the Table
I Will Not Speak Ill of the Dead
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