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
