “like any person sink a hook into her stomach and yank from behind”. There’s nothing fey about her predicament. As Darwin notes when he initially claps eyes on her: “She didn’t look misplaced or haunted, under no circumstances. She look rattling vex.”
It’s made all of the extra believable by the gravitational pull of Banwo’s lushly delineated world – the cemetery, as an illustration, with its rampant foliage and gothic funerary structure, or Morne Marie, the St Bernard household house, constructed on the ashes of a plantation home, its lengthy corridors and wood staircases indexing its transformation over the centuries. [. . .]
For full overview, see https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/mar/06/when-we-were-birds-by-ayanna-lloyd-banwo-reviewWhen We Have been Birds: A Novel
Ayanna Lloyd Banwo
Doubleday. March 2022
304 pages
ISBN 978-0593556689 (pb), 978-0385547260 (hc)
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/672073/when-we-were-birds-by-ayanna-lloyd-banwo