The Possibility of Tenderness - by Jason Allen-Paisant (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

"Extraordinary . . . Surprising at every turn and rewarding in ways you never expect."--Marlon James

"An extraordinary, necessary book from a brilliant writer. A new song of the earth."--Robert Macfarlane

From an exciting new voice in international literature, a profoundly moving memoir that explores the Black experience in the natural world and the transformative power of plants.

Jason Allen-Paisant grew up in the May Day Mountains of Jamaica. The cycles of his boyhood revolved around tending the plots of cabbage, tomatoes, and yams dotting the clay hillsides; playing beneath the cavernous roots of cotton trees; and climbing trunks of the fruit trees that fed him and his grandmother. But as a student of the literature of colonial England, in which the landscape of heather and moors has long been thought of as ideal, these years of subsistence and community evoked more shame than pride, and a language for the natural world that surrounded him remained elusive.

Years after leaving the island to attend university in England, and eventually achieving a position as a lecturer in Leeds, he finds himself "alienated from land, from planting, from watching things grow." Walking among the trees in Yorkshire, he wonders how his own body will be perceived and can't help but think of the epidemic of anti-Black violence across the Western world. He returns to Jamaica and the intimate archives of knowledge in his late grandmother's grung, determined to reclaim his cultural inheritance, and ultimately to rediscover a "second life of seeing," based on old ways of knowing.

"A beautiful and urgent work of productive experimentation and philosophical reckoning" (Kwame Dawes), The Possibility of Tenderness is a book for our time.

Review Quotes

Praise for The Possibility of Tenderness

"Jason Allen-Paisant, Jamaican that he is, manages that extraordinary feat only Jamaicans can pull off, which is to make unworkable ideas work. Here is a narrative of utmost urgency that moves at a glacial pace, a call to arms that's as easy as Sunday morning, a necessary public corrective that comes via cultivating private space. Surprising at every turn and rewarding in ways you never expect, this is an essential work."--Marlon James, author of Moon Witch, Spider King

"The Possibility of Tenderness is an extraordinary, necessary book from a brilliant writer: a new song of the earth. It left me gripped, moved, fascinated, troubled and heartlifted. It rings and sings with curiosity and compassion; it sees with clear eyes and speaks with lucid, wise voice. It is a book that will be widely read and justly celebrated."--Robert Macfarlane, author of Is a River Alive?

"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. . . . A beautiful and urgent work of productive experimentation and philosophical reckoning. Lick shot!"--Kwame Dawes, author of Sturge Town and the poet laureate of Jamaica

"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."--Ekow Eshun, author of The Strangers

"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."--Sinéad Gleeson, author of Hagstone

"A work of delicacy, wonder, and--yes--great tenderness. With shadings of Kei Miller and Robin Wall Kimmerer, Allen-Paisant is an inspired recorder of the wisdom she, the community around her, and the island itself, have to share."--Sarah Howe, author of Loop of Jade