{"id":9061,"date":"2022-03-16T16:40:05","date_gmt":"2022-03-16T16:40:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tahrir2day.com\/news\/2022\/03\/16\/lemn-sissay-younger-self-would-never-have-believed-obe-honour\/"},"modified":"2022-03-16T16:40:05","modified_gmt":"2022-03-16T16:40:05","slug":"lemn-sissay-younger-self-would-never-have-believed-obe-honour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tahrir2day.com\/news\/2022\/03\/16\/lemn-sissay-younger-self-would-never-have-believed-obe-honour\/","title":{"rendered":"Lemn Sissay: Younger self ‘would never have believed’ OBE honour"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Poet Lemn Sissay dedicated his OBE to his younger self, who he said survived a “dehumanizing” time in care.<\/b><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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The Chancellor and broadcaster of the University of Manchester grew up in foster families and children’s homes in Wigan.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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He said his younger self “never believed” he would become an OBE, awarded in recognition of his services to literature and charity.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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He felt obliged to accept the honor because it was a “big thing” for those in need of care.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Sissay was born in 1967 to an Ethiopian mother shortly after moving to England to study.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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He was placed in a foster family in Wigan and named Norman Greenwood.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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After being reunited with his mother at the age of 18, she told him he had been called Lemn, which means “why” in Ethiopia’s Amharic language, and that she had tried unsuccessfully to get him back.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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He waged a 34-year battle with Wigan Council to get his records and settled a court case against the agency over his treatment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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After his inauguration at Windsor Castle, he said when people receive honours, “they usually say, ‘I can’t wait to tell my mum or dad because that’ll make them proud.'”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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“I didn’t have that and it’s a direct consequence of my history \u2014 but it just is and it has an even deeper effect on me than it does on a family,” he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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He said becoming an OBE amazed his younger self.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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“If I had told him that one day you would be at Windsor Castle to receive an OBE from Prince Charles, I never would have believed that kind of magical story – almost fairy tale – would happen,” he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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He added that he had to accept the honor for the boy “who lost his family, left the children’s home at 18 and at that age didn’t know anyone for more than a year and had spent all those Christmases alone”. .<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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“If you were to say to that child… ‘In your adulthood you will be honored for what you do and who you are, but you must reject it…’<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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“I just couldn’t do that to him.”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Sissay, who published his first book of poetry when he was 21, described his experiences in the British care system in his autobiography My Name Is Why.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In 1995 he made a BBC documentary, Internal Flight, about his life and his one-man show Something Dark, which detailed how he was abandoned as a baby, was adapted for BBC Radio Three in 2006.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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He became an MBE in the New Year Honors 2010 and took office as Chancellor of the University of Manchester in 2015.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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He said it was “a wonderful thing to be recognized as someone who has my kind of past”.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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“It’s really important for me to represent all the young people who have been in foster care, to make them think, ‘I can do that,'” he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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“You can think, ‘I can be a lawyer, a doctor, or a hairdresser, or just go where he went.'”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Why don’t you follow BBC North West? <\/i>Facebook, <\/i>Twitter<\/a> and <\/i>Instagram? You can also send story ideas to <\/i>northwest.newsonline@bbc.co.uk<\/p>\n<\/div>\n