Re-rooting

By Hadassah Williams

The Possibility of Tenderness: A Jamaican Memoir of Plants and Dreams

Jason Allen-Paisant, Penguin, March 2025

In the opening chapter of The Possibility of Tenderness, Jason Allen-Paisant invites us to consider our ‘right to non-anger’. At a time when our collective humanity and our right to express dissent is under threat, reading these words might evoke some cynicism. After all, anger remains a vessel through which we can transmute our discontent into action. It is one of our most effective weapons.

We have ‘the right to have time not marked by anger.’ At first the concept feels unearned, luxurious even. But sit with it a little longer, or as long as it takes to read this book. For a while ‘beautiful expressions of rage can be inspiring and empowering’ but Allen-Paisant also claims that non-anger can be life-affirming. That it offers the possibility for us to remove ourselves from a system that ‘by inciting us to anger…achieves…the pillaging of time.’ As he meditates in these early pages on how to ‘escape from the rage in which racism endeavours to confine [him]’ he asks: ‘How do we find tenderness while fighting to preserve our bodies?’ Here the meaning of the memoir’s title emerges. For Allen-Paisant ‘the possibility of tenderness is the possibility of a form of living governed by sovereignty of our own time: by the ability to have rest, to slide away from a racist system that incites us to constantly respond to it.’

When I read this, immediately I heard echoes of Toni Morrison: ‘the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work.’ A reminder to Black people of the need to refocus our gaze inward, to make space in our lives to explore our ‘work’, to ‘shape our narratives according to our own desires, our own dreams…’, as Allen-Paisant writes. This yearning for a world where he can ‘can shift [his] focus from [his] epidermis, bringing [his] earth-hood into focus’ takes him on a journey back to the ‘grung’ or the land.

I did not grow up with a close relationship with the land or nature, but while reading the memoir I thought about what it would look like if I made space for what Allen-Paisant describes as ‘the tactile joy and sensuality of nurturing life.’ This is the real journey that we are being invited to join him on: how we can each find joy and solace from integrating more of the natural world into our lives.

‘Language is place, is flesh’, he writes, and anyone familiar with Allen-Paisant’s work can attest that it has always been deeply rooted in his intimate relationship with language and landscape. In Thinking with Trees, his debut collection, we meet a poet unapologetic about his right to carve a space to exist fully in the physical and literary spaces, where his personhood has been historically challenged. The two works can be read as companion pieces, as they are both responses to Allen-Paisant’s experiences walking through the forests of Roundhay Park near his home in Leeds.

‘I give myself permission/to go outside’ are the opening lines from ‘On the First Day of Autumn’, one of the poems from the collection. This ‘permission’ takes on a deeper resonance in The Possibility of Tenderness. Here it becomes more of a declaration of his ‘body’s right to…the “lavishness” of spending time among trees and growing things,’ in a land that he is not native to but that he now calls ‘home’. As he considers how alienated from nature he had become after settling in Britain, Allen-Paisant reflects on the questions first posited in Thinking with Trees: questions around how one’s race and socio-economic class can impact one’s access and enjoyment of nature. ‘Tenderness was always there, yet invisible to me,’ he writes of his early years in Britain. The ‘fierce reclamation’ of what was once invisible is what he credits as the impetus behind Thinking with Trees. Now, in The Possibility of Tenderness there is an even greater urgency to make tenderness a permanent fixture of his life. A process that for him, cannot be separated from the ‘world of plants’, and ‘the joy of seeing things grow.’ A joy and wonder that he first discovered growing up with Mama, his grandmother, in Coffee Grove, Jamaica.

Coffee Grove, ‘a sparsely strewn settlement’, is described as a ‘tiny place and a huge planet’, ‘a version of Jamaica’. Rocky ochre-coloured soil and verdant green dominate this hillside bastion of rural life. It is a place divorced from the curated tourist-brochure idea of Jamaica, one of turquoise waters and white sandy beaches. Even so, Allen-Paisant reminds us that the jumbled limestone formations of the area are oceanic in origin, where ‘the ocean waves have only just receded’. The caves, tunnels and sinkholes that dominate the landscape of the book were the ‘narrow spaces’ where his imagination evolved while Mama cultivated the grung. As he describes his ‘second childhood of seeing’ where he rediscovers the ‘ways of looking at plants’, he also interrogates the pressures he placed on himself to leave Coffee Grove behind. There are no simple answers to these questions and the memoir does not shy away from them.

There is a direct throughline in the memoir leading to Allen-Paisant’s relationship with Mama. She is the emotional anchor of the work, the one who initiated him into the grung at Coffee Grove and the plants she cultivated there. A ‘small woman’ who ran the local Post Office, conversing with the land she toiled with ‘minimal help’, Mama’s presence inhabits much of the book. It culminates in a poignant reckoning of their once close bond. We also meet the chorus of Coffee Grove natives who remain connected to the teachings, dreams and abundance held within the soil. In these vignettes, each one an ode to the land and its occupants, the writing, heavily interspersed with Jamaican patois, takes on a meditative lushness.

Slowly, through the language of plants, Allen-Paisant converses with himself, his childhood neighbours, and his readers, seeking to account for his time spent obsessed with upward social mobility. One such conversation centres his struggle with the idea of ‘smallness’, that he had ‘spent so much of [his] life trying to emerge from,’ a shame he sought to subsume under the veneer of ‘culture’. When retracing his once daily trek from their grung to the postal agency Mama managed, he chastises himself for only seeing the ‘laughable smallness’ of the derelict building. But he tries to reinhabit the ‘childhood sensations’ of genuine discovery. These instances underpin so many of the personal and academic narratives of the book. Applying the ancestral wisdom of the Maroons, who used their ‘elaborate ecological knowledge’ of the Jamaican interior to not only bolster their resistance against the British but to also create within themselves the capacity to keep their imaginations, their ‘dream attitude’ alive, reminds him that his connection to the land is a portal to transcend his racialised body ‘where some of capitalism’s most terrible violences reside’.

These meditations are not couched in romantic abstractions about land cultivation. Allen-Paisant does not flinch when examining the privileges that now grant him the time to develop a deeper intimacy with the natural world. Highlighting the scholarship of Jamaican academics Erna Brodber, Velma Pollard, as well as British historian Corrinne Fowler, he explicitly outlines how ‘the profits of slavery’ account for the severe state of land inequality in Britain today. This sense of impoverishment and being ‘made to feel unwelcome in [one’s] own landscape,’ has real world implications, as Allen-Paisant notes, for our food sovereignty, our health, and the overall survival of the planet.

Allen-Paisant’s claim that land ownership offers security ‘against uncertainty for future generations’ brings to mind the global conflicts and disasters that have ousted millions from their ancestral lands over the centuries. The spectre of displacement hovers over much of our planet. The memoir does not minimise this reality, but what Allen-Paisant laments the most is not the loss of physical access to the land, but the erosion of our ‘ability to envision a relationship’ with it.

Deeply resonant, The Possibility of Tenderness offers an alternative to remaining tethered to this capitalist fugue. Our creativity, our passions, our curiosity, are at stake. Perhaps by considering how our ‘interdependence with the living world’ can ‘shift [our] systemic understanding of it’ we can fully embrace the rest that can be found in deep communion with each other and the land.

HADASSAH WILLIAMS is a writer from Trinidad & Tobago. She is reading for her MSt in Creative Writing at Kellogg College and is working on her first novel.

Art by Poppy Williams