When We Were Birds
SynopsisPlot
In the old house on a hill, where the city meets the rainforest, Yejide’s mother is dying. She is leaving behind a legacy that now passes to Yejide: one St Bernard woman in every generation has the power to shepherd the city’s souls into the afterlife. But after years of suffering her mother’s neglect and bitterness, Yejide is looking for a way out. Raised in the countryside by a devout Rastafarian mother, Darwin has always abide by the religious commandment not to interact with death. He has never been to a funeral, much less seen a dead body. But when the only job he can find is grave digging, he must betray the life his mother built for him in order to provide for them both.
Story
About this book
In the hills above Port of Spain, where the city presses against Trinidad's rainforest, a young woman named Yejide watches her mother die. With that death comes an inheritance she did not ask for: in each generation of the St Bernard family, one woman is chosen to guide the souls of the dead into the afterlife. Yejide, shaped by years of her mother's neglect and resentment, wants to refuse the role entirely.
Darwin grew up in rural Trinidad, raised by a devout Rastafarian mother whose faith forbids contact with death. He has never attended a funeral or seen a body. When economic pressure drives him to take the only work available, digging graves in the city's cemetery, he crosses a boundary his mother spent his whole life enforcing. The job pulls him into a world he was taught to avoid, and eventually into proximity with Yejide and the St Bernard legacy.
Ayanna Lloyd Banwo's debut novel draws on Trinidadian spiritual traditions and the geography of Port of Spain to build a story where two characters, each bound by inherited rules about death, find their paths converging. The narrative moves between Yejide's hilltop house and the cemetery grounds, connecting questions of obligation, family, and what the living owe the dead.
