Violent World News from the b.b.c. . The former Nixon chairman Carlos Ghosn who is in detention in Japan is due to appear in court next week to hear why he's being detained the executive has invoked his rights to hear the accusations against him he's been behind bars since being arrested in Tokyo in November prosecutors say Mr Goh under reported his income by tens of millions of dollars there's been criticism of the length of his detention and unusually powerful tropical storm has made landfall in southern Thailand in the peak tourism season Tropical Storm public is packing 75 kilometer an hour winds and lashing rain it's churning up the sea with waves up to 5 meters high as our correspondent Jonathan Head this time of year we get a lot of storms in the Gulf of Thailand all that east coast but this is the strongest that they've experienced in 30 years now a lot of people have fled the islands but they got off the islands largely because all sea and air transport has now been suspended those who are there have been advised to stay away from beaches and to stand solid buildings and not to stand where that is close to where there is a risk of a tidal surge this storm has now actually made landfall so they're feeling the full effects of it now and the possibility of landslides as well Zimbabwe's biggest drinks company Delta has abandoned Japan to accept only hard currency and payment after the government declared the move illegal the country's central bank has promised to ensure that the firm has the cash it needs to pay suppliers Zimbabwe is suffering a severe shortage of foreign currency and a collapse in confidence in locally issued bond notes medical experts in Britain have said there's no firm evidence to support the idea that spending time on computer screens and smart phones is harmful to children's health in the 1st such guidance to be published in the u.k. The World College of Pediatrics and child health avoids setting screen time limits but it recommends that devices aren't used in the hour before bedtime and that's the latest b.b.c. News. Welcome to talk on the b.b.c. World Service with me Stephen Sackur my guest today is that poet and Performa of the most intimate kind with his words he lays bare the pain and hurt that lies deep in his past and still resides in his heart and paid lenses say was given away as a baby by his 21 year old Ethiopian mother who had just arrived in the u.k. To study she intended for his foster care to be temporary but she never got her child back instead he was raised by a Christian couple in the northwest of England a black child in an insular white world age 12 he was rejected by his foster family and put into council care over the following 6 years he experienced increasingly prison like conditions routine racial abuse and a denial of even his right to learn about his real identity and yet in the midst of so much darkness a creative impulse flickered to life Lem says they started writing poetry Fast forward 30 years and he's an artist of national renown honored by the queen voted for the post of Chancellor of Manchester University and on earth is official poet of the London 2012 Olympic Games still at the heart of Lemsip say it's an effort to come to terms with rejection loss and a fragmented identity is that a process that will ever have an ending well he joins me now Lem says say welcome to hard talk Hi Stephen you are a writer a poet but you're also a public performer one is very solitary one by definition is clearly public which is the more authentic comfortable you are. You know I think they're both authentic and both comfortable you need to. You need to. You need to be alone to to write and to explore and to find the sort of chemical compound of the poem and you need to read on stage so that the chemical compound. Blows into fireworks and sheds a light you know. That's for poetry as opposed to other art forms when you've done other things in particular you've written quite a lot of plays but I think you've said poetry is your true self the voice that lives at the back of your mind is there something special for you about poetry as a child poetry was a place where I could find a familial resonance in other words when I had no family as a child the writing of poetry would act as a memory so that I could identify where I'd been who I'd been with what I felt at any given sort of time in my childhood and that that's really what family does and in lieu of that poetry allowed me to have a place to look back and say oh I was there then I mean I don't want to be too literal but I mean your problems are almost like your surrogate family substitute family absolutely if family is a collection of disputed memories between one group of people over a lifetime of which I didn't have I didn't have anybody to dispute the memory of me memory is a central part of a family and my poems were a memory of any given event in my in my life well you introduced me already to thoughts about your childhood colors so much of your writing and I guess your take on the world really what what you went through. As a child as a young one so I do want to talk about it a little bit. For people who don't know your story I mean you were you your mom was a need young Ethiopian woman who came to the u.k. To study I think she came with the expansion of Ethiopia through the Emperor Haile Selassie who was sending students across the world to get an education and then to come back and feed back into the growth of Ethiopia it was a very exciting time in Ethiopia at that time when she pregnant actually when she arrived good question I'm not sure she was pregnant when she arrived I think I was conceived quite literally in the journey interesting but there she was a young woman in a new country an alien culture trying to find her place and she then found herself pregnant had the baby and clearly decided she could not live her life with this baby at this particular time and decided to give it up what are you of course women are incredible Ok and the act of giving a child away to be fostered or adopted is is is to me the action of the Harrell when and what my mother did was she asked me to be fostered for a short period of time while she studied so that she could then take me back to Ethiopia say a year year and a half the social worker gave me 2 foster parents and said treat this as an adoption he's yours forever His name is Norman So that was a fundamental deception which changed the course of your life it or totally changed the course of my life here so the foster parents took me and they said Where are your parents now and where your parents for ever and I thought they were my mom and dad they grew up in the north of England you know very it has to be said White fairly insular community where you were there's brown skinned baby and a complete sore novelty and they really and many of the people in the community I the 1st time I met a black person I was 9 years of age so. They the foster parents held me there and said that they were mine forever. And at 12 years of age they put me into children's homes and said that they'd never contact me again and didn't you know you've had years and years to reflect on this why do you think they rejected you having raised you who 12 years and then sent you away for no more contact seemed the most extraordinarily cruel and strange thing to do. They I was going through adolescence so I was the eldest child in the family and I was taking biscuits from the tin without same please and thank you I was staying out late with my friends and they've not had an adolescent before and this is what I think this is the Only when you're 12 you want 16 you want sniffing glue no I wasn't being serious crime no no no I wasn't doing that either. They they they were they you know they meant to do the best for me I think but they were naive and they were also. Extremely religious and they perceived. That the devil was working in this equation and. And yeah and that's that's that's what they did it's it's the most immense complete form of rejection Yes and it was complete I lost everybody I lost my mother my father my sisters my brothers my uncles my cousins my grandparents my title my 1st girlfriend everything from that moment onwards I was in no contact with any of the family ever and I was placed into children's homes with lots of other children who had come from abused families and. Etc and you were abused I mean there was racism there was physical of the racism there was physical abuse I was in wood and Assessment Center at 17 years of age source held in of it was a virtual prison for children for 48 months this this notion that you've already talked about writing poetry in a sense to store memory in a way to poems being the witnesses to what you were going through when did that begin did that begin when you were in the children's home yeah it began at 12 years of age I knew what I wanted to be I've always known that I wanted to be a poet I was very clear about and I've made b.b.c. Radio documentary where one of the staff in the children one of the cleaners cleaners are really interesting people in institutions because they see everything they see what's wrong and they see what's right because they're not staff they're not social workers you know they see everything and they are quite an incredible resource to a child actually they should be paid more. But one cleaner said you know I remember you in the Children's Zone I remember when you were writing and I remember you scribbling up your piece of paper and throwing them away and starting again etc I have been invited to a should say we've discussed this because you've agreed to do I've invited you to read a poem because I want everybody to get a flavor of the poetry and your voice Yeah well and it's called Children's Home and it is a very powerful and very bleak disc. What a little bit of it felt like but I just wonder this sort of poetry which which is somewhat typical of things you've reflected upon in your life and about about your past is this something you wrote. A lot afterward I mean when did you write down some of these things these memories you know that I wrote some of these at the time and I wrote some of them after leaving care you know you really do live your childhood out in your adult life it's not in your childhood that the abuses of being in care actually come to like us when you leave and you draw on your childhood as you grow into an adult it's then that you see. The effect that it's had on you and it's then that you look back and realize whatever abuses of happened . To you can we use one of them one verse from children's home we've been given booby trapped time bombs trigger wires hidden strapped on the inside it became a place of controlled explosions self mutilation screams suicide of young people returned return to sender dorms of midnight moans we might well have all been children but this was never a children's home mutilation screams and suicide Yeah all of those things happened in the care system some of them yeah I mean you. Been through the most extraordinary journey in recent years because you having reflected for so long on what happened to you you decided you were going to seek some sort of legal recourse against the counsel that lied to you lied to you about your own mother about your own history and identity and kept you in those homes for 5 or 6 years and in the course of taking them to court you had to go through a psychologist report in depth sort of forensic look deep into your psyche that I imagine has really introduced you to so much of the pain that been inside you for so long yes I would say that when somebody else takes a look at your life and and they they break it down into into a report which outlines the damage that was done to you via your childhood. That's quite. That's quite an event to read what I tell you was even more extraordinary is your decision to only see and hear what was in that report live as it were on a theatre stage when a fellow actor played the role of the psychologist and read the report to you and you sat in a chair and listened and it was the 1st time you'd ever heard it listen to this long exposition of the damage done to you including the post-traumatic stress the abuse of alcohol other forms of. Mental damage that the psychologist found in you and you took it all in front of an audience yeah on stage a one off completely extraordinary performance why did you do that I did it because other people have been through this process particularly in Wales and they've had a psychology report written about them. And. The suicide rate of people who've been through this process is high I didn't want that I don't want that to happen to me so I felt safe to hear the reports read to me on stage by an actor called Julie has been dolls here in England and I felt I feel safer on stage than I do off it is probably the truth. Well like listening to it was quite disturbing and it. But it was quite liberating as well because there were 350 people 400 people at the Royal Court Theatre in west London there just to support me. Just to just to be with me just to hold me in mind it was like being home. By a nation it was a beautiful event and. I'm proud to have done it I've not looked at the report since then you know I haven't and I won't you talked about how any society can be judged by the way it deals with the children who do not have their own family you know are institutionalized cared for by the state you said in 2012 you can define how strong a democracy is by how its government treats this kind of child you know I don't mean children I mean the child of the state Yeah if you're in care the government is legally your parent. So what does it say about the Britain that you've grown up in your treatment what happened to you war has it's ended you know children still struggle and suffer in care today. This care system in England stole my family from it it named me after the social the social worker named me after himself. Briefly called Norman I was called on the for 18 years. Norman it locked me away and imprisoned me. As a child I want redress for that redress for that and that's important clearly because you've got to do with determination but there's something else about you that fascinates me is this idea of forgiveness because you in another way as you've conducted your career writing and becoming a renowned poet you've also been on a long term quest to find family to find your own birth mother make sense of her life and her decisions and the heart the sort of half sibling is that you have around the world and I'm surprised that you frame that in terms of forgiveness rather than anger in a way is there no anger in me I've been angry I've been incredibly angry and I've been hurt and I've come to realize. That I'm not defined by my scars but by the incredible ability to heal and that forgiveness is part of healing and that and that it's really important that I forgive my foster parents and I forgive the social services here in England who stole my mother from me I even should forgive my mother because it's very difficult when an adult child comebacks comes back to find you it's very difficult for her I think what people watching this would probably want to believe is that when you found your birth mother and indeed when you went back to your foster parents much later in life when you've been. I'm a very successful artist what Perhaps we'd all like to believe is that you found relationships that were meaningful but you found family in a way in these 2 different strands of your life did you I think I found I think it's it's complicated when you find your family my father's family his sisters and brothers my aunts and uncles and my mother and her children is the we're talking about now the birth family yeah yeah are they in your life today. I now know who my family is so the truth is it's it's very difficult for them or for me or for any of us to form familial relationships they're all good people but. It's quite shocking when somebody comes into your family like me in a sense demands of them a form of truth telling and exposing of secrets your families don't want truth a lot of the time you know families want to be Ok they want the structure to stay as it is and you shall and are I do challenge that unfortunately does that mean you can't and I know that I can tell this is extraordinarily difficult for you but does that mean you can't really have long term close relationships with the people from your life you would have to ask them about that I mean just imagine somebody coming into your house and standing there and saying Ok I'm now the oldest brother and by the way your parents were sleeping with other people ins at some point in their life that you don't know about and stuff so I think that possibly possibly I don't know of family families about what's not said it's about not saying things it's about holding the collective group in mind and I'm somebody who wants answers my name Lemmen Herrick said Let men in I'm Herrick. The language of my father's on my time it means a question why you know Ethiopians my people now know me as the person called Wiley So I I come into a family that I've searched for all of my life with the question why as a name that's quite a challenge to a family most of my family don't speak to me my my my my father's children and my mother's children actually and my mother and it's complicated. Throughout all of this you've kept writing and it seems to me there's something interesting about your creativity and your poetry in particular you say that you have to live in the moment you say you know I can't live in the past and I can't look too far into the future I have to be and I have to create in the here and now and I understand that and yet so much of your your writing in this sort of anthology and others is actually about this past so you do go back to time in your head yes I have to live in the present Thanks for the reminder. That we can start the interview. Because there's no my love to survive but certainly present is that is is actually a product of you coming to terms and coping with and weaving stories about your past you can't you can also if you live in the past you know you're not you're not in the present and you're not a lot of leave a real and authentic and Shruti your souls I don't believe that I do live in my past I. In terms of morality in I write about what what inspires me at the time. And if that includes my time in the children's homes then then that's all well and good but what happened then affects who I am now and I think living in the present is a way of of of living the best life you can live and forgiveness is one of the best ways of being able to live in the present because otherwise you're all. I was looking to the past to find an apportion blame it's like war and the troubles for example in Northern Ireland you know we go through the process of anger or Ethiopia or anywhere in the world you go through the process of anger you go through the process of war and then you have to equip yourself to go through the process of peace with yourselves as a people and with everybody that you communicate with and if all you've ever had is the defense mechanisms or the fight or flight. Mechanism then you have to learn new ways of being true to yourself and to everybody else around you and being in the present is one of the ways to do that that is interesting and what's striking to me also is that in your young life you were so much an outsider and so much alone and I think you reflect at one point that you didn't have anybody in your life who'd known you for more than one year yes I think that was when you came out of the children's homes where you're in such is an extraordinarily difficult and isolating place to be in so many ways and yet now you are and yo