The care system’s brutal attack on a black child’s sense of self worth is targeted in the poet’s frank recollections of life in children’s homes
Early on in this affecting memoir, Sissay recalls the authors and books that fired his imagination when he was young. CS Lewis was a kind of “rock star”. In 2019, Lemn Sissay MBE is something of a literary luminary himself. His poetry and plays are lauded. He is chancellor of Manchester University. He was the official poet of the 2012 London Olympics. He was recently awarded the PEN Pinter prize and has appeared on Desert Island Discs. But glittering as these garlands might be, his early life was anything but golden. It’s a painful narrative that underpins much of his creative output and is emotively reframed in My Name Is Why.
Just after he was born in 1967, Sissay and his mother – a young Ethiopian student who had recently arrived in England – were taken to St Margaret’s Home for Unmarried Mothers in Wigan. Their short stay ended when, against his mother’s wishes, social services placed Lemn (renamed Norman by an insistent social worker) into “long term foster care” with a white, working-class Baptist family who lived in Ashton-in-Makerfield, south of Wigan.
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