Earlier in WE, you were introduced to author Yvonne Bobb-Smith. Now, Ira Mathur takes a look at her memoir and the journey that led to her putting pen to paper and finally telling her story.
“I write because I was called ‘nobody’ for too long—an illegitimate orphan, a child born out of wedlock, a girl dismissed as ‘too talkative’ by teachers who saw only my black skin and social status, not my potential.”
Yvonne Bobb-Smith’s memoir, Whose Child Are You? (2025), written in her 90s after surviving breast cancer, is, for want of a better phrase, something else: it speaks to any woman who has been dealt a hard hand, because the optimism it offers is grounded in what has been endured and worked through over time, never turning away from difficulty, showing with clarity and restraint how a life may still be shaped within its limits, and leaving intact the recognition that however difficult the beginning, the capacity for hope remains.
How her writing journey started
A Sunday School in Belmont where Bobb-Smith waited to be called to the stage and listened as other names were read; a classroom where her marks were high and a teacher reduced her to a single line—too talkative—and silenced her when she tried to explain herself, making her wonder how much of how she was treated had to do with her dark skin.
Bobb-Smith writes from the accumulation of a life spent working through hurt with grit, with a clear recognition of what has been overcome and a determination not to be deterred from her right to inhabit the beauty and wonder of the world. Success came, but it took its toll. “I write because at 90 years old, I could no longer carry untold stories inside me,” she says, recalling Maya Angelou. The pressure is felt as a physical weight, one that has built over time and requires release.
The decision to begin came after a student at COSTAATT recognised something in the way Bobb-Smith taught, in the way she used experience to explain culture. “I realised that telling my story amounted to an analysis of identity and interconnectedness,” she writes, “a narrative of self-definition that says I am a woman who believes life is a search to be the best you can be.”
The memoir holds that line between the personal and the shared. Bobb-Smith writes to honour Caribbean women—her mother, trained as an operating theatre nurse in the 1930s; the grandmothers who raised her; Mama Glory, whose words remain in the book as a way of thinking through life. “These women deserve to have their stories told,” she says, “their contributions acknowledged.”
Her own life is remarkable, given her difficult start in life. A degree in library science from the University of Toronto in 1963. A return to Trinidad and Tobago in 1966, where Bobb-Smith established the country’s medical library system. Work in public relations and national development. Years in Canada, where she co-founded the Ebo Society. Teaching across institutions in both countries. A doctorate completed at sixty-eight, based on the lives of Caribbean women.
Bobb-Smith describes what sustained her in a phrase that recurs through the book: “micro-resilience.” She explains it as “the small, daily acts of resistance and survival that compound over time into transformation,” the hard work of pushing back at the terms set by others.
Her students remain part of the frame through which Bobb-Smith understands the memoir. “My students loved to examine present concepts through past stories,” she writes, and the book follows that method. It also carries a concern with the present—“the erosion of values, the minimalising of ethics”—set alongside what she names as sustaining forces: relationships, community, culture, and self-love.
Having survived breast cancer five times, Bobb-Smith is clear-eyed about what remains. “It’s never too late,” she says. “Never too late to tell your truth. Never too late to claim your identity.”
The question in the title has been answered almost a century after her birth.
“I know whose child I am.”
