An award-winning poet living in Roundhay Park, Leeds, Jason Allen-Paisant spent his early childhood living with his grandmother in Coffee Grove, a hilly rural district of Jamaica which was cut off from basic amenities such as electricity and water. Seen through the eyes of a child, Coffee Grove was, he notes, “both a tiny place and a huge planet”. There he developed a close relationship with the local plant life through climbing trees, picking fruit and helping his grandmother harvest yams on the “grung”, the local name for their small plot of land.
Allen-Paisant later yearned for pastures new, moving first to Paris and then to Britain to study at Oxford. His dream of upward mobility had become a reality, yet in the UK he noticed his interactions with nature were few and far between. He came to realise “just how much class keeps people in Britain from the privileges of land and soil and also keeps them from the tenderness that comes with forming kinship with the earth”.
The Possibility of Tenderness is, then, an account of Allen-Paisant’s relationship with the land where he grew up and in his adopted home. Read with warmth and thoughtfulness by the author, the book contains meditations on nature, history, race and the notion of belonging. Allen-Paisant explains how the impulse to surround himself with nature allows him to feel hopeful and “find ways of living through – if not beyond – the constraints of racism”. He notes that while anger at racial injustice can be “inspiring and empowering … this book arises out of a particular impulse: the right to non-anger”.
Available via Penguin Audio, 8hr 32min
Further listening
Don’t Let It Break You, Honey
Jenny Evans, Little Brown, 8hr 16min
A powerful memoir in which the Welsh actor turned journalist reflects on being sexually assaulted by a figure she calls the Famous Man. Her long fight for justice exposed corruption in the press and the Metropolitan police. Narrated by the author.
Slags
Emma Jane Unsworth, The Borough Press, 8hr 50min
Two siblings – 41-year-old Sarah and her younger sister Juliette – go on a road trip to Scotland in a bid to relive their party-loving teens. This raucous tale of sibling rivalry and misspent youth is read by Chloe Massey.
