When We Were Birds and Tayari Jones on Toni Morrison's only short story, Recitatif.

Books and Authors

BBC

Society & Culture, Books

4.2 • 824 Ratings

🗓️ 20 February 2022

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Johny Pitts talks to Trinidadian author Ayanna Lloyd Banwo about her debut novel When We Were Birds. It is a carefully crafted story set in the backstreets of Trinidad, where a young man called Darwin has newly arrived in the city of Port Angeles looking for a fresh start and his lost father. He’s forced to shed his Rastafarian faith in order to pick up the only work going, as a gravedigger in a sprawling cemetery full of secrets. In a parallel story, Yejide lives with her dying mother in an old house on a hill and is about to inherit a super-natural ancestral power passed on down through the women of the family. The novel blends myth, magic, and indigenous wisdom with everyday struggle and is, ultimately, a passionate love story between two lost souls.

Alex Preston's latest novel Winchelsea is set in the 18th century as a young woman enters into the cut throat world of smugglers in a quest to avenge her father’s death. And today he takes us through the stormy relationship some of our literary smugglers have had with the truth and the real smugglers that inspired them…

We’ll be exploring the exquisite racial riddle at the heart of Toni Morrison’s first and only short story, Recitatif, with the author of An American Marriage and Silver Sparrow, Tayari Jones as it's published in hardback for the first time.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You are about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about what goes into making one.
0:06.5	I'm Sadata Sese, an assistant commissioner of podcasts for BBC Sounds.
0:11.2	I pull a lot of levers to support a diverse range of podcasts on all sorts of subjects,
0:16.0	relationships, identity, comedy, even one that mixes poetry, music and inner city life.
0:22.4	So one day I'll be helping host develop their ideas, the next fact-checking, a feature,
0:28.3	and the next looking at how a podcast connects with its audience, and maybe that's you.
0:33.6	So if you like this podcast, check out some others on BBC Sounds.
0:39.5	BBC Sounds, music, radio podcasts.
0:43.2	Today on Open Book, novels that pick us up and whisk us off across high seas through the supernatural
0:49.5	and even into our own psychic landscapes.
0:52.7	We'll be exploring the exquisite racial riddle at the
0:55.2	heart of Tony Morrison's first and only short story. And Alex Preston will be taking us through
1:00.5	literary fiction involving that iconic, and it turns out often misrepresented anti-hero
1:05.8	the smuggler. But first, we begin with a novel full of ghosts of the past,
1:14.4	featured as one of the observer's best debut novels of 2022 and counting among its fans the likes of Pat Barker, Monique Ruffet and Jacob Ross,
1:19.5	when we were birds by Alana Lloyd Banro is a carefully crafted story
1:23.3	set in the back streets of Trinidad.
1:26.2	Darwin is a young man on the precipice of poverty,
1:29.0	newly arrived in the city of Port Los Angeles
1:31.2	looking for a fresh start and his lost father.
1:34.7	He's forced to reinvent himself in perhaps the most unglamorous way,
1:38.9	shedding his Rastafarian faith in order to pick up the only work going
	...

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