The Possibility of Tenderness

Reviews

This exceptional book explores the complexity of human experience, from family to colonialism and class, through an intimate, lyrical voice and sentences that sing. A transformative, absorbing work. Profound and lyrical, The Possibility of Tenderness is intimate in the telling and epic in reach, an exploration of colonial power and collective memory told from the ground up. The Martinican philosopher Edouard Glissant said it was the role of the writer to craft a ‘language of landscape’ that affirmed the relationship between Caribbean people and the natural world, and in this task Jason Allen-Paisant delivers beautifully. A work of delicacy, wonder, and – yes – great tenderness, which excavates a history at once familial and national, local and global. The story reaches from the adult life Allen-Paisant has made for himself in Leeds, England – one of happiness, but tinged with a sense of estrangement from the natural world, and social class, he grew up in – back to his mother, and her inherited plot of land in Coffee Grove, Jamaica. With shadings of Kei Miller and Robin Wall Kimmerer, Allen-Paisant is an inspired recorder of the wisdom that his mother, the community around her, and the island itself, have to share. This book drives at the heart of mankind’s ‘great separation’, our mistaken belief that we are superior to the natural world. In The Possibility of Tenderness, Allen Paisant weaves together his family history and lore, Jamaican knowledge of plants, the enclosure of common land in the UK, the later colonisation of the Caribbean islands, his own love of the green world, his understanding of the function of dreams, and yet refuses a happy ever after bucolic ending. . . In today's time of a climate emergency, Allen-Paisant has written a timely and relevant book which joins the dots between the enclosures and clearances of common land in the British isles and the colonisation of islands and continents elsewhere. I found this book strangely restorative and tenderly written. Hold it in your hands and then dream of the green world The Possibility of Tenderness shows Jason Allen-Paisant embarking on a seemingly new genre of writing, that offers a broader poetics that seeks to embrace and not resist the sometimes porous membrane separating traditional genres. The Possibility of Tenderness is a work rooted in an intimate engagement firstly the history of survival, creativity and resistance in the rural grung, the land of Clarendon, Jamaica, and secondly, with his own body’s relation to this place. Allen-Paisant’s work unfolds with a sense of spirit, sensibility, memory and intellectual acuity to give us what is, no doubt, a beautiful and urgent work of productive experimentation and philosophical reckoning. Lick shot! Expand reviews