In October the University of Manchester is going to have to clone Lemn Sissay, or at least, he suggests, “make a hologram of me”. That’s the month the 48-year-old poet is due to collect an honorary PhD, which, as the university’s newly-elected chancellor, he is also responsible for presenting.
“It’s mad,” agrees Sissay – who left school at 15, and this week beat Peter Mandelson and the Halle Orchestra’s Mark Elder to secure the ceremonial position. “Maybe I will shake hands with myself and say, ‘Well done, lad.’”
When we meet, Sissay is sitting on the roof terrace of a private members’ club in a black T shirt, black jeans and sunglasses. In other words, he looks like a performer whose poetry has appeared everywhere from Leftfield’s award-winning album Leftism to the Olympic Park – and not much like an academic grandee.
But a few details set him apart. The first is a smile so broad that it’s an invitation to make him laugh. Then there is his afro, touched with grey. And finally, when he pushes back his sleeves, the marks you can see on his arm are not from a tattoo parlour, but homemade ink stains, and scars that hint at a pain sharper than needle on skin.
It’s impossible not to warm to Sissay. When I ask how he feels about winning the election (by more than 1,000 votes), he refuses to reflect on his own success, instead focusing on what such victories mean for the black community. He quotes a friend who wrote to him saying, “‘It’s a new day. It’s Sir Lenny Henry, it’s Chancellor Jackie Kay [the poet and novelist recently elected to Salford University] and Chancellor Lemn Sissay.’ Things are changing and that’s a good thing.”
But how does a poet beat a politician in an election? And not just any politician, but Mandelson? The writer denies having had a strategy – his campaign video, in which he performs a poem called Mercurial Graphene in Manchester, was shot four days before voting closed.
Sissay may not forgive the pun, but the writing was on the wall for Mandelson long before that. After all, it’s been 20 years since Sissay’s poems started appearing on the city’s streets – whimsical verse painted on to a Rusholme pub, eye-catching lines on the wall of a takeaway – there is even one embedded into the stones of Tib Street in the city’s Northern Quarter. And the week before the election, the Wigan-born poet’s two-part Radio 4 show, Homecoming, was broadcast. “I am proud that everything I know about myself happened in Manchester,” he finally admits.
The election also came at a time when, according to Sissay, poetry is more popular than ever. He compares it to the 1960s, “when poets performed in the Albert Hall”. Looking at his schedule, it’s not hard to see why. His current projects include a poem to decorate the library in Willesden, north-west London, while in Greenwich a poem is being laid into the floor of the station. This week he spoke at Hebden Bridge arts festival. At the weekend he will head to Washington DC to read in the Library of Congress. After that, he will travel to Brazil, and then back to the US for more engagements.
But despite his evident popularity, Sissay – who has an MBE for services to literature – admits he hesitated when the student union first suggested nominating him. When I ask why, he jokes about wanting to look “serious and considered”, until his voice falters and he looks away. “I didn’t go to university myself,” he says, pausing. “So when I was asked to be chancellor, I had to go away and consider … When you look at yourself … you must come across your own inadequacies. And then rise above them. Or bring them with you. It’s quite a challenge. When I get offered an MBE, or a doctorate, it’s not time to have a party – I get a deep sense of questioning myself.”
A minute later, however, his eloquence returns, as he tells me what it means for someone who has just one GCSE and two CSEs to be a university chancellor. “A university does not have the monopoly of learning, but it is a citadel where learning is celebrated.”
He is clear about his intention as the figurehead for the university: “To encourage as many care-leavers as possible to pursue education.” It’s a cause he is already working towards. At the University of Huddersfield there is a PhD scholarship in his name for care-leavers. He has inspired another in Leeds, and hopes Manchester will follow suit.
This commitment stems from his own childhood in care, a subject he has returned to with heartbreaking effect in his plays, poems and documentaries. Sissay’s mother came to the UK from Ethiopia not knowing she was pregnant, and when he was a few months old asked for Sissay to be temporarily fostered while she studied.
Instead, a social worker gave him to a deeply religious white foster family in Lancashire, telling them to treat it as an adoption. The social worker changed Sissay’s first name to his own, allowing the foster parents to add a surname; so Lemn Sissay was brought up believing his name was Norman Mark Greenwood.
But by the time he was 12, his foster parents had three children of their own. One day the couple asked him if he loved them. He said yes, but his foster mother insisted he read the scriptures and think it over. So Sissay tried a different tack: saying he “mustn’t love them”, but would pray to God to help him do better. In reply, they announced they were sending him to a children’s home and would never contact him again.
He was moved from homes to foster placements while his birth mother wrote anguished letters from Ethiopia asking when he would be returned. As the only black boy in each home, he was nicknamed Chalky White and spat at on public transport. At 16 he took to refusing to wear shoes, continuing to walk barefoot through snow, and to hospital for his cut feet.
With just a year to go before he could leave the system, he was put in an “assessment centre” called Wood End. Today the police are investigating more than 40 complaints of physical and sexual abuse there.
“It was a brutal regime,” he remembers, his anger rising. “I had done nothing wrong, but I was locked away for 10 months with nobody questioning it. I was stripsearched like a fucking criminal. I was beaten … put in a padded cell.
“Staff watched me in the shower, and in the bathroom. We had to walk down the corridor in order of size – smallest in the front [so they could watch us].”
Why does he think there have been so many recent scandals involving looked-after children – from grooming in places including Rotherham, to abuse in Welsh care homes? Sissay says it is because children in care are so demonised that they were seldom believed when they spoke out. “There is an established prejudice against children in care in this country,” he says.
“‘If you are bloody naughty I’ll send you to the children’s home’ – I’ve heard people say that a hundred times. No one wanted a children’s home at the bottom of their street.”
But he says it is too easy to blame social services and politicians: “Institutions and local governments could not get away with it if the wider public said: ‘These are children. These are our children.’”
He is relieved things seem to be changing. Making things better “is not that fucking complicated”, he insists. Showing children some affection would be a start. “When a social worker says, ‘I cannot be emotionally involved in my workload’ – that is an emotional statement to that child.”
But most of all, he says, children should not be seen as a problem: “When a child goes into care, the government is looking after its greatest asset.”
Sissay eventually tracked down his own family. At 17, he was given his birth certificate and learned his real name, which he started using immediately. In the decades that followed, he was reunited with his mother and siblings. But, he says wistfully, that does not mean he lived happily ever after.
“I put all my life into finding my family. At the end of the day, you can’t write yourself into someone else’s life. They have their own story, that’s what they know, and I can’t tattoo myself into them.”
Through it all, poetry was a refuge: “I did it because I was trying to translate the world, because I didn’t believe what I was being told. I investigated the world through my imagination.”
At 18, he self-published his first poetry book, selling it door to door while running a gutter-cleaning business. When his ladders were stolen, he moved to Manchester, and eventually found a publisher. His first performance was in a women’s co-operative in Moss Side.
Having grown up in entirely white areas, he was 17 before he formed a relationship with another black person. This, too, changed in Manchester. “The Caribbean community in Manchester taught me everything about race. I’d lived with people who were frightened of black people. I had to learn things like what food to eat – I had to be introduced to chicken! That old cliche.”
Now, he tells me, people in the city stop him on the street to tell him they are proud of him; and he is amazed by the outpouring of affection since the chancellorship was announced. His face grows still, and he says quietly that it is beautiful when a city treats you “like a family would”.
