I can’t reach out to all the people I know around the world – friends, family and fans – in time so this is the best way. On BBC World News channel this weekend part one of two documentaries on my life. Here are the details.
Viewers worldwide can see part one of BBC Studios produced imagine… documentary @LemnSissay: The Memory of Me this weekend at the following times (GMT) on the BBC World News channel:
Sat: 18:30, 23:30, 05:30
Sun: 11:30#imagine | @BBCWorld | #MadeByBBCStudios pic.twitter.com/V5oT0uhPZX— BBC Studios (@bbcstudios) October 9, 2020
Also on Saturday 10th I am reading from My Name Is Why here.An evening With Lemn Sissay
I just finished reading My name is why. Devastating but not surprising to me. I have, as a teacher and SENCO been responsible for Looked After Children in school. I have witnessed first hand how easily these young people can be misrepresented and misunderstood. Lemn’s story is horrifying for the exposure of cruelty, violence and lack of vital human affection, patience and constancy. I am retired now but I will never forget the children who I championed and tried to defend against the harshness of institutions and imposed rules. One day we have to do so much better with all these precious lives.
Thankyou Tatiana
Hi Tatiana,
Thank you for your post here. It brought so many memories and emotions to the surface. Like you I worked with Looked After Children, supporting their education and ensuring that they were accessing the education they were entitled to. So many were excluded from school with no thought given to their lives, and how “exclusion” was the story of many of their lives.
Good to meet you here! xx
Selam Lemn!!! I just finished your book “My Name is Why” I am so incredibly moved by it. So difficult to read, conjuring up so many emotions… @ times just wanting to jump in the book and rescue you!
I’m so impressed by you and proud of the person you’ve become! Thank you for using your Words and Life to inspire! God Bless You!
I do have a question I would love to see your documentary on BBC but the BBC iplayer doesn’t work here in the US. Do you know of a website, where it’s available, even if it’s for charge!
Thank you for your time!
Thanks. Not sure if I can find a link that you can see. 🙁 Unless someone ahs copied it and put it up.
Thank you for responding…I’ll keep looking! If I find something, I’ll post it here for others to see!
Just finished reading your memoir today, and I thank you for gifting it to us, it contains such heart and candor, the language so powerful and sparing. I relate to your search for love, identity, ground to stand on and plant in and grow, while scrabbling through soil that ranged from nearly barren to toxic for the same. I’ve been engaged in similar psychic archaeology for periods of time most of my adult life. Presently am pulled by desire to write poetry myself, and during the cloistering of the pandemic these months have begun to do so, and to take group workshops online. I was enthralled in your memoir by the litany and testimony you found in the artifacts of your life (those official documents that came into your possession chronicling you time in the Care system). It intrigues me to discover and reclaim my own. Lastly, what led me to read “My Name Is Why”, and appreciate your story and your living art, was a featured poem of yours in the Poetry Unbound podcast by Padraig O’Tuama, another poet I favor. Great thanks once again!
Thanks