My mother couldn’t say what she was sorry for
Poet Lemn Sissay talks to Chris Harvey about surviving rejection from his foster family
In 2009, the celebrated poet Lemn Sissay received a surprise friend request on Facebook. It was from his estranged foster mother. After he’d accepted the request, she phoned him and they talked for “the first time in many years”. The trauma of their relationship – severed when he was 12, when she demanded he be removed from the family home – holds the key to his childhood, to his bestselling memoir My Name Is Why, possibly to his whole life. They arranged to meet.
I ask him about that meeting when we talk on a windy day in July. Despite the fact that we live about a mile apart in east London, we’re chatting over Zoom – Sissay in a yellow shirt, against a blue wall, with a square of red sofa, as if painted by Van Gogh. His life story is the subject of the first film in the new series of Imagine… Lemn Sissay: The Memory of Me. that Sissay endured after that pre-teenage parting, and how poetry helped him to move beyond it, to become an MBE in 2010 and official poet of the 2012 Olympics.
He was born in 1967 in Wigan. His Ethiopian mother had come to the UK to study, got pregnant and was packed off to a maternity home for unmarried women. Baby Lemn – the name means “why” in his mother’s native tongue of Amharic – was fostered by a very religious white Baptist couple in the Lancashire village of Ashton-inmakerfield, joined first by a brother, then two sisters.
At school, he was liked, did well, was happy. But at 12, his foster mother demanded that social services take him back, after arguments at home and an abrupt change in his parents’ attitude towards him. He wrote in his memoir that: “I couldn’t do anything right. The better I did, the worse I was treated.” He was taken away to a children’s home – “the beginning of empty Christmas time and hollow birthdays”, as he describes it in his memoir. On his first day there, he wrote a poem; it made him feel less alone.
It was the first in a series of homes, culminating in a move to Wood End, in Wigan, an “assessment centre” that he later described as “a Kafkaesque nightmare”, where he was “imprisoned” without charge for his final year in care, where “anyone who stepped out of line was beaten”. It would later be the focus of a major investigation into physical and sexual abuse. In 2018, he won an apology and out-of-court settlement from Wigan council for his treatment during the years in their care.
He tells me what happened when he met his mother a decade ago. He’s talked before about a later meeting, but this first reunion, on London’s South Bank, he hasn’t discussed. It went badly. “It was quite difficult,” he says. “I think she asked for my forgiveness, and I said, ‘What for?’ Because I wanted her to articulate exactly what it was she thought I should forgive her for. But she couldn’t, so it sort of broke down, and I walked her to the bus stop. That was really heartbreaking, actually.
“Now I realise it doesn’t matter. You don’t forgive somebody because you want them to understand what they did. Everybody deserves forgiveness. The second time I met her, I did go to see her to forgive her.”
He included her, and his foster father and siblings – “Catherine, David, Christopher, Sarah and Helen” – in the dedication to My Name Is Why. They are not in contact, he adds, sadly. “My foster family would never call me.”
The trauma has had a long-lasting impact on his adult life: there have been bouts of depression, a difficulty in forming long-term relationships, 20-plus years of therapy. He has not married or had children. “It’s not surprising to me that the boy who had no family, and the man who had no family, has no family,” he says, though he accepts: “It could still happen. The only thing that my foster parents taught me was that if you really love somebody, you can lose everything. “That was the lesson that I took away from my family, that an emotional Hiroshima can happen.”
He has, however, been able to make contact with his birth mother. She refused to sign adoption papers for him, and wrote from Addis Ababa shortly after his first birthday, saying she “would very much like to bring him” to Ethiopia. The authorities replied that he was “in very good hands”. Sissay didn’t find out about her request until many years later. He has since forged a bond with his wider family in Ethiopia. As the UK went into lockdown, he tells me: “She called me just to make sure I was OK – which I really loved.”
There’s an exuberant warmth to Sissay, which can be found in his poetry. There’s a quality in it that comforts, brings hope, light. It graces the sides of buildings in Manchester, is a favourite reading at weddings; his paean to the sun has even been sung for summer solstice at Stonehenge: “How do you do it said night/ How do you wake up and shine/ I keep it simple said light/ One day at a time.”
On his release from the care system, he moved to Manchester, only 15 miles from Wood End but a different universe. It provided an escape, but also demanded a response. In the Eighties, the city was a hotbed of creativity, in music, theatre, comedy. “If you were sucked into the vortex, man, it just asked you to step up. Who are you? What are you? What do you do? I write poetry… well do it then, get up on stage, be who you are.”
Sissay found kinship in the righteous anger of southern poets, such as Linton Kwesi Johnson and Benjamin Zephaniah. He would soon develop his own style, performing regularly in comedy clubs with other up-and-comers, such as Cold Feet’s John Thomson, Caroline Aherne (“a sweetheart”) and Steve Coogan. The latter, he remembers as “a heatseeking missile in terms of ambition”.
It was harder for him to achieve instant blast-off, he recalls, with audiences asking, “What is this black guy doing talking about racism at a comedy gig?”
Manchester was also the centre of the rave scene, but not for Sissay. “I didn’t do raving. I was into poetry.” He lived in Hulme. I wonder if he came across The Smiths’ singer, Morrissey, who grew up there? “I’m sure I would have met him at the time,” he says. “I don’t really connect with his attitudes now.” In recent years, Morrissey has aligned himself with the far-right For Britain party. “He’s descended into something that he wasn’t when he was in Manchester,” Sissay says. “He’s a bit like a musical version of David Starkey.”
We talk about the TV historian, who has been stripped of his university posts and ditched by his publisher after his inflammatory comments in an online interview. “The fact is, you don’t have to say anything derogatory to be racist,” Sissay says. “Most racism isn’t spoken, just like most sexism isn’t spoken, and that’s when it’s most damaging.”
Nevertheless, he believes Britain “is still the best place in the world to live in terms of race”.
Had it not been for lockdown, Sissay would have been filming a documentary in Ethiopia for Channel 5, as well as travelling to Australia, India and America. Instead, he’s been reading. He’s on the Booker Prize judging panel this year and has read 146 novels in 160 days, he tells me, punctuated by the occasional walk on Hackney marshes, including one with his friend, Angels in America actress Denise Gough.
He is considering a follow-up to My Name Is Why that he says will be as dramatic as the book telling the first 18 years of his life. “I think I have to write it.” He’s also working on a children’s book. But for now, he’s going back to his reading. He smiles: “I’m in the best book club in the world.”
Imagine: Lemn Sissay - The Memory of Me is on BBC One at 10.45pm on July 27