Slum Boy: a portrait
Juano Diaz
Brazen, £20

INSTEAD of struggling to write sentences with lots of adjectives as his teacher has decreed, a tiny child with scant schooling plays with a pair of craft scissors. 

He cuts a long slit up the outside of his trousers and is absorbed by the miracle of his revealed leg. Happening upon on this, his teacher is horrified and shouty. She demands to know why he has done this bit of sartorial damage and she threatens him with punishment if he cannot explain himself. His expression of bafflement seems like the right way of joining in. 

A collective ecstasy of panic (over what exactly?) is business-as-usual for a child in need of attention of any kind. This all happens in the Glasgow of yesteryear, where struggles are real. Instances of the behavioural untoward are patrolled with high-strung paranoia while great swathes of iniquity and abuse abide in plain sight. In a parallel universe, the scissor-action would have been praised for its apt use of the tool provided – but where’s the drama in that?

The child is now grown. He has set aside scissors and overcome his literacy blockage. 
Short of telling us water is wet; the prose of his memoir Slum Boy is adjective-saturated. There’s something hyper-real on every page. 

It’s a stretch to believe that an adoptive father would really address his seven-year-old: “I am your dad and I love you. You have to put the past in the past, son.” It’s also intriguing to think such wording would lodge with exactitude in an infant mind. 

An even younger narrative voice tells us of a sympathetic nun on the scene (with her big staircase and wonderful grandfather clock) but also announces she is the Sister of an episcopalian diocese. Slum Boy’s memoirist, Juano Diaz, is leading his reader through tonal and other anomalies. 

Multiple paragraphs would, when read aloud in a social context, happily couch a pregnant pause; perhaps a performative drop of the jaw, or a sweep of eye contact. The notion of a live raconteur chimes with the image of a mature Juano Diaz as printed inside Slum Boy’s jacket. I frequently flipped to the image, comforted to witness that the author is indeed living to tell the tale, having made it through the harrowing episodes he describes.

This early-years memoir, also described as a portrait, delineates the chaotic events and vivid crises in a life experienced through shifting identities and locales. Initially, in a Glasgow slum-setting, we find a haphazard cellular connection between mother and child in a situation whose poverty and privation are barely negotiable for either. 

Diaz goes on to tell the reader of phases of temporary rescue, first via a care system and then by adoptive parenting – both facilities imbued with Christian values. Hearts are in the right place and philosophies function supportively – until they don’t. Significantly, Roma heritage (as experienced through the culture of an adoptive father) illuminates and supports our protagonist’s experience as does his late adolescent affirmative engagement with art classes and with an urban gay scene.

A village outside Glasgow is home for a while. The setting is not so much idyllic as tellingly metaphysical. This is a landscape dominated by a working scrap-metal yard where, in a key moment, our memoirist realises how the all the material surrounding him has the potential for recycling, repurposing, and re-sale. Tenaciously wrought details of recollection prove vital in the act of coping. Another epiphany happens where Diaz approaches Glasgow Council for his records and finds detailed information that affirms his miasma of surreal memories as tethered to fact. 

It’s striking how this child, whose chaotic early life has been all urgency, feral survivalism, and Dadaist gambit, is later assumed to comprehend intangibles like societal decorum, and material ownership. Juano Diaz punctures many assumptions, while he amply clarifies how passions that underpin connection, protection, and identity, can manifest with saving grace, then rapidly schism. 

Sinkholes notwithstanding, Slum Boy shows how a pursuit of factual truth can stabilise a lost soul.