To fulfill the role of ‘family’ I needed to prove what had happened to me in my first eighteen years, as there was no one else who could. I needed to find my family. I was performing around Britain and out across the world, writing commission, giving workshops, working in radio and all the stuff a young alive poet does. At each stage of my journey, and with each ‘success’ my sense of loss deepened.

‘Have we been waiting to be accepted for so long that not being accepted has become the criteria for our acceptance.’

I may as well call it what it was. Racism. All the hallmarks were there. My name was stolen. I was stolen from my parents. I was experimented on. When the experiment didn’t work I was placed in a darker institution. I didn’t meet a black person until I was nine. I didn’t know a black person until I was seventeen. I was nicknamed ‘Chalky White’ as a teenager. I internalised this racism. I owned it. But everything in the sixteen years that preceded it was just a warm up. The day I said ‘stop’ was when the nightmare began. And I spoke about this in my readings and in my poems. I had to.

‘A Dutch MC asked me how she should introduce me on stage. “Just say ‘He loves what he does and he does what he loves’,” I replied. She walked on stage and said, “Lemn Sheeshay he likes what he does and does what he likes.”’

But racism was a sideline. I couldn’t allow myself to be defined by how well I articulated what I didn’t like. As seductive as this was I found myself in a situation where my own anger could be commodified in the arts and, instinctively, I knew my anger ran too deep to be accommodated and paid for. There was a deeper level to anger, I believed. One that couldn’t be sold or bought.

‘Anger is an expression in the search for love.’

I needed answers to bigger questions. Why was I in the children’s homes? Why did the foster parents throw me away? Who was my family? Where was I from? Why was I not returned to my mother? Why was my name changed? Where are the eighteen years of records about my life? I knew I had been lied to for seventeen years. The proof was in my name. The letter from my mother was to a social worker who had illegally named me after himself – Norman. I found my mother at twenty-one, in 1988. Tender Fingers is dedicated to her.

‘Life is not worth living if there is no one that you would die for.’