Fringe by the Sea: Lemn Sissay

Belhaven Big Top

A glowing hour of powerful emotion curated by an equally powerful emotional intelligence. 

Lemn Sissay was new to me.  His photo in the programme, lit up in a pulpit like a modest black messiah, is striking. On the face of it, the hour was centred around his reading from ‘My Name is Why’, his memoir of a childhood “robbed” of its memories; for after his eleven year lifetime with the same white Baptist foster family, loving his life, siblings, hometown and school, he was abruptly ejected from home and expressly told he would never see them again. Thereafter, in a series of care homes, he resided until the age of seventeen as “son of the State”. He could only assume this was for purposes of “correction”, that it was what he deserved. 

When Sissay began reading from the book’s preface, he struck a light note, teasing the audience with false starts and “by-the-ways”. Then the book extracts which followed, where he expresses his pain in poetic, erudite prose, were liberally interspersed with chattier asides or assurances - that he was “with you, not shouting at you” or how he understood fully why somebody acted in the way they did.  His show in the Big Top was not a blame-game or form of self-therapy (he has done all that). Rather he saw it as a “conversation”. (Though actually some of the audience, to gauge from the question time which followed, themselves found it therapeutic!) 

Very refreshing was Sissay’s ability to feel intensely, whilst simultaneously standing apart to view self and situation objectively, often humorously. The narrative also rises above a sob story not least because of the language it is couched in. I started off trying to scribble down poignant turns of phrase and words of wisdom: how to view a ravine as a splendid spot to build a bridge, or how the laburnum tree, with its gorgeous blooms and poisonous seeds symbolised ... I didn’t manage to catch exactly what, as I was over-run with great words. 

Sissay is a seasoned performer, and the session was crafted much more than most book events, with its balance of serious and humorous, loud and soft, planned and impromptu, theatrical and artless. Towards the climax of the presentation, when he was reading some of the most harrowing passages with fully expressed fury I was again mulling over how he avoided whingeing, when I was struck with how it felt like a song. And the best singers do precisely this. They pour out anger and pain, but they own it.  They do not want sympathy.  They leave the listener free to feel empathy. 

So, I could liken Lemn’s readings tonight to songs of Piaf, and this book festival-type event can fully justify a place in the EMR.