My Name Is Why. Lemn Sissay
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I tattooed the initials of what I thought was my name into my hand. The tattoo is still there but it wasn’t my name. It’s a reminder that I’ve been somewhere I should never have been. I was not who I thought I was. The Authority knew it but I didn’t.
The Authority had been writing reports about me from the day I was born. My first footsteps were followed by the click clack clack of a typewriter: ‘The boy is walking.’ My first words were recorded, click clack clack: ‘The boy has learned to talk.’ Fingers were poised above a typewriter waiting for whatever happened next: ‘The boy is adapting.’
Paper zipped from typewriters and into files. The files slipped into folders under the ‘S’ section of a tall metal filing cabinet. For eighteen years this process repeated over and over again. Click clack clack. Secret meetings were held. The folders were taken out and placed on tables surrounded by men and women from The Authority. Decisions were made: Put him here, move him there. Shall we try drugs? Try this, try that. After eighteen years of experimentation The Authority threw me out. It locked the doors securely behind me and hid the files in a data company called The Iron Mountain.
So I wrote to The Authority and hand-delivered the letter. The reply informed me I had to write to Customer Services. I wrote to Customer Services. Customer Services replied to say they were not permitted to release the files. The Authority placed me with incapable foster parents. It imprisoned me. It moved me from institution to institution. And yet now, at eighteen years old, I had no history, no witnesses, no family.
In 2015, following a thirty-year campaign to get my records, the Chief Executive of Wigan Council, Donna Hall, wrote me a letter. She had them. Within a few months I received four thick folders of documents marked ‘A’, ‘B’, ‘C’ and ‘D’. Click clack clack. On reading them, I knew.
I took The Authority to court.
How does a government steal a child and then imprison him? How does it keep it a secret? This story is how. It is for my brothers and sisters on my mother’s side and my father’s side. This is for my mother and father and my aunts and uncles and for Ethiopians.
CHAPTER 1
Awake among the lost and found
The files left on the open floor
The frozen leaves on frosted ground
The frosted keys in a frozen door
Eighteen years of records written by strangers. All the answers to all my questions were here. Possibly. And yet, I feared what they’d reveal about me or what they’d reveal about the people who were entrusted with my care. What truths or untruths? Maybe I was loved. Maybe my mother didn’t want me. Maybe it was all my fault. Maybe the bath taps in the bathroom were not electrified. Maybe that was false memory syndrome.
A friend burned her files when she received them from The Authority. Another can’t look at hers to this day. I’ll start by simply recording my reactions to the first early documents and we’ll see how this unfolds.
ST. MARGARET’S HOUSE
GOOSE GREEN, WIGAN
(Affiliated to the Liverpool Board of Moral Welfare)
Telephone Wigan 42143
Warden and Chairman:
THE RECTOR OF WIGAN, THE HALL, WIGAN.
Treasurer: W. WILSON, Esq., 379 Orrell Road, Wigan.
Assist Treasurer: Miss N. FAULKNER, 3 The Avenue, Monument Park, Wigan.
Secretary: Mrs. S. RENWICK, 59 Thornfield Road, Thornton, Liverpool, 23.
Superintendent: Mrs. F. MALLOCH
30. 6. 64.
I. hereby certify that Lemion Sissay is free from infectious disease.
L. Winnard
St Margaret’s House was an institution for unmarried mothers ‘affiliated to the Liverpool Board of Moral Welfare’. On 30 June 1967, State Registered Nurse L. Winnard wrote that ‘Lemion Sissey’ (misspelt) was ‘free from infectious disease’. In a second note on the same day she recorded that the six-week-old baby – now ‘Lemn Sissey’? – weighed nine pounds.
BABY LEMN SISSEY: age 6 weeks
BORN: 21.5.67
BIRTH WEIGHT: 6lb 0oz
WEIGHT 30.6.64 : 9lb 0z
PHENYLKETONURIA TEST NEGATIVE
FEEDS:
Ostermilk NO1. 5 measures to water 6oz
Takes feeds well.
Fed at 9.30pm. 1.30pm. 5.30 OR 9.30pm.
Takes a while to settle after 9.30pm feed: wakes for night feed about 4am.
Buttocks satisfactory
L. Winnard
In the letter below I’m six months old. At this point my mother is invisible.
Patron:
HER MAJESTY QUEEN ELIZABETH THE QUEEN MOTHER
President:
HER ROYAL HIGHNESS THE PRINCESS MARGARET COUNTESS OF SNOWDON
Chairman of Council:
SIR ALFRED OWEN G.B.E.
General Superintendent
V. L. CORNISH M.A.
DR. BARNARDO’S
Head Office: STEPNEY CAUSEWAY LONDON E.1.
AREA OFFICE: 248 UPPER PARLIAMENT STREET, LIVERPOOL 8
TELEPHONE: 051/709/6291
13th November, 1967.
Dear Mr. Goldthorpe,
Further to your Department’s enquiry regarding the possibility of our Adoption Department being able to place a part Ethiopian, part Greek baby boy for adoption. Our Senior Adoption Officer has written to us asking that she be supplied with full information about this baby; in particular, details of his background and whether Ethiopian means that he is negroid or not.
Yours sincerely,
N. Goldthorpe Esq.,
Children’s Officer,
County Borough of Wigan,
Children’s Department,
Civic Buildings,
Parson’s Walk,
Wigan, Lancs.
O.W. Woods,
Assistant Executive Officer (Dictated by Mr. Woods and signed in his absence)
And then there was this:
On the back of the photo it says:
So my name has changed to Norman Sissay; I am supposed to be part Greek. An adoption agency asks whether ‘Ethiopian means he is negroid or not’. This is the first time I have seen myself referred to as ‘Norman Sissay’.