Gold from the Stone. Lemn Sissay

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      INTRODUCTION

      It’s the 21st of May. Facebook and Twitter are overflowing with birthday wishes. I am sat in a café away from home, at the Bradford Literature Festival. My mother has sent me wishes from her apartment in New York. But that’s the end of the story.

      Family is a set of memories disputed between one group of people over a lifetime. Due to a near-lethal dose of racism delivered by The Institution I didn’t know my mother until I was twenty-one. She approached social services to have me fostered for a short period of time while she studied. The social worker gave me to foster parents and said, ‘Treat this as an adoption. He’s yours forever. His name is Norman.’ The foster parents gave up their experiment after twelve years and put me into a children’s home and vowed never to contact me. I thought my name was Norman Greenwood.

      I thought the world constantly smiled. I didn’t realise that it was me smiling at the world smiling back at me. I was a popular kid and did a good sideline in poems for all occasions. My first commission and public reading was at the assembly hall at Leigh C of E, where I performed a poem to celebrate our year group on its last day. I still get Facebook messages about it from ex-pupils. But The Institution was determined to wipe the smile from my face.

      At eighteen, the legal age of adulthood in England, I was officially uncoupled from The Institution and left to float into space. An administrative obligation was to give my birth certificate to a responsible adult – a parent or aunt or uncle. But I had none. They had to give the birth certificate to me. And there it was. My name, my true name, Lemn Sissay. And my mother’s name, Yemarshet Sissay. From that moment onwards I took my name.

      The only proof of my existence was in the poetry I had written since the age of twelve. The social worker wanted to show that someone loved me and so he gave me a letter from my files. It was from my mother just a few months after I was born. She said, ‘How can I get Lemn back? I want him to be with his own people in his own country. I don’t want him to face discrimination.’ She was writing to a social worker whose name was Norman. He had named me after himself.

      Family is a group of people proving each other’s existence over a lifetime. Without family I had poems. In poetry I stuck a flag in the mountainside to mark where I had been. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody hears it then did it fall? So the saying goes. It did fall. And I know it because I wrote it down at the time. In poetry I sought documentary evidence that I existed at a given time. And, given time, I would investigate through the poems and find more evidence.

       ‘Secrets are the stones that sink the boat.Take them out. Look at them. Throw them out and float.’

      My first professional reading was at seventeen. I was given night-release from Wood End – a prison for children. I read on stage at the Abasindi Coop, a black women’s cooperative in the heart of Moss Side in Manchester. I was paid £25. It was 1983. I was rich for a night. I danced to reggae music and returned the next day to Wood End where I was strip-searched and placed back in regulation clothing.

      With a birth certificate, a letter from my mother, and a fist full of poems I left The Institution with two aims. The first was to find my family. The second was to become the poet whom I already was. Due to being moved from institution to institution I didn’t know anyone who had known me for longer than a year. I was about to embark on a search for a family who didn’t know me either.

      In 1984, almost immediately after leaving Wood End, I approached a socialist printer called Stephen Hall of Eclipse Prints. I paid him on ‘tic’ (monthly) and printed 1,000 copies of Perceptions of the Pen which I sold to friends and the families of mill workers and striking miners. Poems from Perceptions of the Pen are in The New British Poetry, 1968–88 edited by Gillian Allnutt and Fred D’Aguiar (Paladin).

      Within a year I also set up my own business – A.S.W.A.D. Gutter Cleaning Services. I wrote a poem and printed it on a leaflet to drum up work. I posted it through the letterboxes of every house in my town. In 1986 I took my first play through a full run at the Edinburgh Fringe, at South Bridge Centre on Infirmary Street, with Pit Prop Theatre and Leigh Drama Centre. I had poems published in the local paper, The Leigh Reporter.

       ‘I am not defined by my scars but by the incredible ability to heal.’

      When my ladders were stolen the gutter-cleaning business was done, and so I moved from the Lilliputian villages of Lancashire to the great city, the OZ on the horizon – Manchester.

       ‘Child says to me in a workshop, “Are you famous?”I says, “The answer’s in the question.” ’

      What spurned my career then is the same as now – word of mouth. I started reading in community centres and theatres around the country. Word of Mouth. In 1987, when I was twenty, my poetry was accepted by Bogle L’Ouverture Publications in London. They were the first to publish Linton Kwesi Johnson in Voices of the Living and the Dead (1974) and Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972). The publishers, Jessica and Eric Huntley, cared for me as parents would a rebellious child about to go off to university. Tender Fingers in a Clenched Fist was published and a certain kind of national recognition ensued.

       ‘Integrate is not a Northern Compliment: “’n’t ’e great.”’

      Among others, the Caribbean poets in England laid the ground for me. Benjamin published his Pen Rhythm chapbook in 1980. Linton Kwesi Johnson, Benjamin Zephaniah, John Agard, Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, Grace Nichols, Valerie Bloom, James Berry, and more. Linton has always been a royal presence as a man and reggae artist. Benjamin has always been the mature prince. Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, the queen. I read with them throughout the country. They introduced me. They created space for me. In turn I brought many of them to Manchester.

      In the 1980s most black poets had Caribbean accents. It would be some twenty years before second-generation African voices came through. I knew it then. The main Black British voices in poetry were Jackie Kay, Maud Sulter, Patience Agbabi, and myself. Is it a coincidence that three of them were either adopted or fostered and two of them were mixed race?

       “I’m a poet.”“But what does a poet do?” said the airhostess.Saying “write” seemed churlish. “I do readings around the world,” I said.She looked down at her palms.“Will you read mine?” she said.’

      In 1988, on publication of Tender Fingers, the Guardian ran a double-page article by Kate Muir: Lemn Sissay ‘has success printed across his forehead.’ But ‘Success’ was a spark in a match factory. I was relative to no one. What was success if I had no one to prove myself for or against?

      Any ‘Success’ printed across my forehead would only compound the unfathomable depths of loss. I could not release myself from this conundrum. I wanted to. I realised I would have to wait years for my friends to understand the importance of what they naturally took for granted. I would have to wait for them to have children, or for them to lose someone, before they felt a morsel of what I did. Thankfully some of them remember me saying as much.

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