On Lemn Sissay’s new collection, ‘Listener’
Before we get to know each other / And sing for tomorrow / And unearth yesterday / So that we can prepare our joint grave / You should know that I have no family, / Neither disowned nor distanced – none… /…I am the guilty secret of an innocent woman / And a dead man – tell your parents, they’ll want to know.
‘Before We Get Into This’ – Listener
Meeting Lemn Sissay for an interview on his new collection ‘Listener’ I can’t help but have this particular poem from the work ringing in my ears. The incredible story of Lemn’s childhood in a foster home and then in care, and his subsequent search for his family during his adult life, has played a crucial role in how Lemn Sissay is viewed by the public and literati. Mid-way through his career the BBC brought Lemn’s journey to find his family into our homes, with the 1995 documentary ‘Internal Flight’. In 2006 Lemn began touring with a one-man show based around the story of his life ‘Something Dark’– available in book form since last March. Sissay’s life as a poet, playwright and vocal literary figure has run parallel to his struggle to discover his family and roots. He now has, in his own words, ‘a dysfunctional family, like every-one else’. It’s been twenty years since Lemn published his first poetry collection at the age of twenty-one – ‘Listener’ is his fifth. In the intervening decades he has become a profoundly influential voice for poetry, manifesting his vision of poetry as ‘everyday’ through his work in public art. This year, Lemn was appointed South Bank’s Resident Artist and as I walk along the Thames to the Riverside Rooms, I wonder how to approach this remarkable figure and his latest body of work. In terms of dealing with ‘Listener’, do we need to know Sissay’s story ‘before we get into this?’
Lemn Sissay is the child of an Ethiopian mother and an Eritrean father. When his mother came to study in Britain, she sought to have Lemn fostered for a short time, unaware that the foster family had been told it was a permanent adoption. Lemn had no knowledge of his biological mother, or that she had made attempts to reach him, until he was eighteen years old. I meet Lemn at his desk, surrounded with mottos and proverbs scribbled in enthusiastic biro - ‘It aint where you go but where you’re at’ and ‘Nothing is written in stone unless you are one’ jostle for space with projects plans, maps, and notes from fellow writers and collaborators. It strikes me that this man, with so many visions for the future, seems happy for his past to be part of the public arena. Does he believe in upholding this connection between his art and life? Lemn pauses at the question, then fixes me with bright, impassioned eyes.
People read my work and they’re always trying to peg me down: am I about race? Do I just want to be well known? I put ‘Something Dark’ out there to say ‘This is my story’. None of that other stuff matters. What matters is this story that I’ve had to drag like a dead body through my life since I was eighteen. It’s a story I’ve been wanting to tell. People might watch or read about my life and wonder what work comes out of that. But is it a bad thing, if I’m not dependant on it? It’s already in the poetry, if people look.
Whether or not we choose to map the facts of Sissay’s life story onto ‘Listener’, it is Lemn’s lasting attitude towards poetry as performing the function of both family and friend that truly is given voice in ‘Listener’. There’s an intense longing for intimate encounter with the reader - or ‘listener’ - that resounds throughout the collection. Take the title poem, commissioned for the eightieth birthday of the World Service. The lilting lines speak to us off the page:
Radio waves like flocks of swallows or the flamingos of / Lake Tana / That seem to fly out from the reflecting solar wind / Land upon both of us with feather-wing ease / Bringing my world to yours and your world to mine…. / … Tuning in through the hissing noise / To you tuning in to me.
The poem’s introduction frames this piece as the imagined meeting of Lemn and his mother, a call across the void from Britain to Ethiopia. However, this faith in poetry’s potential to unite can, be just as keenly felt in the relationship between the author and ourselves. In ‘Receiver’ we find this same conviction in poetry’s ability to connect, ‘Emotions in transit transmigrate / Story transmutes and what transpires / Are transfinite transonic choirs.’ ‘Receiver’ at times seems constructed to trip us up, pointing to the impossibility of a story’s smooth, unadulterated passage from ear to ear, yet Sissay ends the poem with this jubilant image of transcendent creative expression.
Though ‘Listener’ is visionary in scope, its sagacity most often comes to the fore dressed in the simplest language. The image Lemn has often used to describe his work, is that of poems as ‘flag posts in the mountainside, showing the view you see at any given point in the journey’; for the poet this alludes to charting his progress. Tellingly, the image also suggests the act of guiding others. There are poems in the collection that function as signposts to life – ‘Inspiration’ and ‘Applecart Art’ evoke the repetitious form of the mantra, compelling the reader to look inwards, and in the case of ‘Applecart Art’ to reject the inflated superficiality of art ‘scenes’. One of the most striking of these pieces is ‘Moving Target’, a battle cry against society’s ‘unwritten laws’ - ‘Do not engage with them. / They will devour you. / Do not wear them or grow with them. / Do not challenge them or walk in them, / Do not counter them.’ Lemn lights up when I mention the piece. ‘Yeah!’ He lets out a joyous holler.
Don’t engage with them! Society wants you to be binary. You can’t fight the system by being a rebel. You’re just at the shore waiting for the boat to sell you down the river…’ He sits back in his chair, suddenly reflective after this outburst. ‘It’s about not losing your voice. It’s like I don’t try to reach out to my readers, though it might seem like that. I’m in contact with myself, and constantly involved in expression. Therefore it touches people. I hope. If I wasn’t concerned with being in touch with other people I would lose my own voice.
We can read in ‘Listener’ the product of a career that has remained uncompromising in the face of the anxiety of influence. In his early career Lemn was one of the only Black British poets working in Britain. Gigging with a group including Benjamin Zephaniah, Grace Nichols and Linton Kwesi Johnson, it was often taken for granted that Lemn too was a Caribbean poet. He has since been trumpeted as a Mancunian poet (his birth-place and home until he moved to London two years ago), an African poet, or simply a ‘Black’ poet, to mention a few labels from which he has struggled to keep his distance. ‘When I was just starting up, Grace Nichols signed her book to me, “Keep on keeping on”. I’ve just tried to be me and a bit more of that.’ There’s a triumphant, even a defiant streak in ‘Listener’’s complex portrayal of the interaction between identity and race. The poetry’s approach to African identity differs radically in tone. Moving from ‘The Battle of Adwa, 1896’, a piece that glorifies the spirit of brotherhood in the Ethiopian fight for independence, to the depiction in ‘Molasses and Long Shadows’’ of a post-independence Africa beleaguered by systemic betrayal, where ‘The families who sowed this rotting crop / Reap its benefits today and, no wonder, forgot.’ It’s telling, then, that the last creative piece in the collection is a call to rise above the constraints of national identity. The play ‘Queen’s Speech’, originally commissioned for the BBC, imagines a bold dialogue between Her Majesty and three immigrants, one of whom, Rabbi Hattenstone’, ends the piece with a utopian call to open our borders to all peoples.
Sissay’s work has been noted for its diverse readership and its ability to attract those coming to poetry for the first time. Lemn believes ‘Listener’ will be no exception. ‘I’m available to people who want to explore poetry as a normal thing.’ Speaking these words, Lemn’s eyes have the glint of the revolutionary. ‘Poetry is for the people. Think of all the people who believe books are exclusive and as soon as they start reading they can’t stop.’ One of the greatest joys in reading ‘Listener’ is the frequency with which we recognize ourselves in the poetry. ‘Lost Key’ is one such poem where we identify with the searcher, becoming increasingly irritated with our well-meaning companion, ‘Have you checked the back of the sofa? Underneath it? / Could it be in your pockets?’ Addressing our frustration, a voice begins to asserts itself with an astute eye that’s almost menacing in its clarity, ‘Funny how when you’re looking you find everything else / Except. Don’t start blaming people. Before you know it / You’ll accuse everyone that is nearest to you’. We can all relate to such a surge of irrational bitterness, and the banal scenario of losing a key at once becomes a site for profound self-questioning. It is the expert use of the ordinary scenario to extraordinary effect that has given much of Lemn’s public poetry landmark status. Three poems in the this new collection- ‘Rain’, ‘Catching Numbers’ and ‘Gilt of Cain’- are also works of public art, and for Lemn its crucial that people identify with the poetry. ‘I like public art because it's about people owning it. There are hundreds of statues in London, but only a few that people recognize as pieces they just want to be near to. You can’t make a landmark, people have to decide it is.’
Should a reader of ‘Listener’ be aware of the incredible life that has produced this work? Do we need to know the life of these poems as they exist outside the page? It would seem that the answer is no, on both accounts. ‘Listener’ is a deeply affecting collection, with an incisive wisdom that carries the boldness of its vision. It will remain so whether you know of the significance of the search for Lemn’s mother in the title poem, or not. Likewise one doesn't necessarily need to know that it is Lemn himself, confronting presumptions as to his sense of identity, in the role of Rabbi Hattenstone in ‘Queen’s Speech’. ‘Listener’ is the creation of a man who has spent most of his adult life searching for a familial connection, and who has found it – in part – in poetry, and its potential to connect.
What we take from it is the impression of a potent body of work which begs to be shouted in the street, whispered over the radio and scrawled on the walls. Equally, we can read Listener in a quiet room, and there establish an intimate connection with this profoundly personal and politically significant collection.
- Lemn Sissay’s ‘Listener’ is due for release on October 16th
- The public artwork ‘Gilt of Cain’ will be unveiled in the City of London on September 4th
- For more news on Lemn Sissay, including dates for his Winter tour, visit his blog www.lemnsissay.com
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