Lemn Sissay: Foster care, belonging, and snake charming

Happy Place

Fearne Cotton

Society & Culture, Mental Health, Health & Fitness, Relationships, Personal Journals

4.6 • 15.2K Ratings

🗓️ 1 April 2024

⏱️ 56 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“Am I mad, or did it happen?” This is a question that poet Lemn Sissay regularly finds himself asking. Having grown up in care, he has no family members to bear witness to his life experiences; is his understanding of his own identity correct?

In this chat with Fearne, Lemn talks through why it’s important for us not to compare trauma, that everything’s relative, and no one deserves more or less empathy. He also exposes the reality of the care system in the UK, and offers practical ways for all of us to help those who’ve been in care better integrate into society.

Between them, they suggest how to watch out for when you’re performing to a crowd, rather than being present – that’s where a true feeling of belonging lies – and how to mitigate the negative voices that want to knock your confidence.

Lemn’s latest poetry collection is Let the Light Pour In and his memoir is My Name Is Why. Both are published by Canongate.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello I'm Fern Cotton and this is Happy Place, the show that sheds new light on difficult
0:07.0	pasts. Today I'm chatting to Lem Cise.
0:11.0	I wanted to get my files from the government so that I could at least have some
0:14.7	context with my own childhood. Am I mad or did it happen? Because it is the
0:20.0	worst thing that anybody would want for their children children is that they were left in a wilderness with no family member to acknowledge their existence from the time they were born that they would be deprived of touch.
0:34.4	Emotional Hiroshima is what happened to me and I was the only witness in that
0:40.6	wilderness and I knew it. I wrote poems as witnesses.
0:46.0	Lem is a Bafter nominated award-winning writer and broadcaster.
0:51.0	He's also the most beautiful poet and for the last decade he's
0:56.5	composed a short four-line poem as dawn breaks each morning which he shares online. Recently they've been
1:04.2	collated into a book, Let the Light Pour in, which is so beautiful. These poems
1:11.4	are so life affirming, they're witty and they're so full of wonder
1:16.0	but they're fueled by a hardened resilience that Lems
1:20.0	had to develop in dark times.
1:22.0	He had an extraordinarily traumatic childhood which I'll let him tell you
1:26.4	about shortly and which he details in his brilliant memoir My
1:30.6	name is Why. He grew up in Care with no one to call family and is now
1:36.3	infinitely passionate about telling stories and taking action that exposes and
1:42.1	rights the injustices in the care system.
1:45.0	He's also, by the way, one of the funniest people I've ever met.
1:50.0	From the moment he walked through my front door, he had me cackling.
1:53.4	He's just the best.
	...

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