MY NAME IS WHY
A MEMOIR
Poet Lemn Sissay MBE is, as Michael Donkor pointed out in the Guardian, ‘a literary luminary’: ‘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 behind him is a painful childhood of bewilderment and abandonment. In My Name Is Why Sissay tells the story of his childhood in care and his attempts via social services’ archives to unearth the truth about his Ethiopian mother and his 1967 birth in a home for unmarried mothers in Wigan.
In the Times, Melanie Reid described the memoirs as ‘an unputdownable thriller that Sissay tells as a duet, his vivid memories juxtaposed with the impersonal voices of social workers, adminstrators and teachers, the two accounts of one life cutting in and out. One tale, two tellings: lived experience versus bureaucracy; poetry versus leaden prose; light versus dark.’
Sissay was fostered at birth by an evangelical family who called him Norman Greenwood and then, when he was 12, without explanation, sent him back into care. He never saw them again. Added to this rejection was the most terrible lie of all: that his mother had not wanted him. In the Sunday Times, Helen Davies, bowled over by a ‘quietly devastating’ memoir, described how Sissay sifted through letters in ‘bureaucratic typefaces, scribbled marginal notes and official stamps [to] expose the failings and irrefutable power of the state when it acts in loco parentis, especially in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s’. But he arrived at the most important truth of all: which was that his mother had wanted to keep him, and that she had named him Lemn. It is, as Davies put it: ‘sensational stuff told with an elegant restraint that leaves the reader feeling some of the hurt, bewilderment and anger that he has endured’.