In the same week that Jeremiah Emmanuel, aged 15, received an award from David Cameron in Downing Street for his voluntary community service, he was also stopped and partially strip-searched by police in south London, for reasons that are still not apparent; he was never arrested.
The push/pull duality of Emmanuel’s life recurs throughout Dreaming in a Nightmare, this 21-year-old’s beguiling memoir, which works best in its moments of quite phlegmatic but intense reflection.
The ethereal cover photograph – young, carefree boys scrambling, dangerously up the side of a building – is a metaphor for the jeopardy of lives on the edge that Emmanuel illuminates. By the end of the first chapter he’s already recounted the knifing of two school friends, one of whom didn’t survive his injuries. Later, intervening to defuse tensions as shopkeepers, armed with planks, attack a suspected thief, he’s punched in the face by a fist ringed with a knuckle-duster.
In unfussy, conversational writing, Emmanuel ruminates on violence, poverty, miseducation, pre-determinism and the indomitable spirit of Esther, his Nigerian-born mother – a single parent who also fathered him. His book reads as an inspirational text (Emmanuel is an altruistic entrepreneur and activist who started his first charity as a teenager), and a rousing heartfelt testimony in which self-love trumps self-loathing.
We yearn for the transformation of hopeless black youths manifest in Jeremiah Emmanuel. He appears almost conjured by the culture to provide a ballast to our iniquitous society; challenging the pessimism that threatens to engulf us.
Emmanuel, who confesses “there was a period [when] I didn’t believe I would live to see my 20th birthday”, has had a complicated, and at times, nightmarish youth. But his graceful book fulfils its humble ambition to act as “a guide to recognising the nightmare – and a blueprint for dreaming your way out of it”.
• Dreaming in a Nightmare by Jeremiah Emmanuel is published by #Merky Books (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15
