Lillian Allen 149

don’t believe in beginnings, I don’t believe in ends. It’s just a circle. People who remember me from my past remember that I was always writing. When I go back home, people I know from thirty-odd years back say, “Yuh still writing?” I grew up in the church, in a large fam- 13 ily, a community. I was very active in school. I was always involved in elocution and activities like that; church activities and getting together with other kids to do plays and so on. I must have distin- Lillian Allen guished myself as a writer back then. That’s before I was ten or so. born 1951 I didn’t realize it until I went back and people, you know, started talking about it. But I remember sort of around age twelve, being amazed at writing, thinking about writing and I wasn’t quite sure lillian allen was born in , , where she spent where writing came from. I remember going through the geometry most of her formative years—the years that would help to shape her book where you had to learn three hundred theorems or something sensibility and self-identity. As a teenager, she left for New York, where like that, and when I was done, I figured, even if I thought somebody she spent several years attending school. During that time she became wrote books, after geometry, I wasn’t quite sure. I thought it may immersed in American culture, particularly black American culture, have come from some tree, or factory, right. So it was much later, at a time of significant activity in that community. She attended New actually, that it really clued in to me that there is something called , where she majored in English and developed her an author, a writer, and I remember when I realized that I figured, skills as a writer of children’s literature. After returning briefly to yes, that’s what I want to do, I can do that and I’d love to do that. Jamaica, Allen soon settled in Canada, where she has lived since. And I started to think of writing, not as a profession, because I had In 1979, after meeting Jamaican dub poet in at no conception of the profession—I knew no writers, I probably just the CARIFESTA Conference, she returned to Canada and teamed found out that somebody wrote a book by accident. But it just gave with a number of poets and artists, notably the poet Clifton me that “in.” I could say, “Yeah, I wanna write books, I wanna create Joseph, and began to work in the mode. She has toured with words the journey that I’ve taken with books.” And just every throughout the world as a performer of her work and is a commit- opportunity I have gotten since then, I write. People doing things in ted activist for cultural and political diversity in Canadian society. school plays, I would write. If there was a band or singers around, I She teaches literature and writing in Toronto colleges and is a regu- would say, let me write a song. And I also realized pretty early that lar consultant to national arts and political organizations. the other side to writing was learning about writing. So as soon as I Lillian Allen has produced three albums for adults and one for got a chance to, I did literature and I made a real big effort to read a children, and two books for children and young people. Her poetry lot. Also, as soon as I got a chance, I started attending writing work- collections include Nothing But a Hero Dub (Women’s Press, 1987), Some shops. This is when I left Jamaica. Imagining Women (Women’s Press, 1990), Why Me? (Well Versed, 1991) KD: You left Jamaica when? and Women Do This Every Day: Selected Poems (Women’s Press, 1993). LA: ’69, aged seventeen. KD: And you came straight to Canada? KWAME DAWES: When did you start writing? Did it begin with LA: Yeah, I came to Canada. But somebody like Miss Lou was poetry or prose? already indelible in my mind as an artist. I mean, I didn’t even asso- LILLIAN ALLEN: I always have problems with beginnings because I ciate her that much with writing, but as an artist and a persona; when I looked in society at what the possibilities were—she looked like she 148 was having more fun than anybody else.