WHO?
I was in primary school at Lower Morvant Government before I realized that other people’s fathers lived with them. It never occurred to me before I saw Michelle Rosales’ father in her front porch, sitting there as though he had every right to do so. “He lives with you? All the time?” I asked her, baffled. “Why?”
My own father did not live with us but rather in his wife's apartment. I remember his wife as a stern and distant lady who slept all day, like a bear, only rousing herself to make very sweet Milo and bread and butter sandwiches for my brother and me whenever we were in her apartment. I lived with my mother, sisters and brother in a house Daddy built for my mom a little distance away. But my brother and I were often in dad's home for long stretches. We were, in essence, an extended family.
Nobody seemed to find it strange that we were more or less an extension of the household which consisted of: my father Rito Allen, a welder with a successful muffler and water tank factory; his wife Sarah, a bipolar and heavily medicated former teacher; me; my brother Dennis; and my mother, Dolores Ollivierre, my father’s factotum in the muffler factory and generally acknowledged love of his life.
Mummy had other children: I was the last of nine. Daddy, too: he had a son and another daughter. Being the last, and the child who looked most like him, I was often accused of being spoiled. Maybe I was. But since my brother was the one who got the electric race car set and I never got the
Sindy dolly I begged for, I differ with this interpretation.
I’ve always read and I've always written. I remember finding stacks of paper and making them into a book that I decorated and called my diary. I was in Second Year Infants and had a dreadful crush on my big sister’s friend, Curtis. I would write song lyrics detailing the minutiae of my crush, with earnest lines like: “You make me delirious.” But I never learned to tie my shoelaces until I was quite big. Telling time also boggled me. Spelling and counting still remain mysteries.
My own children, who are 16 and 9, are both writers. I blame myself.
WHAT?
Growing up, I saw myself as a poet, although I also wrote short fiction and plays. I thought journalism was whoring out God-given talent, so it came as a surprise to me, if to no-one else, that I would become a journalist with the
Express while finishing my BA in English at UWI. I moved over to the
Guardian after a couple of years and have been there, more or less, ever since. I write features on anything you could think of, except sports, and have written commentary in a variety of genres. I am proudest of the weekly column I write, mostly in Trinidadian creole, for the Guardian. It covers a range of topics. Except sports. I also write for the
Caribbean Beat magazine and the
Caribbean Review of Books.
I was a performance poet for years after I first did it on stage at my alma mater Bishop Anstey High School in the school's Miss Anstey contest. I self-published a book of poems,
Something to Say, when I was 18 and I’m now working on a poetry manuscript with Vahni Capildeo as my writing coach. She’s making my poems look good—an impressive feat. In between, I appeared on a CD and tour called Ten Sisters with my old friend Paula Obe and a host of powerful women.
I started writing long fiction about five years ago. My first novel was published by Macmillan Caribbean as part of the Island Fiction series in 2008.
The Chalice Project is a children’s sci-fi adventure book set in Trinidad. I wrote it to be part of a three-book series, so cross your fingers that parts II and III are commissioned, too.
In 2008 Akashic Books published
Trinidad Noir, as part of their award-winning Akashic Noir series. I co-edited it, with Jeanne Mason, and have the lead story in it.
WHEN + WHERE?
When I was a little girl I was sexually abused by an older relative. I think a lot of the pain I went through as a teenager and young adult had to do with that experience, and in some ways it continues to affect me. Thinking about it, and seeing the way our society has lurched ahead without fully dealing with how prevalent this problem is, I started a project last year on the topic. My manuscript is about halfway through. The protagonist is nothing like me, though we share that common history of child sexual abuse. Unlike me, she has let it completely shape her life.
It’s a hard story to write, even though it’s not my story, and I want to do it well. She doesn’t want pity, but she does need sensitivity and there is a brutality to the story that I don’t want to shade out. Writing her is balancing those elements. Wayne Brown was my coach on the project but he passed away a few months ago. It wasn’t unexpected but it was still a shock and I haven’t recovered. It was only a few weeks ago that I stopped checking my inbox for messages from him. Monique Roffey is coaching me on the project now, and I hope to finish it early next year.
WHY?
I write because I can’t not write. It’s one of the four things I do best. (Two of the other things are cooking and parenting.) This is why God made me.
SAY SOMETHING DEEP (ABOUT ART):
We need art. It is not about beauty, because much of art isn’t beautiful at all. We need beauty, too, but it’s not the same as art. Art is a mirror showing us ourselves and what we could become, for good or ill. For me it’s right up there with food, water, shelter and sex.
ASK THE QUESTION YOU WANTED ME TO ASK:
What would the world be like without Lisa Allen-Agostini? A little sadder, a little smaller, a little meaner. But probably a little better disposed towards small dogs, and a lot more patient.
***
(BTW WE SHOULD ADD:)
Lisa Allen-Agostini lives in Diego Martin, Trinidad. This is what she looks like:
Photo courtesy Richard Acosta. Header photo by Andre Bagoo.
READ from
Trinidad Noir here. BROWSE more about the book
here and
LISTEN to a podcast with Lisa at
Caribbean Free Radio here.
CHECK out
The Chalice Project here.
This/discourse/has/no/ start(middle)nd is an interview series featuring the responses of Trinidad artists to a set questionnaire.
FIND out more about it
here.
Ouch. Now that's a tough one: naming the best films of a decade. Most people miss the majority of great films in any given year, far worse over the course of a decade. 
You're getting beaten up in school everyday. It's always f--king snowing. The apartment you live in has really thin walls. Your mom dresses like she's from the band ABBA. And you spend most of your time 'playing' with your imaginary friend. Life couldn't get any worse, right? Oh yes it can. You could live in Sweden. And your girlfriend could be a vampire (later, you discover that not only is she apparently not fully human, but there is something seriously weird going on with her...gonads, to the extent that she explains, "I'm not a girl"). After several feeding frenzies (quite a few of the locals get chomped on) she dumps you because she's got to go away to stay under the radar. 
We've all seen Schindler's List. Some of us have seen The Pianist. And Saving Private Ryan is always on television. But we've never quiet seen a movie like Inglourious Basterds which defies our expectations for what a World War II film is supposed to be like in exceptional ways. Not only does Tarantino reallocate how the violence of the Holocaust is depicted, but he does it with some style. Witness the most unforgettably tense bar scene/shoot-out ever filmed. READ a review at Tattoo here.
Almost the inverse of Inglorious Basterds. It is the eve of World War I and strange things are happening in a remote German village. Accident after accident happens, getting deadlier and deadlier. But there is no sight of a solution as to who is doing it all. Could it be the children? The adults? Outsiders passing through? Micheal Haneke, the great director of The Piano Teacher, Cache and Funny Games makes us think there is a solution just beyond our grasp and delights in keeping us away. CHECK a full review of the film here.
The genius of James Toback's documentary is how it simply lets its subject do all of the talking. The film is basically a series of interviews with former heavyweight champion of the world Mike Tyson, interspersed with news footage. He tells us things we may never have guessed about him: he has a lung condition, he was fat as a kid, he was bullied as a child, he likes to abstain from sex and then break his fast, the quality he wants most in a lover is protectiveness. 
Everybody wanted this to be the new Heathers, but let's face it that was never going to happen. That said, I'm still very very glad this film did happen. It's a teenage slasher romp of uncommon quality, with a central performance by Megan Fox that will MAKE YOU A BELIEVER. 
Winner of Best Film at this year's Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival, Carmen and Geoffrey is an affecting documentary about the extraordinary Trinidadian Geoffrey Holder and his wife the great Carmen De Lavallade. Especially for a generation that knows little of Holder, the film is a revelation. “I walk through doors. If I’m not wanted in a place, there’s something wrong with the place not me,” Holder says in the film directed by Linda Atkinson. “People don’t know your name until you tell them what your name is. I am like Madonna and Andy Warhol. Madonna tells the world that she is Madonna and she is who she is.” BROWSE more here.
This was another selection for the TTFF. An odd and unforgettable film about a love triangle in a Mennonite community in Mexico of which the world knows little about. A ravishing visual feast about being trapped and being freed. I enjoyed interviewing the film's director, Carlos Reygadas, for a feature which you can read here.
Of this Almodovar creation Roger Ebert cheekily said, "Broken Embraces is a voluptuary of a film, drunk on primary colors, caressing Penelope Cruz, using the devices of a Hitchcock to distract us with surfaces while the sinister uncoils beneath. As it ravished me, I longed for a freeze frame to allow me to savor a shot." READ his full review here. I've a weakness for Almodovar, and I must confess to being ravished too.
A deceptively simple documentary that threatened to be nothing more than an extended tourist brochure for Jamaica. The film was a surprise gem when it screened at studiofilmclub a few weeks ago. Through interviews and footgage in Jamaica before, during and after the Beijing Olympics, director Miguel Galofre and producer Fernando Garcia manage to unpack the key elements of Jamaican society in a surprisingly profound way. The question is actually a MacGuffin. The real subject of the film is the island itself.
Each year there's always at least one film I really like for purely sentimental reasons. In Erick Zonka's film, Tilda Swinton plays a drunk slapper who gets wasted and wakes up somewhere different every morning. I say no more.
