When We Were Birds is a gorgeously immersive, mesmerising and life-affirming literary debut – a love story and a ghost story set in modern-day Trinidad. In this Q&A, author Ayanna Lloyd Banwo chats about creating fictionalised places, the book that had the most profound influence on her and being invisible.
The sense of place is very important in your novel. Can you tell us more about where you come from and how it infused the story?
I grew up in Trinidad and Tobago in the 1980s and 1990s, and then years later I moved to Norwich in the UK. They’re both small places that don’t act like small places – they punch somehow above their weight. My mother’s family specifically came from Belmont, a suburb of Port of Spain which was originally known as Freetown. Her stories about that neighbourhood in the 1950s inspired me to create Bellemere, a fictionalised version of the same suburb, which features in When We Were Birds and will reappear in my second novel too.
In fact it’s not just Bellemere – the whole city, the whole island where the novel takes place is fictionalised. It is an imagined Trinidad with the volume turned up loud: I transformed Port of Spain into a city called Port Angeles, rearranging streets and rivers and buildings, bringing mountains impossibly close to the edge of the city and flinging neighbourhoods far apart. I wanted to show how an island can feel as vast and unknowable as a continent – the kind of place where stepping out of your door, crossing into an unknown quarter of the city, might mean getting so lost that no one will ever find you again. That’s how Trinidad feels to me.
Who or what are the major influences in your writing?
There are a handful of writers who are never far from my mind and, I hope, my writing. Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things had a profound influence on me when I read it so many years ago. Toni Morrison’s Beloved, anything Earl Lovelace has written, Isabelle Allende’s House of the Spirits, Kei Miller’s Augustown, Olive Senior’s poems in Gardening in the Tropics, Lorna Goodison’s poems in I Am Becoming My Mother. Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate. Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry. Anything by Jesmyn Ward or Sarah Hall. These days I’m reading and rereading my way through Saidiya Hartman, Sylvia Wynter and Dionne Brand. No finer inspiration to be found.
“I grew up on calypso, reggae, classical music, soul and R&B. Lots of dancing in the kitchen, going to clubs way too young, playing steel pan and piano.”
And then I am interested in and influenced by folkways and deathways and the movement of Black Atlantic cultures. I am a believer in the magic of luck and the science of the ‘get through’. I am constantly amazed by my grief and my good fortune.
Apart from reading (of course!), what are your other passions? Where do you draw inspiration from?
I grew up on calypso, reggae, classical music, soul and R&B. Lots of dancing in the kitchen, going to clubs way too young, playing steel pan and piano. All of us had to learn a musical instrument. There were four pianos at my grandmother’s house at one point, because my mother and aunt taught piano lessons there. My teenage years were swept up in hip hop, dancehall and rapso. I don't think a lot of people know about rapso – an indigenous Trinidadian music form that is described as ‘the power of the word in the rhythm of the word’ – think Rastafari roots, resistance energy, doption drums, hip hop/dub poetry flow and Fela Kuti horns.
Carnival. Anything and everything carnival. I am spiritually devoted to Jouvay, and the ancestors.
I like taking walks. I like looking. Feeling invisible when I want to. I am a short Black woman who is rendered invisible or hyper-visible at inconvenient times, so I love when invisibility is voluntary and pleasurable. I am inspired by houses and cities and places that feel well-lived-in.
Food. My husband is a chef so we love to eat! Trinidad breadfruit and Julie mangoes.
I’m getting better at gardening, even though my husband is the one who wakes up early to water the plants and check for caterpillars and deal with slugs and earthworms. But I’m finding there is something in gardening that I keep coming back to. My mother, grandmother and great-grandmother all had gardens.
And I love dogs. At one point we had fourteen of them! At the end of things, before I left Trinidad to come to the UK, I lived with seven dogs. I still have very extensive dreams about them.
When we were Birds by Ayanna Lloyd Banwo is out now. Read an extract.
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