Book review - My Name is Why
I
don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that writing poetry as a teenager
saved Lemn Sissay. It validated his sense of self and helped him out of the pit
of depression which threatened to overwhelm him. Words continue to shape and
define Sissay. He was the official poet for the London 2012 Olympics, has been
Chancellor of the University of Manchester since 2015, and was awarded the 2019
PEN Pinter Prize. His astonishing memoir
is dedicated to the foster family who took him in for the first twelve years of
his life, before rejecting him on the cusp of adolescence, and to his Ethiopian
birth mother.
From
the moment he was born in May 1967, Sissay’s life was documented by Wigan
council. Reports and letters from The Authority responsible for Sissay comprise
half the book. The remainder is made up of Sissay’s memories, his attempts to
make sense of what happened to him and the hurt and rejection he was
ill-equipped to process. He prefaces each chapter with a stanza of his poetry.
When
Sissay finally got hold of the documents about his eighteen-year journey into
adulthood he learned that his mother had refused to sign him over to adoption.
As a single mother, she was pressurised to give up her baby. Told her father
was dying she returned to Ethiopia without her son. However, in 1968 she wrote
to The Authority asking them to help her bring Lemn to Ethiopia. Meanwhile,
Lemn had been renamed Norman and was already being fostered by Catherine and
David Greenwood who had no other children at the time. Six months later,
Catherine gave birth to a son, followed by two daughters. The photograph of
Sissay on the front cover suggests a happy childhood, a mischievous nature, and
a warmth between siblings. His own account of the twelve years he lived with
the Greenwoods supports this.
By
the time Sissay was approaching adolescence his parents had three of their own
children. Cracks in their relationship had started to appear. The Greenwoods
were strict Baptists and their foster child’s high spirits appeared to wear
them down. How ordinary familial rifts were transformed into deep chasms is
shocking. Sissay had a sweet tooth – he had a tendency to steal biscuits and
extra bits of cake. For Catherine this indicated that he was a liar and a
thief. She nicknamed him Macavity – a fictional character from T. S. Eliot’s Old
Possum's Book of Practical Cats who, Sissay later learned, is “dark, quiet
and a thief” Worse was to come. An argument over cricket stumps apparently left
the family reeling when Sissay, in a fit of childish pique, shouted that he
wanted to kill them all except for Baby Helen. How many children have not
behaved badly in a fit of frustrated anger? Sissay writes “I didn’t threaten to
murder the family. I have no history of threatening to murder people. Full
disclosure: I probably said to my brother, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ Brothers
say things like that in the heat of the moment.”
Sissay
was twelve when his foster family – who in all this time had not formally
adopted him – decided that they could no longer deal with him. He was placed in
a children’s home. His foster parents tried to assuage their guilt by
pretending that it was his decision.
Brutally cut off from the only family he had known and loved, Sissay
recalls his shock at being abandoned. He was shuttled between children’s homes
- fitting in nowhere - until 1984, when he was placed in Wood End Assessment
Centre in Wigan, effectively a remand centre where children were routinely
abused. We don’t have to rely solely on Sissay’s testament here – he has
received countless emails and letters detailing similar mistreatment and
includes some affecting extracts.
Alongside
Sissay’s retelling are the accounts from his social worker, Norman Mills, a
sympathetic man who Sissay includes in his acknowledgments. Mills evidently did
his best in the face of an unremittingly bleak and prejudicial system. His
reports and personal reflections bear witness to Sissay’s ill-treatment. When his
parents “demanded that Lemn be removed,” Mills commented: “Mr and Mrs Greenwood
showed a great deal of inflexibility and lack of tolerance, in being unable to
accept Lemn’s rebellion against their Christian beliefs.”
express themselves through poetry. He reveals the meaning behind his book’s title on its final page.
Read and weep.
Originally published by New Humanist