Читать книгу Gold from the Stone - Lemn Sissay - Страница 8

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.

‘“Famous poet” is an oxymoron.’

To fulfill the role of ‘family’ I needed to prove what had happened to me in my first eighteen years, as there was no one else who could. I needed to find my family. I was performing around Britain and out across the world, writing commission, giving workshops, working in radio and all the stuff a young alive poet does. At each stage of my journey, and with each ‘success’ my sense of loss deepened.

‘Have we been waiting to be accepted for so long that not being accepted has become the criteria for our acceptance.’

I may as well call it what it was. Racism. All the hallmarks were there. My name was stolen. I was stolen from my parents. I was experimented on. When the experiment didn’t work I was placed in a darker institution. I didn’t meet a black person until I was nine. I didn’t know a black person until I was seventeen. I was nicknamed ‘Chalky White’ as a teenager. I internalised this racism. I owned it. But everything in the sixteen years that preceded it was just a warm up. The day I said ‘stop’ was when the nightmare began. And I spoke about this in my readings and in my poems. I had to.

‘A Dutch MC asked me how she should introduce me on stage. “Just say ‘He loves what he does and he does what he loves’,” I replied. She walked on stage and said, “Lemn Sheeshay he likes what he does and does what he likes.”’

But racism was a sideline. I couldn’t allow myself to be defined by how well I articulated what I didn’t like. As seductive as this was I found myself in a situation where my own anger could be commodified in the arts and, instinctively, I knew my anger ran too deep to be accommodated and paid for. There was a deeper level to anger, I believed. One that couldn’t be sold or bought.

‘Anger is an expression in the search for love.’

I needed answers to bigger questions. Why was I in the children’s homes? Why did the foster parents throw me away? Who was my family? Where was I from? Why was I not returned to my mother? Why was my name changed? Where are the eighteen years of records about my life? I knew I had been lied to for seventeen years. The proof was in my name. The letter from my mother was to a social worker who had illegally named me after himself – Norman. I found my mother at twenty-one, in 1988. Tender Fingers is dedicated to her.

‘Life is not worth living if there is no one that you would die for.’

Poetry was closer to me than family. My poems are photographs. And with two books under my belt at twenty-one they felt a point of record. There was nothing else that could bridge the emotional and physical stories other than poetry. My poems are my family. Sometimes when I perform or publish them it is like I’ve released them to scrutiny. It irritates me that anyone would criticise them. They are not perfect. They never pretended to be. They’re my family. They are at different stages of development. And that’s okay.

In the early 1990s I moved to Bloodaxe Books. I needed to move from my beloved Bogle L’Ouverture and Bloodaxe accepted me in 1992. I was twenty-five. I’d been out of the institutions for seven years, published for four. Bloodaxe published my book Rebel Without Applause. It sold out. What they didn’t tell me was that they had no intention of reprinting. It would be eight years before I published another book. There was no Jessica and Eric to talk to. And Bloodaxe wouldn’t return my calls. I had no idea why.

‘They separated from me and pointed their fingers at me and shouted, “Are you integrating or separating or what?”’

Regardless, I spent the next eight years writing and performing, making radio documentaries and writing plays. Occasionally I would contact Bloodaxe to ask when they would reprint. I was contracted to them. They did nothing. I continued searching for my family. In 1995, in a BBC documentary called Internal Flight, I found my father and brothers and sisters. I also confirmed the childhood abuse I had suffered whilst in the institutions. Slowly the jigsaw was coming together. Time Out reviewed the documentary: ‘Will this man not do anything for publicity?’ it read. No book release from my publishers. Not a whisper.

Crazy as it sounds, on some level I believed I deserved to be treated this way. It was like being quietly beaten up in the corner of a busy room, by the person who invited me to the party, whilst also being accused of gatecrashing. Make of this what you will. It happened and it must be said. Seventeen years later I received an apology of sorts from Neil Astley of Bloodaxe, for it was he. The apology accompanied a request that I change some detail about him on my website. Something that had always bothered him.

‘It’s not difficult to be successful in poetry but as a successful poet it is.’

My books are flags in the mountainside. I have another flag in broadcasting, another in public art, another in performance, in plays, in television, in music. I am the first of my generation, of the contemporary poets, to make poetry as public art. Today in England it is normal, but it wasn’t in 1992. I started Landmark poetry with Hardy’s Well, in Manchester. My central influence is Ian Hamilton Finlay. I released an album in Germany, Disjam Phuturing Lemn Sissay.

By the age of thirty-two I’d found and visited all my family. I had travelled the world to find them: Ethiopia, Senegal, America, Europe. I had travelled the world to perform too.

‘It’s not difficult to be funny in poetry on stage. Just set up a false idea of what poetry is and then ridicule it, set up a false idea of what an audience is and then ridicule them – they’ll love it.’

A new generation of poets were emerging out of their teens. A few years passed. I met Jamie Byng when filming a poem in the Spiegeltent at Edinburgh International Book Festival in 1994. The title of the poem was ‘Gold From The Stone’. Jamie became the CEO of Canongate Books where he founded an imprint, Payback Press. The second syllable in ‘Rebel Without Applause’ rhymes with swell. Rebel. Rebel without applause. In the same year Bloomsbury published my children’s book The Emperor’s Watchmaker. In 2000 my next book Morning Breaks In The Elevator was published by Canongate. It sold out. Both these books are in print to this day.

‘If you are searching for your family the search begins when you find them.’

I’ve my own journey and it is unique. My conversation has not been with the gatekeepers or the ivory towers. Why would you storm an ivory tower unless you wanted to build one yourself? There are gatekeepers though. They need you to want to go through their gate. The more you want to go through their gate the more real their gate becomes. Poetry belongs in the world. The world belongs in poetry. I have always thought that way. I have always been that way.

‘I’ve never thought of the artist’s career as up or down. I see our careers as orbits. Each orbit is unique.’

So we come to my last book Listener. It was published by Canongate in 2008. It has a killer cover by Rankin. But the book is a third too big. And for that I apologise. I’ve always wanted to apologise for it.

My Landmark poems are on walls across the world. My radio documentaries have meant sitting in the home of Gil Scott-Heron while he makes me mango juice, or interviewing The Last Poets on street corners in Harlem. From walking on stage at Paul McCartney’s book launch at the Queens Theatre or giving a workshop to homeless surfers in Durban, South Africa, I have been blessed with living my entire life as a poet. A life based on word of mouth above all. The life of a poet, and yet it only feels like it’s beginning now.

So here is Gold From The Stone: New and Selected Poems. I have been a poet since I was twelve years old. I knew it then. I know it now. My journey has been kicked and punched at different times, and to be honest I am aware that I’ve tried to sabotage it myself at times too.

The best poems are unseen and unheard by anyone other than the person who wrote them and the persons they were intended for. They are read at funerals or between lovers or between daughters and fathers. They are kept within the family. Writer, audience, performer, performance and applause. It is the perfect journey for a poem: beginning, middle and end. The closest to that is a reader and a book.

‘The idea that poetry is a minority sport has never rung true with me. Ever.’

At the start of Rebel Without Applause is the quote: ‘if you are the big tree I am the small axe.’ It is a quote from ‘Small Axe’ by Bob Marley. I was a fan of Bob Marley before I knew I was Ethiopian. My father was a pilot for Ethiopian Airlines and co-piloted The Emperor, Haile Selassie. Although my father died in 1974 I still have a picture of him in which he has the exact same ring on his finger as Bob Marley had on his hand.

An Ethiopian man said, ‘Do you know what your name means? It is an unusual name.’ I told him that I didn’t. ‘It means Why?’. If you are not from Ethiopia please don’t think Ethiopians give their children questions as names. It is an unusual name in any culture. I had no idea what it meant until I was thirty-two. How could I be anything other than a poet with a name like ‘Why’?