5 ‘My name is Why’: stolen identities
In this section, the experience of being disempowered through receiving discriminatory social care is poignantly illustrated in extracts from an autobiography, My name is Why, by poet Lemn Sissay (2019).
Below is a copy of a letter written by an educational psychologist to the local authority responsible for Lemn’s care in his youth. It followed an assessment of him as a 17-year-old who had been in care for most of his childhood.
Lemn was initially placed with a family as a foster child, with the intention that he should remain with the family permanently. However, the foster carers rejected Lemn and he was removed from their care after 12 years and spent the next four years moving between children’s homes and other residential care.
When he was fostered, Lemn was renamed Norman. He did not find out his real name until he was 15 and given access to some of his files.
Schools Psychological Service,
Orrell Lodge,
Orrell Mount,
Orrell,
Wigan 12th July 1984
Dear Mr. Mackey,
Lemn Sissay (D.O.B. 21.5.67)
Thank you for asking me to see this young man whose behaviour at Oaklands and general hostility have led to a placement at Wood End.
I have chosen to write to you rather than to do a conventional report as I have no psychological test results to comment upon or interpret and, in view of my limited acquaintance with Lemn, would feel unable to offer more than an impression of his personality and problems.
As you know Lemn answered some of the questionnaires and completed most of the tests in a non-serious way. He also rejected the idea of completing an individual intelligence test for me. The reason he gave for this rejection of the tests was that such tests could not give a true picture of him as an individual and might be used to make decisions for him which he preferred to make for himself. I think that he was casting doubt on the validity of the tests and the psychometric process and although not a point of view that I personally subscribe to, it is certainly not untenable nor is it unreasonable for an intelligent person to adopt. However the motivation for rejecting assessment is not intellectual but part of a growing (?) rejection of the ‘care’ concept, i.e. of other people making decisions for him.
Lemn is very much into self-identification. He is interested in his Ethiopian roots (familial and historical) and in some of the concepts and attitudes of Rastafarianism which offer black consciousness and black pride in a cultural context.
When he was asked to write about himself he commented that ‘life … seems like a documentary on television’ – which appears to me to be an expression of alienation. He decided to write a poem to, as he says, ‘capture a piece of emotion’. The poem reads as follows:-
‘They told me
This was me, my family, my home
But i still ended up, alone
Once again i packed my smaller suitcase
Another loss of trust on a wild goose chase
Like a knot in a shoe lace,
They thought they did it best
But the more they pulled the harder the case
And who ended up with less
And now through the jungle of paper theory and pen
I just only find out my name is Lemn
An i bin cheated beated pushed and hit
Now mi name a Lemn and de fire bin lit
Now after i learnt dem say i mus’ learn
Throw water on the fire but the fire still burn.’
The spirit of Bob Marley lives on! I applaud Lemn’s courage but am not convinced that the choices he makes will be very sensible. He is better off making his own mistakes, given some degree of support, than having decisions made on his behalf.
Yours sincerely,
J. Yates
Principal Educational Psychologist
It is interesting that Lemn resisted the psychological and intelligence tests because they would not give ‘a true picture of him as an individual and might be used to make decisions for him which he preferred to make for himself’. This comment suggests that Lemn had experience of social care professionals failing to consult or involve him in decision-making, but that decisions had been made by others who had failed to understand his identity.
The psychologist highlights Lemn’s sense of alienation and the importance of his ‘Black consciousness’. Lemn’s moving poem captures the emotion of a child who has had his name, family and culture denied to him, who has experienced the powerlessness of being moved from place to place and having no control over his own destiny. Finding his real name through reading his files exposed both his anger about the removal of a core part of his identity and a hunger to reclaim who he really was.
My name is Why powerfully illustrates the ways in which the identities of service users can be devalued or even lost. It is a reminder of why social care professionals need to remain sensitive to individual identities and aware of the potential damage that can arise from discrimination and stereotypes.