BOOKS & ARTS
Radio
Identity politics
Kate Chisholm
I first heard Lemn Sissay talking about his
childhood experiences on Radio 4 in 2009.
At that time he was still fighting Wigan
social services for sight of the official dos-
sier on his years as a child in care, fostered
at first and then dumped back in the sys-
tem and institutionalised in care homes and
then a remand home. Eighteen years of his
life stored in an Iron Mountain data facility.
He’d been asking for his files, the story of his
life, since he came of age.
It was not easy to forget that programme;
the banal cruelties of the system and Sis-
say’s resolute dignity in talking about them.
At 18 he was told that the name he had
been given by his foster parents was not his
birth name. But it was too late: at 14 Lemn
had had his initials tattooed on his arm,
using the first name given to him by his first
social worker, whose name was Norman.
It’s still there. He was also given a letter by
his mother in which she asks: ‘How can I get
Lemn back? I want him to be with his own
people, his own colour. I don’t want him to
face discrimination.’
Sissay’s career as a writer and perfor-
mance poet has never flinched from observ-
ing the way that children in care are treated,
with not enough attention paid to the con-
fusion, absence and loneliness at the heart
of their individual stories. Now he has writ-
ten a memoir, My Name Is Why, fuelled by
his determination to make things better for
other children in a similar situation and by
the quiet courage and relentless honesty of
someone who has not stopped feeling bitter
but won’t let it destroy the rest of his life.
He read passages from it on Radio 4 this
week (produced by Elizabeth Allard), giv-
ing us disturbing insights into how the wel-
fare state has treated him.
Lemn’s mother (who fell pregnant while
she was in the UK on a student visa) must
have the gift of prophesy as his name hap-
pens to mean ‘why’ in Amharic. Lemn has
never stopped asking questions, wondering
why he was ‘chocolate’ and everyone elsehe knew was white. Why that made people
angry with him. Why no one told him he was
‘the same colour as Martin Luther King’.
He now at last has been given the four
packed files that chart his years in care. But,
if anything, he is left with more questions.
‘Maybe I was loved?’ he wonders. ‘Maybe
my mother didn’t want me? Maybe it was
my own fault?’
Word of Mouth is one of those Radio 4
programmes that’s been in the schedule for
years (since 1992), is easy to dip in and out of,
and is often taken for granted. Yet it’s always
fascinating and speaks directly to us, whether
it be about how the Vikings changed the Eng-
lish we speak now or the history of ‘the most
powerful word’ in English, ‘the’. It’s also the
kind of programme that makes an excellent
podcast; a focused conversation, exploring
new thoughts and ideas through an estab-
lished format. It was developed by Frank
Delaney and Simon Elmes but is now pre-
sented by Michael Rosen (and produced by
Melvin Rickarby), who in last week’s episode
talked about dialect and Dickens with the
Vauxhall-born writer Gabriel Gbadamosi.
Gbadamosi grew up with a Nigerian
father who spoke Yoruba and a mother who
was Irish and spoke with a strong brogue.
The house was always full of people who at
times might speak standard Nigerian Eng-
lish, pidgin English, south London, street
London. While at school he also came across
formal English through listening to BBC
schools programmes. As a child, Gbadamosi
recalls, he could veer back and forth through
all these dialects as if at the sweep of a dial.
If he was stopped by the police as a teenager
during the 1980s when the sus laws were in
force, he would switch into his poshest voice,
dumbfounding them with an Eliza Doolit-
tleish ‘Good evening. Can I help you?’
He learnt early on how to shift between
worlds through language, a skill that proved
useful when he went to Cambridge Univer-
sity, where he did not meet another black
British person. At school, he had been intro-
duced to Dickens and the way the writ-
er develops characters through how they
speak, their back stories revealed through
their different dialects, intonation and
vocabularies. Rosen reminded us how Dick-
ens taught himself shorthand at 15, got him-
self a job as a freelance reporter, and spent
his time in pubs overhearing conversations
and noting down exactly what was said.
Gbalamosi added that he was also a parlia-
mentary sketchwriter, listening to MPs and
learning ‘the language of power’.
Reading Dickens helped Gbadamo-
si to see who he was — a south London-
er. ‘Through the novels,’ he said, ‘I got
immersed in it [the street life of Vauxhall].
I can be in this world and I can feel; I can
afford to feel. I don’t need to be frightened.
It is possible to be a Londoner. So he made
me a Londoner.’ The best argument for
Dickens you will hear in a while.body-bag by her grieving husband. It begs
the question: of all the many stories left to
tell in the opera house, was this really the
most urgent?
The telling itself here is strong, however.
Soutra Gilmour’s simple, suggestive designs
imprison the action in a tight cluster of pil-
lars that, with the help of Will Duke’s pro-
jections, transform from church to hospital
to rig. Where Von Trier exploits the ten-
sion between the open Scottish landscapes
and the oppressive community living with-
in them, Gilmour and director Tom Morris
celebrate the claustrophobia of interiors,
trapping Bess in a fortress whose stern,
black-suited elders are all but indistinguish-
able from the stone columns that surround
them.
A revolve keeps the opera’s many short
scenes (a hangover from the film) progress-
ing fluidly, though its constant movement
risks becoming frenetic in the less focused
action of Acts II and III, where Mazzoli and
Vavrek misjudge their pacing and let the
story slip a little from their grip.
Bess was the breakout role for actress
Emily Watson, and American soprano Syd-
ney Mancasola is scarcely less impressive.
Vocally and physically pliant, reinventing
herself under the gaze of the elders, the
much-desired touch of her husband, the
touch of strangers that must be endured,
Mancasola’s Bess is a mirror to all around
her. Her childlike demeanour and woman’s
voice create an uncomfortable friction, par-
ticularly in the graphic sex scenes that make
no concession to the confrontation of the
live, staged experience.
So dominant a central character leaves
little space for the supporting cast. Mez-
zo-soprano Wallis Giunta is earth to Man-
casola’s air as Bess’s sister-in-law Dodo, and
some of the best singing of the night comes
from Elgan Llyr Thomas’s Dr Richard-
son, his high, crooned melismas an answer
to the rough-and-tumble force of Duncan
Rock’s Jan. The latter may be underwritten,
but it’s a mistake to compensate with a late
aria. A man standing over a dead woman’s
body speaking for her, translating her — it’s
an act that takes the wind out of the clos-
ing miracle’s sails, dulling the absurd, the
extraordinary, the redemptive into some-
thing sentimental.
Breaking the Waves is just one of a flood
of recent operas based on films. Ades’s The
Exterminating Angel, Neuwirth’s Lost High-
way, Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking, Jen-
nifer Higdon’s Cold Mountain — all speak
of a growing need to bolster new opera with
the scaffolding of old stories. There’s noth-
ing new there; we’ve been doing it with nov-
els for centuries. What is different now are
the composers.
You can count the number of high-pro-
file, full-length operas commissioned from
women in the past 20 years on very few fin-
gers. That such a large proportion are based
on or associated with films is worrying. Just
look at the directors: Minghella, Von Trier,
Lynch. Are female composers only to be
admitted on to the main stages of our major
houses with the chaperone of a starry male
auteur behind them? It’s beginning to look
a lot like it.Are female composers only to be
admitted into opera with a male
auteur as chaperone?