“A fourteen-year-old boy should never have to ask the questions Who is my mother? and Who are my family? These were not easy questions to formulate in the mind or the mouth because the question comes with others . . . What did I do to deserve this?”
In his profoundly moving memoir, My Name Is Why (2019), acclaimed poet Lemn Sissay touches on the role of understanding family background and knowledge of one’s own childhood in finding hope amidst adversity.
Sissay had a disrupted childhood: separated as a baby from his mother against her will, growing up in an area with which he had no family connection. The rejection by his foster family at the tender age of 12 only added to the disarray. In the following years, he lived in four different care homes. Eventually, after a long struggle, Sissay was able to access his files and begin to create a narrative of his early years.
For any child who is often moving around their sense of home is challenged. This applies not only to those in the care system, but children sent to boarding schools, from military families, and those whose parents live far from each other. Children growing up in imperial cultures, such as those scattered across the vast expanse of the British Empire,(1905), a history of Britain relayed through vivid storytelling.
