Foster Care Indictment

~ My Name is Why, by Lemn Sissay ~

This novel is an indictment of the children’s foster care and care services in UK. Sissay tells the story of how he was taken away as a baby from his Ethiopian mother, fostered until he was twelve by the Greenwoods, rejected by them traumatically and sent to Woodfield’s Children’s Home, moved to a small Family Group Home in Gregory Avenue.

It [Gregory Avenue] was homely in the way a grotto in a shopping store is Christmassy. It was false. I could see the cracks. The staff were on shifts like elves in the grotto.

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It is clear Sissay struggling with disillusioned even at a young age. Having problems with the relationship with one of the officers there, he is moved to a large children’s home called Oaklands, and from there, because of alleged indiscipline, he is moved to Wood End, which is a dreaded place because it is not a home but a prison, essentially. Eventually, he manages to get semi-independent living in his own flat.

There is no doubt but that this child – and many others – has been badly let down by the care system. Moreover, the system withheld from Sissay information about his birth mother, whom Sissay was desperate to know about. (When he finds out his mother named him Lemn, he changes the name the care system, gave him back to this one.) Sissay intersperses his account with testimonies and letters from social workers and other authorities, all from his ‘File’. It is clear this is an account which is selected and edited by Sissay, which is not to say there is any doubt about the veracity of the facts, but that this is very much the story he has crafted of his childhood experiences.

With justification, Sissay is exceptionally bitter over the rejection he had at the hands of the Greenwoods whom he regarded as his parents and family for the first 12 years or so of his life. This rejection which he dwells upon, has coloured and shaped the rest of his childhood. He feels very wronged, and in a more eloquent passage, indicts them for visiting their failings on him and making him pay a high price for it:

A foster child will expose the cracks in the familiar veneer. Insomuch as the foster child is a cipher to the dysfunction of a family and also a seer. But the responsibility is too great for a child and so he finds himself manipulated and blamed for what he exposes by simple virtue of innocence. The wrath this innocence incurs is deep and dark.

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The narrative is chronological, but rather unattractive reading, crammed with as much material from his ‘File’ as narrative. Much is vague referred to but left unexplained; the reader is left with a rather potted account of how the system works. The tone Sissay takes is antagonistic, embittered, defensive, hostile – which is entirely justifiable given his tale, but hardly endearing. There is also something extremely self-righteous about his take, which seems to exempt him from responsibility while indicting the system which abused, wronged, and traumatised him. Throughout, there is the presence of one Norman Mills, Sissay’s social worker, who seems to have worked tirelessly in support of Sissay and yet there is no indication in the book of any gratitude or even bond or relationship Sissay may have felt towards this social worker. Doubtless it is an omission of mention rather than of fact, but it would have been easier to identify with the protagonist if he shared some positives as well as negatives. This story is almost unremittingly negative, almost as if the author is afraid if he allows that there were some positives, the system will not be indicted as it should be. And yet, a less black and white account – no pun intended – may make for a more even, balanced interpretation, which might be more sympathetic and easier to identify with.

Sissay also includes some accounts in response to his blog from others who have gone through the same system and whose lives and psyches have been wrecked as a result. Some of these testify to even more horrific abuse (sexual particularly) than that Sissay personally recounts, exposing further the horrors of the system. This is a book which is important to read, for awareness raising and as a personal testimony; but be warned, it is not a good read – not because of its topic, but more because of its narrator’s persona, which is rather off putting.