But this nationally significant byelection has afforded Sissay a chance to return and concentrate on the town, its people, its businesses, churches and pubs. To view the community through the lens of an expat deeply tied to the streets, villages and towns of the place.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s been a really good time for me because I’ve been able to say positive things about Makerfield and I think that’s really important in this present climate of toxicity,\u201d he says. \u201cBut it’s also a shock.<\/p>\n
\u201cNobody told them it was going to happen. Then suddenly you wake up and you’ve got all of these sort of lemmings looking up at your house from when you open the door to ask which way you’re going to vote. And actually voting is a very private choice.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat we see on these occasions is the concentrated juice of politics. You see politicians for who they are. Because they have to present themselves eye to eye to their constituents. So who they are will come out.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat their true motivation is or form is. Are they acting? Are they genuine? Do they believe in what they say? Are they just saying this for me, you know, or do they believe it, or where’s the proof?<\/p>\n
\u201cWe get a chance to really investigate who they are. It’s like a poet going on stage and there’s no lighting. You\u2019re not hidden on stage.\u201d<\/p>\n
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“You see politicians for who they are.”(Image: Manchester Evening News)<\/p>\n
Sissay is a prolific Facebook poster and he\u2019s written a fair amount about Makerfield in recent weeks. He has enjoyed reading the replies, many from people he knows or knew – including some he played Kurby with as a child.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt’s actually quite beautiful. It means a lot to me,\u201d he says. But he also thinks the byelection has been \u2018traumatising\u2019 for some living there.<\/p>\n
On using that word, he stops himself and questions if it\u2019s too dramatic. \u201cI don’t know,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat’s happening at the moment is quite traumatic for anybody’s town. In any of our towns if this was happening, it would be quite a shock to the system.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sissay shows me a comment from his Facebook page from a local woman. It reads: \u201cMost people here, like me, are not racist. We\u2019ve been thrust into the \u201climelight\u201d for a few weeks. I can\u2019t wait until I can nip to Galloways for a pasty without being asked who I intend to vote for. I am hopeful that the majority of decent people around here will do the best they can for the town we live in.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sissay himself has shown support for Andy Burnham<\/a> in the run up to polling day and has appeared in a video with the Labour<\/a> man talking about the beauty of Jubilee Park and how his old school, Byrchall High, is a rival to ‘Eddie Arrows’ where the mayor’s kids studied.<\/p>\n Content cannot be displayed without consent<\/p>\n He has also allowed Mr Burnham to use one of his poems to support his pitch to Makerfield and appears in a campaign video reading extracts from \u2018Anthem of the North\u2019. \u201c”This is our power, our house”. An excerpt of my poem “Anthem of The North” finds its place at last. Vote hope,\u201d he posted on X this morning.<\/p>\n Sissay\u2019s formative years in Makerfield are still fresh in his mind\u2019s eye. He recalls with clarity the smile of the lollipop lady; Mr and Mrs Jolly who ran the corner shop selling sweets and bonbons in big glass jars; the clip-clop of the Rag and Bone man\u2019s Shire horse emerging through the mist.<\/p>\n If it all sounds like something from a Warburton\u2019s advert, Sissay says that\u2019s a fairly accurate analogy of the 1960s Lancashire he knew.<\/p>\n Though he is probably best known as a Manchester poet, Sissay\u2019s Lancashire inflection reveals he is a true Makerfield man. He describes Jubilee Park as the \u2018flower park\u2019, calls the M.E.N the \u2018Evening News\u2019 and pronounces \u2018bus\u2019 as \u2018buzz\u2019.<\/p>\n Content cannot be displayed without consent<\/p>\n He talks with distinct clarity about the laburnum tree in the front garden of his foster parents home on Osborne Road and the leaves that would carpet the ground – along with the toxic seed pods.<\/p>\n \u201cAt this time of year the postage stamp garden with yellow leaves, these beautiful yellow leaves from the punnets of the laburnums. That really is rich in my memory and has found its way into a few of my poems over the years.\u201d<\/p>\n He describes Ashton as \u201ca village of three parks\u201d and says the \u2018flower park\u2019 played a big part in his childhood.<\/p>\n \u201cOsborne Road is the road that I learned to cross. Then I learned to cross it on my own, which was a big deal. And then I could go to the park on my own. So it was the beginning of the rest of the world.<\/p>\n \u201cIt was ringed with these massive beech trees that rattled in the winter. And I remember the sycamore tree helicopters carpeting the floor of Osborne Road.\u201d<\/p>\n He tells me how he would scrub the wooden boards at the local butcher\u2019s shop on the high street as an 11-year-old doing his first Saturday job. I ask how the place has changed from the Ashton of his youth.<\/p>\n The cover of Sissay’s book shows the poet as a young boy(Image: Publicity Picture)<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of people who live in Ashton now don’t use the high street as much as they used to. It was butcher, baker and candlestick-maker and remember they were all independent shops.\u201d<\/p>\n The people, he says are \u2018salt of the earth\u2019 and it was, and remains, a town where everyone knows each other. \u201cIt was really community oriented around what church you went to, what school you went to.<\/p>\n \u201cI guess under the surface there were very complex interwoven behaviours by people who all worked together. You had the business of religion and then the business of business.\u201d<\/p>\n The Makerfield that Sissay was born into in the 1960s was a predominantly white working-class town. And he has spoken before<\/a> about growing up as the “only black child in a sleepy market town outside Wigan” in the 1970s.<\/p>\n He was born in Wigan to an Ethiopian mother who had come to Britain to study and ended up in a mother and baby unit. She refused to sign adoption papers but Sissay was placed in care and handed to long-term foster parents.<\/p>\n When he was 12, he was handed back to social services by his religious foster family. They had caught him stealing biscuits and decided the devil was in him.<\/p>\n He was left to fend for himself within the care system where he was abused physically, emotionally and racially. Decades later he received an apology and compensation from Wigan Council.<\/p>\n Lemn Sissay, outside Hulme Crescents, 1991(Image: Richard Davis )<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t until he was 15 that Sissay learnt his real name, having been named Norman after the social worker who handed him to his foster family. Despite experiencing the most difficult of childhoods, Sissay speaks with great affection about the people of Makerfield.<\/p>\n \u201cI have been back so many times for so many different reasons over the years,\u201d he says. \u201cThe reason we go back to the places that we are from is because our family are there, right?<\/p>\n \u201cThat’s what you do, that’s why you go back to your hometown and then your home bedroom. Well, I didn’t have that.<\/p>\n \u201cI would mention it in articles \u2018this is where I’m from\u2019 even though there was no family there who wanted me. I can’t have lived my formative years in a place and then spend the rest of my life pretending I wasn’t there because somebody got rid of me.<\/p>\n \u201cSo I fought for my memory. I go back to Ashton and people are just so kind.<\/p>\n \u201cThey say \u2018if we knew then\u2019. And I even have people saying they\u2019re sorry. It\u2019s not their fault.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople call me \u2018Lemn\u2019 even though I was only known as \u2018Norman\u2019 when I was there. So the kindness just blows my mind.\u201d<\/p>\n Much of the narrative around this byelection has focussed on concerns about immigration. Sissay believes Ashton is not a town disproportionately affected by an influx of immigrants. He also believes it is not a particularly racist town.<\/p>\n \u201cIt’s really important to say that Ashton was no more reactionary about other races than anywhere else in the 1960s,\u201d he says. \u201cIn fact, it was probably a better place to live regarding other races, regarding me for example, especially in the 1960s.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019d be lying if I didn’t say there weren\u2019t some people who didn’t like people from other races but then that was a 1960s stance.\u201d<\/p>\n Lemn Sissay(Image: Manchester Evening News)<\/p>\n In this byelection period, Sissay has written a new poem, Eight Games, to mark the start of the World Cup. Published in collaboration with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, it celebrates football\u2019s ability to bring people from different backgrounds, cultures and generations together, marking the tournament as a powerful opportunity to put hatred aside.<\/p>\n He has also spoken to several newspapers about Makerfield and visited old friends. It has, undoubtedly, made him nostalgic and introspective.<\/p>\n \u201cThere’s something about memory,\u201d he says. \u201cYou’re supposed to not recall something when there’s nobody to recall it with. The experience is one that only you have had.<\/p>\n \u201cGoing to children’s homes you get moved from one place to another. Those places disappear and there’s nobody to anchor you back to the memory.<\/p>\n \u201cBecause I have no family, I have to have my memory. So I’ve done it through articles and documentaries and through speaking about it.\u201d<\/p>\n A few years ago, Sissay started the project Tell Me Something About Family<\/a> – which asks people from across the globe to write about moments from their own familial experiences. Contributions come from all over the world, as far flung as Tasmania. Some are just a line, some are huge essays. The poet reads every single one of them.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s really emotional,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s little, private, beautifully-sculpted pieces of loss, of family and love. I can see just the breadth of what family is.<\/p>\n \u201cEveryone does things in their own way. You see adopted families, blended families, mixed race families. Families where people have split up, where two sisters have not spoken, where fathers have died.<\/p>\n \u201cIf you want to know what diversity is just look at family. It’s who we are.<\/p>\n \u201cSometimes I’ll read something on here and I’ll have such an opinion on it. I\u2019ll think \u2018well all you’ve got to do is to call your auntie and you’ll be all right\u2019. But it’s not my job. It’s not my place.\u201d<\/p>\n Lemn Sissay(Image: Manchester Evening News)<\/p>\n Sissay speaks about family as an observer and says he has met many people \u201cvery hurt\u201d by family and by their own unwillingness to forgive.<\/p>\n \u201cThe beauty of family, that I’ve observed, is that you never have to forgive,\u201d he says \u201cYou can hold that gripe forever. You can build a house on that gripe. You can have children on that gripe. You can get married on that gripe.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the privileges of family is that you don’t have to forget. You can take that to the grave. And people do.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I forgave my foster mother I could then empathise with her. But I couldn’t empathise before forgiving because I was so angry. After I forgave, I started to be able to breathe a little bit more.\u201d<\/p>\n As we chat about people and place, Sissay brings up his close friend the Bolton<\/a> comedian and writer Sophie Willan, who was also brought up in care. He immediately says \u201clook what she was has done for Bolton\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cIt’s us who were held on the outside – who were cast out, who were told that we were worthless – it’s us that bring worth to the places we are from.\u201d<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/0_My-Name-Is-Why-by-Lemn-Sissay.jpg\")
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