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The Guardian
03-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Possibility of Tenderness by Jason Allen-Paisant review
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. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion 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 Delivery charges may apply.
The Guardian
22-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Poet Jason Allen-Paisant: ‘We belong in the picture'
Jason Allen-Paisant, born in Jamaica in 1980, is a poet, writer and academic. Currently a professor of critical theory and creative writing at Manchester University, he released his debut poetry collection, Thinking With Trees, in 2021. His second collection, Self-Portrait as Othello, (2023) won the TS Eliot and the Forward prize. Through time spent in the north of England and Jamaica's rural Coffee Grove district, his debut in nonfiction, The Possibility of Tenderness (Penguin), intimately explores ideas around class, leisure, economics and self-discovery, looking closely at the life of his farmer grandmother, as well as the plants and people that shaped who he is today. Allen-Paisant lives in Leeds with his wife and two children. The Possibility of Tenderness is a departure from your work in poetry. How did you go about writing it?I started with a mix of poetry and prose. Then I thought to write a series of essays [and] hammer out some of these big questions around leisure and class within nature but I remember thinking: 'All of the ideas that I'm talking about in a theoretical way, I can bring them all out if I just tell a story.' My grandma, 'Mama', she's the protagonist outside myself. I can use the story of her life to talk about planting, food independence, food sovereignty, living with plants, plants as medicine, globalisation and its effects and kinship with the land. What do you want the book to communicate? Living between two different landscapes. I wrote this book to understand how the place I grew up, which is so far away from where I am now both socially and class-wise, shaped me as a writer. I've taken a journey… I needed to write to understand where I am now in relation to where I came from. When did that desire to look back at your life in this way begin?I was walking one night [home through Roundhay Park], I cut across a field and, perhaps it was the silence of it all, it suddenly hit me – that I'm living here in this place [with all of this] space and nature. A place where you can roam, where there's a sense of freedom, of openness. But how did I get here? How come somebody like me is here? I felt for the first time that I had become a different person. We didn't plan to live here. It's a very affluent area. Walking across that field in the dead of night unlocked a door and I started to think about nature, trees, birds, big spaces. [Living here] is a kind of privilege on the face of it. But why couldn't I think about Coffee Grove as a privilege? Was it that bad? I grew up in nature. I grew up among a wholesome green with equality, kinship, exchange, social solidarity. I had all of that. But I had blocked out my background. I think a lot of migrants from the Caribbean do block out our background when you think it's associated with poverty. What emotions did thinking about your early life bring up?There was that sense of loss and wanting to retrieve something. A part of that was wanting to retrieve the people. But there was also a feeling of euphoria. I found something that brings me meaning. You have written about nature before in your poetry…My first book of poems, Thinking With Trees, came from going on walks, but [before then] I had shied away from nature poetry. I always had in the back of my mind, as a black poet, that you need to talk about more pressing things. A lot of The Possibility of Tenderness was driven by this impetus: 'Who said natural writing can't look like this?' Me talking about class, a non-romanticised version of nature, about people working hard, having dirt under their fingernails. There is a set of concerns in nature writing that doesn't easily imagine black bodies and lives, but when you consider the history of black people in Britain, it's critical to situate our identities and our histories within [nature] because we are connected to that history. My little hillside district of Coffee Grove is deeply connected [to the UK]. It was a coffee plantation using enslaved labour from the 18th century founded by a Scottish planter. I wanted to write about these entangled issues, but at the same time, write about joy and the sense of belonging we find in the natural world. We belong in the picture. How did you find writing intimately about the lives of people you care about?There's a responsibility that I feel towards my people. A big part of the premise of the book is dignity. So often, my kind of environment is portrayed in a lowly light. I wanted to tell a different story. That informed the characterisation. I even had to change my language in certain aspects. I remember my friend, the writer Jacob Ross, read an early version where I was talking about [the local Rasta herbalist] Congolin and his ideas about plants. Jacob was saying: 'You need to not overexplain. You need to assume [Congolin's] vantage point.' I had to be careful of not speaking to a western gaze. What books are on your bedside table?The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa. Jacqueline Crooks's Fire Rush. We Were There by Lanre Bakare. W, Or the Memory of Childhood by Georges Perec. What's your typical writing process?I'm a chaotic, unstructured writer. I write when I get the time. I have two young kids and life is very demanding. It's been more than a year since you won the TS Eliot and the Forward prize for poetry. What have those wins done for you as a writer?Those wins have been mind-blowing. Unexpected, extraordinary gifts. When it comes to the TS Eliot, I'm still getting used to the fact that I won that. It is surreal. Concretely speaking, it's transformed my life. It's brought more opportunities my way. It's hard to think of a stronger type of affirmation, [although writers] shouldn't need validation. We have to know how to work without it. The Possibility of Tenderness: A Jamaican Memoir of Plants and Dreams by Jason Allen-Paisant is published by Penguin (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
