How LiIIian Allen infused sound, rhythm and energy into her poetry collection Make the World New
CBC Radio | Posted: January 28, 2022 7:52 PM | Last Updated: December 23, 2022
This interview originally aired on Jan. 29, 2022.
Lillian Allen is a groundbreaking artist in spoken word, poetry and dub. Allen is one of the leading creative Black feminist voices in Canada, a two-time Juno award-winning recording artist, a dub poet and a professor at Toronto's OCAD University.
Drawing on Jamaican reggae music for its rhythm and diction, she's been performing for audiences around the world for more than 30 years. Her poetry often focuses on the totality of Black life and the unique experiences of those from the Black diaspora.
Make the World New is a collection of poetry based on Allen's most notable work. It is a selection of new and uncollected poetry — and also features poems from her collections Rhythm an' Hardtimes, Women Do This Everyday and Psychic Unrest.
Make the World New was named among the best Canadian poetry of 2021 by CBC Books. She spoke with Shelagh Rogers about Make the World New.
You grew up in Jamaica and started writing and performing your poetry as a young girl. How did your upbringing shape your style and what you wanted to write about?
Lillian Allen: Jamaica is such an oral culture — there's hardly any silence. There's always the reggae going on, conversations going around, kids playing — and language is the one tool that's free like the air. So people use language for everything. Storytelling was a natural part of life that we practiced in school or in church.
Storytelling just gave us this other dimension, this other avenue to construct something in the world that belonged to us that we loved and that enriched the culture.
These were ways of creating ritual, of reflecting our feelings, what we were thinking — whether it was religious or just reflecting on social or personal things. Storytelling just gave us this other dimension, this other avenue to construct something in the world that belonged to us that we loved and that enriched the culture.
In the biographical note, it talks about how you linked your early love of art to the creativity of your mother who made everything look beautiful and magical. Can you tell us about your mother?
Lillian Allen: She was a magician. I would wake up in the morning and my mother would be at work in the kitchen doing something. There were 10 of us children — five boys and five girls — plus my father. She made all our clothes. She cooked all our meals. I can't even imagine where she got the time to attend to each of us, having had [one child] myself.
One day I was sick and she was tending to me, feeding me some soup and trying to cheer me up — she drew a pig, and the pig was smiling. I'd seen real pigs, but I hadn't seen pigs in stories. And I thought, 'How do you make a pig smile?' And when she left the room, I turned the page over to see if there was something there.
That just stuck with me. And later on, my sister married a farmer who had lots of pigs, and I would tiptoe to the pen to see if the pigs were smiling. And my mother, she made pigs smile — and that was the seed of my creativity.
You so often celebrate the joy of music and rhythm in your work. What is it about music that lifts you up?
Lillian Allen: There's something in music — there are these vibrations and this dimensionality. There are all these things that are encoded in rhythm and sound. And it gets to you — your soul is reaching out for it. And I am especially enthralled by rhythm because we're all in this rhythmic space.
I am especially enthralled by rhythm because we're all in this rhythmic space.
We begin with the heartbeat. The Earth moves everything that we have — the day, the night, before the seasons. So they're all integral to us. But I think we have fragmented them in our daily lives. And music has a way of bringing those things back together for us in that little encapsulation.
LISTEN | Lillian Allen speaks to Fresh Air:
Breath comes up in your poems so much. What was the connection you were trying to make with breath and the pandemic?
Lillian Allen: It goes back to the idea of how the breath is taken away — the pandemic is so much about the breath, about the lungs. I first started thinking about the idea when people got really scared about going outdoors. They were not sure what would happen if they went to the theatre or to the store. They didn't know if they'd come back home or if they'd come back home with a death sentence.
I wanted a way to mark the pandemic, and also to mark the worldwide movement that was also giving breath and voice to the struggle and the movement against anti-Black racism.
I did many decades of social work and this was what the young — especially young Black men — were feeling. I wanted a way to mark that and also to mark the worldwide movement that was also giving breath and voice to the struggle and the movement against anti-Black racism.
You write that you wanted to provoke the imaginary in your work. What do you mean by 'provoking the imaginary'?
Lillian Allen: I wanted people to be shook out of what they think and believe and to start to imagine something different. To start to question not only why would somebody like me be writing what I'm writing, but why didn't they know about these things? What else is there to know?
I think that might be the biggest thing: Why haven't we had all this information, these experiences in our lives? Why haven't we been reading about these things in school? Where have these voices been?
I wanted people to be shook out of what they think and believe and to start to imagine something different.
I want them to imagine what the scenario would be with more equality, more presence, more involvement, more beauty, and more language.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
For more stories about the experiences of Black Canadians — from anti-Black racism to success stories within the Black community — check out CBC's Being Black in Canada project.