A review by emilybh
My Name Is Why, by Lemn Sissay
3.0
‘The children’s home may well have been housing us but it wasn’t caring for us [...] The act of writing would follow me wherever I went. No one could take it away from me.’
.
This is a short and powerful account of Lemn Sissay’s childhood in care, the discovery of his Ethiopian mother and retrieval of his name. Prefacing each chapter with a stanza of poetry, Sissay asks what it means for a childhood to be told through official documents and reports, rather than the story of a family. As he weighs his own memories against the notes of his social worker, his early struggle to form a sense of self becomes clearer. This is exacerbated as he is uprooted from a foster family to a children’s home and then an assessment centre, in which he is subject to growing forms of neglect and racism. In My Name Is Why, Sissay responds to these experiences, setting out his own voice and personal resilience in spite of this mistreatment - 3.5 stars.
.
This is a short and powerful account of Lemn Sissay’s childhood in care, the discovery of his Ethiopian mother and retrieval of his name. Prefacing each chapter with a stanza of poetry, Sissay asks what it means for a childhood to be told through official documents and reports, rather than the story of a family. As he weighs his own memories against the notes of his social worker, his early struggle to form a sense of self becomes clearer. This is exacerbated as he is uprooted from a foster family to a children’s home and then an assessment centre, in which he is subject to growing forms of neglect and racism. In My Name Is Why, Sissay responds to these experiences, setting out his own voice and personal resilience in spite of this mistreatment - 3.5 stars.