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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.
Yahoo
24-03-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
The banned pesticide poisoning Caribbean paradise
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. The Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe conjure images of sun, sea and sand. But for several decades they have been far from a tropical paradise for many local workers. From the early 1970s until 1993, chlordecone, an "extremely toxic and persistent" pesticide, was used in banana plantations to tackle the banana weevil, a "pest that ravaged crops", said The Guardian. Years later, residents of the two French territories continue to suffer. The islands have some of the highest rates of prostate cancer in the world, and chlordecone is "one of the culprits". Chlordecone was first produced in 1952 and patented in the United States for use on a variety of crops. But it was banned in the 1970s after factory workers in Virginia producing the molecule exhibited "alarming neurological damage", said Atmos. Other countries outlawed the pesticide, but France acquired its patent for use in its former colonies, "despite warnings" of its side effects. By the time France finally banned it in 1993, around one-sixth of the world's chlordecone had been used in the Caribbean islands. "Adding insult to injury", landowners across the islands successfully petitioned France to extend the use of chlordecone after it had been banned, although there were "effective alternatives", said Equal Times. The consequences have been "staggering". It was estimated by local authorities in 2014 that 90% of the islanders have "traces of the pesticide in their blood". It will also take "around seven centuries" for it to be totally eliminated from the soil. Many Martiniquais and Guadeloupeans were exposed to the chemical through "food consumption" from contaminated land, said The Guardian. Former plantation workers exhibit a host of illnesses, from cancer to "hormonal and heart issues". In March this year, a landmark ruling found France guilty of "wrongful negligence" for the widespread use of chlordecone in the Caribbean, said The Associated Press. The French government must now offer "financial reparation" for the anxiety suffered by those "durably exposed to the pollution", if they can prove damage. While the decision is a "small step in a long fight for justice", the "vast majority" of plaintiffs in the case will receive nothing, said The Guardian. For those who have been able to claim compensation, through the recent ruling or via previously established aid schemes for workers, the lengthy application process is seen as a "slap in the face" for the sick, many of whom "may not survive".
Asharq Al-Awsat
13-03-2025
- Politics
- Asharq Al-Awsat
On Violence, What Precedes It, and What Follows
The events that transpired on the Syrian coast were triggered by a terrorist operation at the hands of "remnants" of the deposed regime. However, it quickly morphed into something else, something much bigger that raises a series of pressing questions about our lives and our politics: How can we deal with grudges and vengeful tendencies? How should we approach the social contract in a pluralistic society? And how can we prevent extremist ideas and their proponents from taking over and shaping decisions? In addition, it seems that another issue these painful events have reintroduced: how violence and nonchalance toward violence shape our lives. There is no doubt that we are deeply inclined to fall into the illusion of controlling violence, of restricting it to one place and leaving it out of another, of using it here and abating it there, and thus of steering it to serve the ends that we believe to be righteous. This inclination is often exploited to rationalize violence, while our mainstream political culture encourages us to embrace this delusion. For decades before Islamist movements eliminated all metaphoric interpretations of "jihad," Levantine parties like the "Syrian Social Nationalist Party" and the "Arab Nationalist Movement," influenced by European fascism, had idealized the use of force. Martiniquais physician Frantz Fanon, as a result of his enthusiasm for Algeria and its revolution, taught us that violence against the colonizer is a form of therapy that cleanses the psyche of the oppressed. With the Iranian Revolution of 1979, a new theory flourished: Khomeini had precipitated a major shift by channeling ritualistic violence, which had been directed inward, toward "imperialism and its stooge the Shah." And whenever an Arab country is rattled by domestic instability, there is always someone there to lecture us and insist that we ought to direct our rifles at "the Zionist enemy." However, it seems that, relatively quickly, these teachings were proven spectacularly misguided. Algeria, despite having been "cleansed" by its "million martyrs," was not spared a long and costly civil war that saw Algerians killing Algerians. And every jump Khomeini's Iran made in its fanaticism against imperialism did nothing but aggravate self-directed ritualistic violence. As for the "Zionist enemy," at no time have civil wars and intra-Arab disputes flourished like they have when our rifles had ostensibly been directed at the Zionists. Violence, in this sense, resembles the unruly forces of nature that pre-philosophy philosophers believed to be the source and root-cause of the world. That is, contrary to its architects' claims, we cannot control the forms and trajectories violence takes; we have just about as much control over it as the movements and trajectories of air, fire, and water. As for the (correct) claim that violence had been at the center of our lives in the past, this is not a compelling reason to grant it a central role in our future. Accepting it as the inevitable "vehicle of history," simply because it had been so in the past, amounts to considering ourselves passive inertia in the face of violence - an inertia that benefits from neither civilization, nor progress, nor experience. Moreover, since we are weak and lack any lever of power, all that violent ideologies do is compensate for our weakness by spreading an illusion of strength. The only material translation of this illusion is the circulation of the supposed force among ourselves. Overwhelmed with frustration by the clash between our imaginary world - where battles and victorious warriors define history- and the reality of our defeats, we delude ourselves once again, becoming convinced that we can overcome our frustration with more violence that, this time around, will surely do us justice and deliver an unequivocal victory. It is true that we have had peaceful political movements in our modern history. Egypt's Wafd Party may have been the first to launch one with its revolution in 1919. The first Palestinian Intifada of 1987 was also largely peaceful, as were the early days of the Arab Spring before they were crushed by force. However, violent means would always eventually take hold, especially since we have never had any truly consequential peaceful movements. Thus, our lives have never been drained of sources of violence, while politics was marginalized, freedom of expression was stifled, and justice for victims was denied. We have never managed to distinguish between allegiance to an idea and allegiance to a community, nor to prevent one ideological allegiance's victory over another from turning into a victory of one community over another. We have never made serious efforts to reconcile our support for an idea with tests of the others' will or their capacity to endure the consequences of the victory of our idea. As for the worship of power and the monopolization of righteousness, both have become ingrained through a variety of mediums, some old and modernized, others modern and spiritually drowning in antiquity. Through a fusion of these mediums with a conspiratorial worldview that has mastered the craft of associating evil with foes that never change, power and resistance are presented as our destiny and only option. With toxic slogans like "a war of existence, not a war of borders" and "never humanize the enemy," the door to tolerance between two sides of a conflict is closed shut, pushing everyone to firmly identify with their organic and sectarian background - identification that is more suited to genocidal violence than anything else. The fact is that no cause justifies arbitrary violence. And now, with the immense opportunity that has presented itself to the peoples of Syria and Lebanon, both the victors and the vanquished, the choice might be clearer than ever before. We can choose either politics and justice or force that leads to savagery and turns potential new beginnings into conclusive endings.
