Myth, magic and metaphysical alterity in Ayanna Lloyd Banwo’s When We Were Birds

Abstract

Contemporary Caribbean literature frequently revisits ancestral memory, folklore, and indigenous spiritual traditions as means of interrogating the enduring effects of colonialism and cultural displacement. Ayanna Lloyd Banwo’s novel When We Were Birds (2022) exemplifies this literary tendency through its engagement with Afro-Caribbean cosmology, oral storytelling, and beliefs surrounding death and the afterlife. This paper examines how Banwo employs myth, magic, and metaphysical alterity to challenge colonial forms of othering and to recover marginalized cultural epistemologies. Drawing on postcolonial perspectives on cultural memory, hybridity, and resistance, the study undertakes a close textual analysis of the novel’s major characters, Yejide and Emmanuel, alongside its representations of ancestral spirits, oral traditions, and sacred landscapes. The analysis demonstrates that Banwo reimagines death not as a finality but as a continuum connecting the living and the dead, while simultaneously validating Afro-Caribbean spiritual practices such as Orisha and Obeah traditions. The novel further reveals how storytelling, memory, and inherited beliefs function as mechanisms of cultural survival and resistance against colonial erasure. The study concludes that When We Were Birds transforms myth and folklore into powerful modes of reclaiming identity, preserving collective memory, and affirming alternative ways of knowing within contemporary Caribbean literature.