#72: Aren’t We All a Little Broken?

A Review of Someone Birthed Them Broken by Ama Asantewa Diaka

Ama Asantewa Diaka’s Someone Birthed Them Broken is a collection of fourteen short stories with interrelated characters set in Ghana. It was published in 2024, and it’s the author’s debut book. With themes of body-shaming, abuse, neglect, trauma, and economic hardship, Diaka illustrates many facets of the human experience.

There’s something about brokenness that makes you want to pass your fingers on cracked surfaces and trail them on their sharp edges, you know? Just to be able to tell how truly broken they are.

Greetings, once again dear reader👋🏽👋🏽
I hope you are doing well and taking good care of yourself.

Welcome to another edition of this spectacular newsletter
Today’s newsletter is a guest feature by Doyin, a lover of all things art—literature, music, paintings, and movies. You can mostly find him reading, writing, or daydreaming about the Corleone family. He's addicted to cakes, books, and suits. He writes from Lagos and tweets @AjayiAdedoyin14

In God or Whatever, Opoku Snr, a bitter young man, reflects his circumstances–his father’s promiscuous ways which he has inherited to detrimental effects, against a backdrop of resentment from his grandmother and economic hardship. Boatemaa deals with body-shaming and a relationship that turns sour in The Year I Turned Twenty-three. This story follows her struggles due to her excessively large breasts.

Fear Means Boy is John’s story as he struggles with coming to terms with his sexuality after being kissed by a male friend. It explores themes of friendship, sexuality, and acceptance. As he tries to gain a deeper understanding of his desires, he tries to accept the changing dynamic of their friendship. When you’ve been abused as a child and later felt the sting of uncaring lovers, it becomes a difficult task to find any pleasure in sex. Drip follows Ayeley as she discovers sexual pleasure at her own hands rather than at the hands of others.

Stubborn Anyway is a painful piece about Kekeli struggling for air beneath the crushing weight of her mother’s disapproval and expectations. In Patchwork, Opoku Jnr. struggles to find comfort in his Christian faith when he considers his life’s many troubles and the hardship around him. The story points to striking a balance between our faith and our actions; that we are as much in control of our fortunes as we choose to believe.

A father’s neglect and a mother’s continual condemnation is a truly terrible place to be, as Victoria painfully discovers. Eating Sorrow for Breakfast tells her story as she decides that ending her life is a better option than living with unsupportive, emotionally insensitive parents. It’s a story that’s as dark as they come, and is my favourite in the collection.

The distractions work provides are not enough for Baaba as she navigates being raped by a former partner. Footnote brings to light certain issues such as a broken justice system. As Baaba tries to soldier on, she lives as a shell of herself, no thanks to the emotional scars won’t be so easily relegated to the background.

Re: How Are You and I Miss You is an epistolary from Deanna to her friend, Amoafoa, telling her about her adjustment to motherhood, friendship, adulthood, as well as accepting imperfections in others. While the harsh economic conditions of Ghana are secondary themes in other stories, the author expresses it boldly in Politicians All Demma Mordas. It is a melancholic tale of what-could-be as Maayaa contemplates the many things she could become in a country with better infrastructure and politicians had more humanity. Politicians All Demma Mordas is very much a story on life limited by harsh economic conditions.

Just like the title implies, Hand-Me-Down follows a mother and her daughter as their similarities extend beyond physical resemblance and mannerisms, to their circumstances. Mamaa and Ayebaa, her daughter, both experience rejection and cruelty from men. Silence tells of the unraveling of a once-beautiful friendship between two women that became stale and lost its juice. Despite meeting in an unusual situation and with a seven-year age gap between them, Deanna and Amoafoa quickly warm up to each other. This story emphasizes life as a journey, and how some people we meet ride with us not forever, but for some moments, no matter how much we’d like them to stay with us. Additionally, Silence is a story of acceptance and being tolerant of people’s shortcomings.

When you’re seemingly cursed with mediocrity, ‘smack right in the middle of excellence and unremarkability,’ ending up with a pretty girl is a huge slice of luck. In This Bizarre Middleness, Takyi as he navigates his relationship with Coleen, and tries to prevent the mediocre curse that has seemingly plagued his entire life from sweeping away the relationship. Can I Get an Amen?! is the last story in the collection. It’s light-hearted, a last, happy hurrah for the characters in the previous stories as they all find measures of peace from their hurts.

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Have you read this book? What did you think about it? Leave a comment, maybe? 😊

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