My Name Is Why by Lemn Sissay

Author:Lemn Sissay
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Canongate Books

Christmas Eve, 1980

My social worker sees what the Greenwoods are doing to me, and the superficiality. If they kept their hands by their sides they hoped that I would realise that I was hugging them but they were not hugging me. I wasn’t going to ask my social worker if I could visit them for Christmas. I wanted them to ask me not to be alone on Christmas Day. So I did what they wanted. I stayed away. As impossible as it was to understand I grasped the idea that I wasn’t welcome. I was not welcome.

Children from homes all over the North West were taken to Blackpool in a convoy of black cabs and Rotary coaches to see Lancashire legends and national heroes Cannon and Ball that summer. Lenny Henry was their special guest star. Mid-performance Lenny did a bit of what’s called ‘crowd surfing’. With his open and smiling face he said, ‘I need one of you on stage.’ He theatrically cast his eye from left to right with his hand shielding the light as if for a better look. A Mexican wave of hands flew into the air: me me me me me! But all the children in our group screamed at Lenny and pointed at me: him him him him him!

Memories in care are slippery because there’s no one to recall them with as the years pass. In a few months I would be in a different home with a different set of people who had no idea of this moment. How could it matter if no one recalls it? Given that staff don’t take photographs it was impossible to take something away as a memory. This is how you become invisible. It isn’t the lack of photographs that erodes the memory. It is the underlying unkindnesses, which make you feel as though you don’t matter enough. This is how to quietly deplete the sense of self-worth deep inside a child’s psyche. This is how a child becomes hidden in plain sight. Family is just a set of memories disputed, resolved or recalled between one group of people over a lifetime, isn’t it? And if there is no one to care enough to dispute, resolve or recall the memory, then did it happen? I had to check with Wikipedia to see if Lenny Henry ever even played Blackpool. It’s there. It’s right there in Wikipedia.

‘You! What’s your name?’ Lenny Henry was talking to me. I couldn’t reply because the others were shouting ‘Norman. Noooorman’.

‘Right then, Norman, come up here then,’ he said, and so I got out of my seat, walked down the aisle and up the steps. Up until that point I was nervous, but on the stage I was unafraid. I was home. The stage lights only made me shine. Look at this man. He’s black like me. And he’s a star. My first time on a professional stage was with Lenny Henry. And I can’t remember any more than that.

Of that particular season

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