My Name Is Why

My Name Is Why is a memoir by the poet Lemn Sissay, built around the social services files he spent 30 years fighting to obtain. In 2015, the Chief Executive of Wigan Council sent him four thick folders covering his life from birth to age 18. The records revealed institutional deception, racial prejudice, and bureaucratic cruelty directed at a child hidden from his own mother. Upon reading them, Sissay took the local authority to court. The memoir interweaves personal recollections with official reports, exposing the gap between Sissay's lived experience and the story constructed about him.

Sissay was born on 21 May 1967 at St. Margaret's House, an institution for unmarried mothers in Wigan, England. His mother, Yemarshet Sissay, a young Ethiopian student, named her son Lemn, but records misspelled his name and eventually changed it to Norman Sissay. A letter from Dr. Barnardo's adoption agency asked whether "Ethiopian means that he is negroid or not," revealing the racial calculus of his placement. When Yemarshet refused to sign adoption papers, Norman Goldthorpe, the Children's Officer, defied her wishes and placed the infant with long-term foster parents Catherine and David Greenwood, who renamed him Norman Mark Greenwood. Sissay explains that institutions like St. Margaret's functioned as "baby farms," pressuring vulnerable unmarried women into surrendering their children. His mother, whose father was gravely ill, returned to Ethiopia with virtually no chance of finding her son, whose name and placement had been concealed. When Sissay was three and a half, the authority served notice through his mother's church in Ethiopia, declaring she had "abandoned" him with an impossible one-month deadline to respond.

The Greenwoods raised Sissay in Ashton-in-Makerfield, a small Lancashire town, in a household shaped by Baptist faith and growing racial hostility. Catherine was volatile, while David was broody, tall, and silent. As Sissay grew, racist incidents multiplied: Neighborhood children called him "chocolate boy," and someone scrawled graffiti on the family's wall. Catherine elevated her own love by expressing hatred toward Yemarshet, repeatedly telling Sissay his mother had abandoned him.

Sissay describes deeper dysfunction beneath family life. Catherine's twin sister, who was born with a severe disability, lived in a residential institution; their mother, Phyllis Munro, never visited her. Sissay speculates that Catherine carried guilt over surviving while her twin did not. At school, his headteacher suggested Sissay be moved because his successes were too many for Christopher, the Greenwoods' first biological child, to cope with. Childhood mischief, particularly stealing cake, became evidence that "the Devil was working inside" him. Catherine began caning him and shouting, "Don't look at me with those big brown eyes." Each morning she dragged a metal comb through his Afro hair, citing a fabricated condition called "hair sore"; this lasted eight years until Catherine arranged for him to meet Errol Brown of Hot Chocolate, who gave him his first Afro comb.

Tensions escalated as Sissay approached adolescence. By November 1979, Catherine told the social worker that Sissay "smokes, swears, steals," demanding his removal, yet his school report described him as "well-behaved" and making "good progress." In late December, the Greenwoods sat him down and asked, "You don't love us, do you?" Steeped in Baptist theology, Sissay concluded they wanted him to confess his sinfulness and replied, "I musn't love you... But I will ask God for forgiveness... and learn to love you." Catherine used his answer as proof he had chosen to leave. The files reveal the Greenwoods had already told the social worker they wanted him "removed without further discussion."

On 2 January 1980, Norman Mills, Sissay's new social worker, collected the 12-year-old and drove him to Woodfields Children's Home. Catherine refused to hug him. In the car, Sissay said, "I know this is my fault and I will ask God for forgiveness." Mills pulled over and told him, "None, none of this is your fault. None of it." The Greenwoods told extended family to stay away, and none of them ever contacted Sissay again.

At Woodfields, Sissay arrived with no belongings. He befriended Peter Libbey, a mixed-race boy who nicknamed him "Chalky White," a label Sissay later understood as protective alliance. Brief visits to the Greenwoods deepened his confusion: He was told he could never return unless he conformed completely. By December 1980, he recognized the superficiality of their conditional affection and refused to spend Christmas with them. In January 1981, he was moved to Gregory Avenue, a smaller family group home in Atherton.

Over three years at Gregory Avenue, Sissay built friendships and started a Saturday job. Mills began sharing information about his birth mother and discussed the possibility of tracing her. A friend introduced Sissay to Bob Marley's music, which proved transformative: Marley became his first Black mentor, and Sissay began identifying as a Black man. This period also brought relentless racism and deteriorating mental health.

At Christmas 1983, Mills gave Sissay letters from his files, including a 1968 letter from his mother asking how to reclaim Lemn: "He needs to be in his country, with his own colour, with his own people. I don't want him to face discrimination." The Children's Officer refused to provide the foster parents' address and falsely implied Yemarshet had wanted adoption. Sissay realized everyone had been lying. Mills also gave him his birth certificate, and upon seeing his real name, Lemn Sissay, he reclaimed it. Around this time, at 14, he had tattooed "NG" for Norman Greenwood into his left hand and cut his wrist with a razor blade.

A police charge for £9.26 in damage triggered institutional escalation. The Director of Social Services recommended Sissay's removal. He was transferred to Oaklands Children's Home, where his anxiety and depression worsened, and then to Wood End Assessment Centre after a series of disputed incidents. Dr. Penny Cook, a consultant child psychiatrist, assessed him as intelligent and articulate, experiencing depersonalization, or detachment from oneself, but "certainly not 'mad.'"

Wood End was a locked facility where children on remand and children in care were treated identically as charged criminals. Sissay was stripped of his clothes, given a regulation uniform, and permitted one hour of recreation daily. Staff maintained order through intimidation and force. An educational psychologist praised his poetry and wrote that his rejection of testing was "not unreasonable." Despite these conditions, Sissay grew his dreadlocks and wrote poetry daily. He includes former residents' testimonies of systematic physical and sexual abuse.

Margaret Parr of the National Association of Young People In Care (NAYPIC), herself a care leaver, became Sissay's first outside visitor at Wood End. She warned him not to let the staff drug him. Through NAYPIC, he attended conferences where his poetry gained recognition. He devised an exit plan: After earning gardening privileges, he ran to the Atherton Town Hall housing office and revealed his situation. Despite institutional resistance, Sissay secured a council flat by December 1984 on a development called Poets' Corner. He was seventeen and a half. Senior management refused any grant for furnishing the home. Someone anonymously left a black Olivetti typewriter outside his door.

In the epilogue, Sissay reflects on his solitude at 18, possessing only his mother's 1968 letter and a birth certificate bearing his true name. All the names imposed on him were created to hide him from his mother and from Ethiopia. He reveals that among his mother's Amhara people, one of Ethiopia's largest ethnic groups, it is tradition to embed a message in a child's first name. In Amharic, Lemn means "Why?"