The Possibility of Tenderness by Jason Allen-Paisant review

The Guardian

03-04-2025

Go these days to any independent bookshop or art gallery or zine fair, and you may find yourself asking: where are the humans? Title after title is devoted to clay and stone, trees and flowers, the riverine and the botanical, gardens and allotments. Some volumes are philosophical, others urgent calls for climate justice. They share a vocabulary: care, tending, grounding, rootedness, nourishment, regeneration. Nature, however battered, is held up as an antidote to morbid modernity, its alienations, its amnesia.
The Possibility of Tenderness is also about nature, its setting Coffee Grove in the May Day Mountains of Jamaica. During Jason Allen-Paisant's early childhood there, it had no electricity or piped water. Neither beach idyll nor Trenchtown ghetto, its personality was shaped in large part by 'grung' – the local name for small plots cultivated by peasant farmers. Apples, guava, mangoes: here, for all the sweat and toil, was succulence. And memories of feeling connected – to the ground, to the past, to kinfolk. 'In 'soil',' Jennifer Kabat has written, 'I hear other words: soul and social.'
Education was Allen-Paisant's passport. He moved away – to the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Later Oxford. He didn't shed his past entirely, though: a study of Martiniquais poet Aimé Césaire was subtitled Thinking With Spirits; a volume of his own poems was called Thinking With Trees. Returning to Jamaica from Leeds where he lives, his new book attempts to think with Coffee Grove. This involves deep time: it emerged from the ocean, a bed of limestone, more than 15m years ago. Slavery, understood in environmental terms, sculpts and embeds itself in the landscape, too.
If there's a dominant figure it's Keturah, the author's grandmother, who converted to the Church of God, married a man much older than her and, when their relationship fell apart, moved to the Grove with her young daughter. She was upright, a 'de facto administrator for the village, a sort of mayor'. She looked after Allen-Paisant when he was young, carrying him up the hill to the Mount Pleasant postal agency she ran. It was a modest shack, but to the knee-high boy it seemed much more solid and grand than that. His grown-up self, back to plant his own daughters' umbilical cords in the earth, wants to know and tell us more about her.
He talks to locals, goes on mini-treks with herbalist Rastas, pores over old maps in local archives. No clear story emerges. In its absence are riffs – on the difference between a vision and a dream, the ubiquity of tombs, the frequency with which hillside people speak about the dead, what he claims is the absence of the term 'forest' in the local vernacular. Walking especially fascinates him as it allows him to smell and to hear the countryside with an almost tactile acuteness. He even remembers how his grandmother, like many who lived in the Grove, 'would walk with one arm gripping the other behind her back'.
By his own telling, Allen-Paisant hasn't spent a lot of time in Jamaica in recent decades. One of the things about grung life that he now responds to – its smallness, so different from industrial-scale agriculture – is what led him to leave in the first place. It would take longer than the few weeks he's able to spend in Coffee Grove to be able to offer more than skin-deep insights into its present state
For a poet his prose can be surprisingly slack. (A house has 'a kind of aliveness'; subterranean stories exert 'a special kind of fascination' on him). It combines wellness-platform peppiness (endless swooning about 'beauty' and 'joy') with lurches into grandiosity (trying to evoke the time that has passed since slavery, he declares, 'I am reminded of some lines I wrote in a prose poem').
A fondness for lectern-isms leads to silly overstatements such as 'Europeans have all sorts of marble structures, columns, statues, monuments, temples to the glory of their history'. Allen-Paisant's heart is in the right place, and there are passages that prickle and sing, but The Possibility of Tenderness is too self-conscious, groomed and full of box-ticking invocations of grace/embodiment/connection to fully realise that possibility.
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The Possibility of Tenderness: A Jamaican memoir of plants and dreams is published by Hutchinson Heinemann (£18.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.