When We Were Birds Quotes

“Grave is home, grave is lineage. Grave is to know where your people is, even if you can't see them anymore.”
― Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, When We Were Birds

“When the last feather has gone, and your woman body has grown full, remember that you remain a bird inside. You have not forgotten how to fly. For what is more woman than holding death and life, sky and earth in your body same time, to fly while earthbound?”
― Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, When We Were Birds

“Yejide don't have the heart to tell him that is not only headstones that make a place a burial ground. Under the Green, under fancy restaurants that used to be plantation houses, under the government buildlings, under the housing complexes, under the shopping malls, is layers and layers of dead — unknown, unnamed, unclaimed. It don't have a single place on this whole island that don't house the dead.”
― Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, When We Were Birds

“You feeling the thing that in my mother, and her mother and hers, calling to the thing that is you, and in your daughter (...), and in her daughter and hers.”
― Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, When We Were Birds

“Bad enough to fall in love with anybody at all, but to love a woman who heart split in two, the other part residing in the body of a dead woman. She wonder if Peter ration his own heart, loving just enough so he have something left for himself when Petronella up and leave, just so when the storm decide it was time.”
― Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, When We Were Birds

“Maybe that is the deal: she, her mother, all her mothers before that give up everything in service of the dead, but they get something back - an anchor. Somebody rooted and kind and alive, to tether them to here, so they don't forget that a spirit was a body once, so they don't forget how it feel to not know the day or the hour, so they feel the precious cost and the weight of dying without warning.”
― Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, When We Were Birds

“Only children does ask about God. We is women. We come from Death.”
― Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, When We Were Birds

“How to explain to him that her mother is a womb and a grave; a cage and a pair of wings; a feeding tube and a noose.”
― Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, When We Were Birds

“First thing you have to remember,” Granny Catherine hold her granddaughter, Yejide, close on her lap, “is that there was a time before time.”

And I never leave you.”
― Ayanna Lloyd Banwo, When We Were Birds