First, you must consider the type of account you want to create, what username would best reflect your personal or professional brand: It’s difficult to remember where exactly these symbols go within the name. Although it can be difficult to avoid if other usernames are taken, users find it difficult to remember these exact punctuations and your account can get lost in the masses. 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? This is a deeply moving memoir that speaks with incredible poeticism. A staggering exposé of colonial theft and abandonment, this book is grippingly heartbreaking" (DAVID LAMMY) Discussed Norman with Miss Jones, who has quite a pathetic attitude towards the child, purely based on his colour – see recent school report where she refers to him as a Ray of Sunshine – she sees his colour as his cross to bear – hopefully the staff attitude in his new school will be more realistic.

It's a beautiful thing. I'm actually writing the speech for it, as we speak, but it's quite intimidating to follow Chimamanda Adichie but I'm going to do a good job. I'm going to do my absolute best.

Saturday Playhouse: Chaos by Design: BBC Radio 4 FM, 10 May 1997". genome.ch.bbc.co.uk. BBC Genome Project . Retrieved 2 November 2017. I do... to this day, think that success is being able to look in the mirror and know that I'm alright on that day. I don't believe I've made it–I believe that I'm making it. I believe that I've found my past so that I can live in the present, it's the most important thing to me. The books and the plays and the touring and the gigs and the speeches and the cash...it all pales into insignificance when compared with knowing that I didn't do anything wrong, and I'm going to be okay now." BBC Four - Winter Walks, Series 1, Lemn Sissay". BBC. 15 December 2020 . Retrieved 11 December 2021. I would build relationships. I would remember people’s significant moments. I would not fear closeness.

We were fostering and adopting way before those places were established. There are enough people who can do that. We need to encourage that. I'm not taking you away from what those parents want to do in Europe, but there's a reason why they've been taking children from Africa—it's directly connected with the infantilization of adults in Africa. If they truly cared about those children, they would give their money to adults to care for those children. Why take them thousands of thousands of miles away? Part of the beauty of family is its dysfunction. It’s dysfunction that is at the heart of all functioning families. I promise you, when you don’t have a family, you actually crave that dysfunction. I would give away everything I own or have achieved to have had a dysfunctional family who knew me as a child. When I got my OBE, I was stunned into silence. When someone says, “We’ve been watching what you do, and we’d like to give you this…” It’s a rare occasion when I don’t have the words. I think it’s important to be good at receiving compliments, but equally important to be given them. If you’re only giving things away, but you’re not receiving them, there’s something wrong with that. My Name Is Why is Lemn Sissay's poetic, heartbreaking, scathing look at the foster care system in the UK and how he was failed by it time and time again. Sissay's mother was an Ethiopian student who studying abroad at a university in the UK when she became pregnant. Due to circumstances beyond her control she was unable to care for him right away and he was put in temporary foster care. He could never be adopted though because she has refused to sign her rights away. So begins the memoir which ends with Sissay receiving his file and leaving the system. It's evidence. My friend, Tishani Doshi, is a novelist from India and she has a poem called Girls Are Coming Out Of The Woods. It's metaphorical, as well as being an actual truth. We are in the days of WikiLeaks, there are more words passing between more people now than since the beginning of time. Information is starting to pour out. The past is not what they said it was. We need to find the evidence and out it because the evidence of what happened in the past has been controlled.I have never read a memoir like it. A blistering account of a young life in the hands of neglectful authorities. It’s a quest for understanding, for home, for answers. Grips like a thriller. Astounding” Renowned poet Lemn Sissay OBE will join Community Care Inform for an exclusive live webinar this month, to mark World Social Work Day 2022.