Ayanna Lloyd Banwo’s debut is presented as a romance, but it also centres another kind of love: the complexity of mothering and its beautiful and terrible consequences. On the eve of her mother Petronella’s death, protagonist Yejide provides one of the book’s most haunting extended metaphors: “She only know her mother through moments meant for someone else.” As a child, she creeps after Petronella, watching her intense relationship with her aunt, her mother’s twin, and saving the memories of her own neglect in multicoloured boxes that she spreads out and looks at sometimes: a light blue box that “smells like loneliness”; a forest-green box, “wide with a false bottom”; another, black, “padlocked and humming”; a box in heavy purple, “like an unanswered question”.
When We Were Birds moves between two characters, Yejide and Darwin, living in a fictionalised Trinidad, its rich urbanity so fondly drawn that it occasionally threatens to take over the narrative. Darwin was raised Rastafarian in the countryside by a devoted mother, the pair “living like their own island”. They fall out painfully when Darwin must take a city job as a gravedigger, defying scripture (Numbers 21:6 says “the Nazarite must not go near a dead body”). The scene where Darwin shears his head in order to work is tender and lonely and powerful, reminiscent of Kei Miller’s hymnal to Rastafarianism in his 2016 novel Augustown.
