“WE’RE SO OLD DEATH BEGINS HERE”: Ayanna Lloyd Banwo in Conversation

with Leanne Francis

Strange things occur in When We Were Birds by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo. Storms are conjured, graves are desecrated, and vultures cast a shadow above, circling, circling. The novel follows Yejide and Darwin, two death workers whose lives intersect in a turbulently magical way. We’re transported to the shadowy parts of Port Angeles, a fictionalised version of Port of Spain in Trinidad, where we are introduced to Yejide St Bernard. This young woman resides in her old family home on a hill, grieving her dying mother whilst experiencing her own rebirth. Yejide soon learns about her family legacy and their deep connection to the corbeaux, meaning the black birds who take in the souls of the dead, flying east at sunset. Meanwhile, Emmanuel Darwin, a young man estranged from his mother and their Rastafari faith, arrives in Port Angeles where he secures a job as a gravedigger in the Fidelis cemetery with a group of men harbouring their own dark secrets. As the lives of Yejide and Darwin slowly intertwine, becoming one at the infamous Fidelis graveyard, a darkness within Port Angeles is unearthed, bringing with it storms, deception, and the collective anger of souls not at rest. Together, Yejide and Darwin must navigate the thin veil separating the living from the dead in this story sewn from folktales and flesh, age-old wisdom and love. When We Were Birds is not only a story for the living but for the dead, reminding us of the ancient wisdom we must find a way to preserve. 

Ayanna smiles at me from the screens we have become all too familiar with over the past two years. Dressed comfortably in a cerise jumper with nails delicately painted to match, her positive, calming energy radiates through the screen, accompanied by a gentle Trinidadian accent that feels like a welcome summer breeze. I feel so incredibly privileged to be speaking to Ayanna, and though my knowledge of Trinidad and Tobago is somewhat limited, Ayanna describes a sense of community that reminds me of St Helena and South Africa. She talks to me about writing an ode to our ancestors, who are our very own libraries, and the importance of preserving their stories at a time of great loss all across the world. Together, we explore everything from understandings of lineage and love to magic, spirituality, and creating something that feels like home in the diaspora. Ayanna is currently working on her second novel. 

LEANNE

When We Were Birds is an incredible novel about love and grief and magic, in a world surrounded by the dead. Was there anything in particular that inspired it?

AYANNA

For a long time, I tried to write what I thought was my big grief novel. Our family had a series of deaths in a very short space of time. I was still in Trinidad then and had spent a lot of time walking around in cemeteries. There was one cemetery in particular, Lapeyrouse Cemetery, which people may recognise as Fidelis in the novel. I started writing about a man who was the keeper of the keys in a graveyard, walking through every night to make sure that no one is left behind before locking up. One day, he finds that a man has been left, Mr. Julius in the novel. This small scene turned into a story I took to workshop at UEA (University of East Anglia). My tutor told me it had legs. The story has a whole world that’s bubbling under the surface. Think about whether this is what you want to work on this year.

That’s the timeline of the novel, but what I’d been thinking a lot about was death work, really. That there is invisible work that happens around death. Mortuary workers, grave diggers, the people that you go to to process your funeral grants—they’re invisible. No one wants to become a death worker. These are the people you never want to see. You’d prefer to act as if they don’t exist at all. And because everything is as above, so below, in the spirit and in the flesh, there has to be an accompanying spiritual death work, also. When I started thinking about characters, that’s how Darwin and Yejide became these two representatives of that kind of work. I had the world, which was the cemetery, then the characters, and then the story.

LEANNE

I want to know more about the origin story of the corbeaux and how it’s told from generation to generation until it reaches Yejide, who experiences her own kind of metamorphosis. How did the story of the corbeaux come to you?

AYANNA

So, here’s the thing: it’s easy to say I made it up, but I don’t know if I did. It’s difficult to make anything up, especially around mythology. I grew up reading a lot of mythology, everything from fairy tales to Greek myths. I was born in 1980 and there was a series of story books about Anansi at that time. I think that many people who came of age in the 70s during the Black Power movement in the Caribbean, were very conscious of the need to find Black stories for their kids. I grew up with stories from everywhere so I find it difficult to say, this is where I read this. This is where this came from. This is where. This is, this is. What we call the corbeaux in Trinidad is the American vulture, found all along the landmass. First Nations have their own legends, stories about vultures, about ravens, about blackbirds. They’re sometimes menacing, sometimes death omens, sometimes spirit guides, sometimes everything all at once. What I was drawn to was their biology: the idea that these birds can eat dead flesh but don’t get sick, don’t die. They’re able to take in death, take in contagion, take in what is rotting—and almost transmute it in their bodies. They’re everywhere in Trinidad, in the cities, in the countryside. When you see them circle, circle, circle, you know there’s some kind of death nearby.

“What I was drawn to was their biology: the idea that these birds can eat dead flesh but don’t get sick, don’t die. They’re able to take in death, take in contagion, take in what is rotting—and almost transmute it in their bodies.”

LEANNE

As much as this is a story about love and grief, it’s also an allegory for the current climate crisis. You show us the many close relationships between humankind and nature, both good and bad. Is there something you hope readers will take away from When We Were Birds?

AYANNA

I suppose two things. One is call your mom. She wants to hear from you. If she’s dead, call her still. She wants to hear from you. The other is for us to think about how we are going to continue to live, to get the things we want, to build the empires that we think are necessary to continue to thrive in capitalism. We can’t think about how to do the ‘climate thing’ while continuing to do all of this. They are incompatible. I open the novel with that deep time allegory because, for me, it does two things. It says that the Caribbean is an old place. We imagine that the islands, or any place in a postcolonial world, is born through European discovery. I wanted to make it clear that, no, you’re a latecomer to our story. We are so old death begins here. The idea of deep time, that these spaces are old, that our ways of doing things are old, says that the mess we’ve made is new. This is not how we’ve always done things. It’s new. It’s disruptive. And we need to act with incredible haste if we’re to have any chance of survival. I’m not a climate change activist. I don’t know enough of the science. I’m just a black Caribbean woman who knows that this can’t be the way we’re gonna go along. It can’t.

LEANNE

I’d quite like to go back to the setting of Port Angeles. It’s a city bursting with life, full of colourful characters and culture that almost flies off the page. Is When We Were Birds a homage to those back home?

AYANNA

Oh, absolutely. In my dedication, I say that this book is for my parents who have died but are not asleep. It was always very, very clear to me that that’s who I’m writing for. It probably sounds self indulgent to say that I don’t write for people, but I actually don’t. I write for dead people. My sense of creativity is ancestor driven, lineage driven, and that means I hope that it sits right with them, more than anything else. I feel that if things aren’t enough aligned with who this is for, with what work this is doing, then it’s not going to resonate outside of that.

LEANNE

A lot of us can relate to writing for your ancestors, particularly with pandemic we’re going through. Reading When We Were Birds genuinely made me cry. I just want to thank you for writing it.

AYANNA

I’m glad it did that for you. I wrote it during the height of the pandemic and was living in Norwich by myself at the time. I didn’t see another person in real life for around five months. Everyday, I’d look at the rising death toll and go, is there a cure? I’d be messaging home, anybody find any bush tea that I can cure this thing? What I can take? What I can take? I kept thinking about how there is a serious psychic and spiritual toll that this is taking on us. I don’t know if we’re thinking enough about how losing that many elders at the same time, all around the world, is a very heavy, heavy thing. They are the caregivers, storytellers, matriarchs and patriarchs who run houses, who help care for children. But they’re also our libraries, and we’ve not just lost them, but we’ve been unable to mourn them and bury them properly. I think we’ll be dealing with that for a while.

“I don’t know if we’re thinking enough about how losing that many elders at the same time, all around the world, is a very heavy, heavy thing. I think we’ll be dealing with that for a while.”

LEANNE

You say, in the novel, “the power belong to the women. The dead don’t listen to us.” Were there any women from your research, or your own life, that helped shape this story?

AYANNA

My own family, I suppose. My grandmother was a storyteller. Stories about her mother, stories about her grandmother. It meant that I grew up with a clear sense of lineage on my mother’s side, less so on my father’s side, at least at the time. I think my grandma had this sense that she was part of somebody else, and they were part of somebody else. She grounded us in that sensibility. I know her mother’s name was Lily. I know her grandmother’s name was Prudence. I know things about them even though they are so long dead. I am part of a line.

I’m also interested in the ownership and repatriation of land. The idea that the plantation was overtaken, burned, and rebuilt as something else came quite late in the novel, and bits of my PhD probably bled into that story. The plantation that I’m thinking of in my head is a real place in Trinidad. Most of the history and the images would have come from things I saw growing up. There are things that exist and are real, things you read, and things you research. Imagination layers over that, and you use it all to create something else.

LEANNE

It feels like home, even as someone who grew up in the UK. The use of Creole also grounds us in the setting. Was it important to you that you use Creole to narrate When We Were Birds?

AYANNA

Very, but I didn’t know how important it was for a while. I had been trying to write in Standard English, but when I talk, it shifts, depending on what I want to talk about. There was an inconsistency between the dialogue and the narrator’s voice, and I figured, there shouldn’t be a separation at all. It could all be in the same Creole, the same register, the same present tense all the way through, which is how the grammar of Trinidadian Creole works. There’s no past tense. It’s all present. It doesn’t mean that people don’t use the past tense when they speak, but it’s how Marlon James talks about Jamaican Creole: I go, he go, she go, them did go. There’s no other modification to the verb ‘go’. One of my teachers at UEA said, you’re caught between thinking of the audience and the writing. You’re translating yourself. Don’t do that. I think every writer has that colonial English teacher on their shoulder that tells us, this is grammar. This is the right. This is, this is. It took me a little while to get rid of them.

LEANNE

What was the transition here like?

AYANNA

I came to Norwich in 2017 and only moved to London a year ago with my husband. Norwich is slow whereas here, in London, it’s very go, all the time. I love that now. I’m within easy reach of plantain all the time. There are black people. That’s nice. I’d love to say that the house smells like the Caribbean, but it does not. My husband is Nigerian and he’s the cook. But because I came here so old, I don’t ever feel like I’m not in Trinidad. I don’t know anywhere else as I know Trinidad. That’s where I am no matter where I am. Home is fixed and clear and true.

This place, England, is the imaginary place for me still. This is the place that doesn’t quite exist in my consciousness. I like writing in public and people watching, especially because England is still an odd, strange place to me. I like watching what people do, how they dress and talk to each other. I find people watching to be good.

LEANNE

Tell us more about your second novel. 

AYANNA

I’m in the thick of writing it now. After UEA, I went straight into my PhD programme. My second novel is a PhD project and it should be done this year. Done as in right, this is it, now let’s take it apart and edit it. What I can say is that it is set in the same world of Port Angeles, the same imagined space. Writing a second novel is a different process. We’ve aged a lot in the past two years. I’m trying to be kinder to myself and my body, quit smoking and drink more tea.

LEANNE

Any recommendations?

AYANNA

The good thing about this book thing is that people send you books. Lisa Allen-Agostini’s The Bread the Devil Knead was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize. Kevin Jared Hosein, another Trinidadian writer, is releasing a book next year. It’s not the first book he’s published, but it’s his first big publisher. Okwiri Oduor, Things They Lost. Louise Kennedy, Trespasses. Sophie Jai’s Wild Fires. Caroline Mackenzie.