This novel opens with a sequence that focuses on menacing birds – corbeaux, or black vultures, which have advanced from parrots – then rapidly switches to a person beginning work as a gravedigger, underneath a “dirty-clothes sky”.
If this sounds somewhat murky, readers needn’t be postpone. Ayanna Lloyd Banwo paints her pulsing, plausible – however fictional – Trinidad with mild and intimacy. When We Had been Birds is an instantly seductive, pleasurable expertise due to the craft within the colloquial language – the story is advised in Creole English – and a surefooted consideration to element. We meet odd and arresting characters and, added to all of this, rumbles of light humor and primary kindness are woven via the darker themes.