posted on 07 Mar 2024

We Could Fly by Rhiannon Giddens, illustrated by Briana Mukodiri Uchendu

Rhiannon Giddens is a Grammy award-winning folk/country musician from North Carolina who plays with a band called the Carolina Chocolate Drops and also writes and records as a solo artist. We Could Fly uses the lyrics of one of her songs to tell an aspirational, even magical story, of finding our inner selves and being in tune with our cultural heritage.

In a useful note at the end of the book, Giddens tells us the inspiration behind the song she has written. As a child she was besotted by a book of Black American folk tales called The People Could Fly retold by Virginia Hamiliton and illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon. The book stayed with her through the years but it is the last story in that anthology that encapsulated the real magic – something she felt more acutely than ever when she came to read it to her daughter.

“That story was about the people who could fly, who had been captured from their homeland and brought to a terrible new reality across the ocean. They lost their wings and forgot how to fly until one day, after generations in bondage, an old wise man remembered the magic words, and the people who could fly remembered how and flew away to freedom. The ones who couldn’t fly… they continued to tell the story down through the generations, because hope takes many forms.”

Translating this into a song that found its way onto Giddens’ album, Freedom Highway, the symbolism is more ethereal, more lyrical and enigmatic. But even so, the message is clear:

“…..we are only here because of what our predecessors went through – and that we have a responsibility to tell their story, wrapped around with our own.”

But the words in this book are only a part of the story because this is very much a work of art that comes from a full partnership between author and illustrator. The artwork from Briana Mukodiri Uchendu is stunning and the large format allows the drawings to fill the space, often bleeding right off the edges. Uchendu also provides a note at the end in which she tells us what her approach was:

“The imagery that came to mind was a corded thread made up of many colours of light. I saw different souls and stories weaving and winding together to create the chords of the ancestral song. So that’s what I drew.”

Published by Walker Books, We Could Fly can be obtained from your local independent bookshop – who will be happy to order it for you if they don’t have copies on their shelves.

 

Terry Potter

March 2024