Believing in Me is an endearing homage to the power and value of compassion and community. Over 12 short chapters the book follows the author, Deborah Somorin, from her childhood in a “normal middle-class” household in Nigeria, through the breakdown of her family life and her parents’ separation, which brings her to a small town in Co Kildare as a 10 year old.
Feeling alienated and out of place in Naas, she admits feeling “like a freak” because the children in her new school make comments about her dark-skinned, full-lipped West African features. Her father goes back to his other family in Nigeria and leaves her in the custody of her mother and three siblings in a low-income, single-parent, immigrant household. There she suffers a lot of physical and verbal abuse at the hands of her mother, who reacts violently to what she believes is deliberately deviant, selfish and frustrating behaviour from her daughter, going as far as locking 11-year-old Deborah out of the house and calling the Garda on her for missing her curfew. The scars left by the “spankings” and “beatings” become the catalyst for Deborah spending her teen years in State care, moving from foster homes to homeless accommodation to residential homes.
Somorin writes about her traumatic past from her current position as a management consultant, chartered accountant and founder of Empower the Family, a non-profit organisation that aims to provide affordable social housing and childcare to single parents and care-leavers pursuing a degree. The book posits an important central question: how was it possible that a young person who found herself homeless at 13 and pregnant at 14 managed to not only navigate but overcome challenging social circumstances, and a flawed care system to achieve a successful and enriching career and life?
Each chapter is introduced with quotations from famous writers, thought leaders and poets such as Paulo Coelho, Toni Morrison, Bell Hooks and Helen Keller. Somorin attempts to establish her position among the literary, philosophical and cultural authorities she invokes. Conversely, the author concludes each section with a letter to her younger self, with the exception of the final letter which is addressed to her future self. The use of the epistolary form in the narrative allows us to view the speaker in her most vulnerable state.
She enacts and performs the core message and aim of the book which is to offer friendship, generosity and reassurance to young people in need of support. The book is culturally relevant, especially at a time when the economic and political status quo is stripping people of the ability to imagine or plan a future. It is heartening to see an ambitious and conscientious young woman with a tangible plan to transform the lives of some of the most vulnerable people in our society by providing the vital resources of stable accommodation and communal childcare.
With a chronological structure of colloquial prose, it reads like she is talking to a new friend and offers a patient, well-paced narrative, full of nuanced observations on the residential care system, homelessness and asylum seeking in Ireland. Overall, Somorin’s memoir is easy to read, though some parts are more emotionally wrought than others. The section that lingers in the mind most is chapter six, where Somorin invokes Irish rock band The Script to express sympathy for her “poor mother” who, as she explains, “simply did not have the tools to cope with and address [her own hurt and trauma]”.
Somorin is a convincing example against the idea of a self-made success story. The book demonstrates the age-old adage that it takes a village to raise a child
Unlike her daughter, who by sheer luck found a handful of adults who surrounded her with compassion and attention, Somorin’s mother Oriyomi fell through the cracks of a broken system that did not make enough, if any, effort to understand her uniquely challenging circumstances. Her chronic ill health, experience with asylum seeking, eviction, homelessness, limited access to her children and to childcare, and lack of emotional support likely made her feel unable “to rest or feel settled”.
Somorin extends the kindness and understanding that was shown to her towards her own mother, a factor she feels was lacking during her mother’s dealings with social services. The author criticises the administration of the residential care system in Ireland as “a very blunt tool”, lacking the design sophistication to “cater for and address individual or complex interpersonal problems”.
The book argues against a hyper-individualistic image of success and encourages attitudes, practices and ideas of collectivism. Somorin is a convincing example against the idea of a self-made success story. The book demonstrates the age-old adage that it takes a village to raise a child. Somorin had the good fortune to be minded by kind people such as Shelly, Ciara, Alan and Margaret, who collectively changed her life in various tangible and material ways. They helped her access the resources she needed: therapy to process her childhood trauma; gifts of makeup products to motivate her to stay in school; baby clothes and a doula to ensure she had a safe and healthy pregnancy and baby (Liam); and, most of all, helping her lobby Government agencies to gain grants for secure housing and further education.
Believing in Me is an urgent, convincing and enthralling testament to the power of community support and compassion in shaping lives for the better. Readers who enjoyed Unsettled by Rosaleen McDonagh (essays on disability, activism and the Traveller community in Ireland) and Nanny, Ma and Me by Jade Jordan (three generations of Irish women provide observations on race, love and family) will also like this.
Chiamaka Enyi-Amadi is an Igbo-Irish writer, performer, literary editor and arts facilitator. She is a commissioned poet on the Poetry as Commemoration project and is working on her debut poetry pamphlet
