Root Work

Alexis Pauline Gumbs interviews Jason Allen-Paisant about his new memoir.

By Alexis Pauline GumbsDecember 31, 2025

• Memoir & Essay

MY GRANDMOTHER IS from the same region of Jamaica as Jason Allen-Paisant’s grandmother, and so when I read the beautiful first scenes of his new book The Possibility of Tenderness: A Jamaican Memoir of Plants and Dreams, depicting his memories of being a child among the guango trees and the yams on his grandmother’s grung in Coffee Grove, I felt kinship and envy at the same time. The Possibility of Tenderness reflects on a childhood spent in the May Day Mountains of Jamaica, one that was deeply intimate with the patterns of the land and soil that had sustained and carried his ancestors. Unlike Jason, I was born in the United States. By the time I lived with my grandmother, she had migrated multiple times, first as part of the Windrush movement from Jamaica to England, and then to the United States. We lived in a suburban cul-de-sac in Plantation, Florida, a name more descriptive of Florida’s racist nostalgia than of the land, which was largely paved over with the exception of some tiny trees propped up with sticks and bushes meant to divide subdivisions from each other.

I read Jason’s memoir with longing, grief, and curiosity. What would it have been like to be in deep relationship with the very dirt of my grandmother’s stories? My Nana is 92 years old, and in her mind, she lives mostly on that ground in Christiana, Jamaica. She tells me over and over again the stories of being a young girl, poems of repetition. Like the one about falling into the creek—her great-grandmother Georgiana wrapped her in petticoats and dragged her out. Or the one about lying on the earth between her mother Eugenia and Georgiana’s gravestones when she got in trouble and didn’t want to go back into the house where her strict and fiery grandmother Rebecca was raising her.

My Nana’s own migration to England precedes that of Jason, who left Coffee Grove to attend university in England, where he now lives and teaches. But in Leeds, Jason recalls feeling himself “alienated from land, from planting, from watching things grow.” The Possibility of Tenderness follows his return to Jamaica and his grandmother’s grung, determined to rediscover and reclaim the connections between him and his home. This need for connection through soil is a familiar one; everywhere she lived, my Nana grew hibiscus and orange trees and roses, and during her time in London, she also grew cabbage. Nana isn’t able to travel easily right now or maintain her own garden, and my dream of traveling with her to Jamaica—so she can tell me her own names for the plants she grew up with—will probably never happen. Instead, we walk slowly through botanical gardens in Florida, letting the blooms prompt her memory or not. I am trying to learn to grow hibiscus in less conducive ground.

All of this is to say that I meet The Possibility of Tenderness in the same way I meet my own ancestors and elders, dizzy with the calculus of what Audre Lorde calls “the marvelous arithmetics of distance.” As a diasporic Jamaican, with roots in the Parish of Manchester, I sometimes felt like the primary audience for Jason’s memoir. Sometimes I felt keenly aware of who might overhear any conversation we might have. Always I celebrated the bravery and reach of form to honor what is still transforming all of us in relation to this earth, the possibility of closeness across time, theft, forgetting, death, and oceans. The possibility of being here.

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ALEXIS PAULINE GUMBS: I get the sense of a sacred relationship with earth in your book The Possibility of Tenderness. I see your sanctuary of relation and play in the early scenes where you describe your relationship with the plants on your grandmother’s ground, and I wonder if you could say a little bit more about relationality and the ecology of the book, but also the tenderness that you remember, describe, and, in some ways, advocate for and model in this book as an example for our collective relationship to earth and each other.

JASON ALLEN-PAISANT: I’ve been learning that ecology is really all about the ways things live together in relation within an ecosystem. When I first had the impulse to write this book, I realized that the visceral sensation of feeling you are a relative to a piece of land was one I had grown unfamiliar with, lost in the vagaries of my migrations away from the place of my earliest years.

The sense of a place is something felt deeply in the body. You sense that it is speaking. But sometimes you don’t notice it speaking, because it is always speaking, which is why I write so much about silence in the book. When I write about silence, I’m really writing about that capacity to hear—about the sensation of always hearing, of expecting to hear.

That kind of expectation fascinates me. I write about it at the start of chapter four, when I describe the vivid image I still carry of trailing behind my grandmother in the early mornings as she went into the woodland to collect herbs for tea, dew still on the grass. Only now can I put words to what I sensed then: that she carried an expectation the woods would answer her, that the bush would speak to her needs. I realized this, too, was a form of love and desire. We don’t often use the vocabulary of love—or desire, even eroticism—when speaking of plants or of the sentient, nonhuman world. Yet what my grandmother bore was desire, conditioning her belief that the plants would answer her need. One of us might have been ill, and she might have had a dream—and I realized that the dream was also part of the ecology, part of that process we call ecology.

Mostly what we had was the land. Land to roam—whether our own small parcel or others’. I didn’t then realize what a wealth that was. Of course, we had homes, but I don’t recall possessions much—I don’t recall accumulation. There was none to speak of. We were peasant people and our lives were basic. We had what was needed for dignity, so we were never destitute. There was always a sensation of having the land—that it was our principal possession. It defined us.

And, as I’ve said elsewhere, that was a double-edged sword, because it carried shame, unresolved trauma, even self-hatred. I felt this especially when I left the community for high school, encountering middle-class and upper middle-class Jamaicans for the first time. Why? Because you then realize that the land defines you in a conflicted way, recalling how enslavement had bound Africans—people who looked like us—to the land in forced, subjugated ways. That is why my mother, and so many like her, were intent on leaving the land and the bush behind. Many of their parents supported that choice, not wanting their children to carry a mirror of that history. Places like Coffee Grove meant backwardness. The grung—the earth that was our wealth—was also a curse, keeping us down.

I’ve lived with that conflict my whole life, unable to articulate it, so trying to articulate it became part of the energy of this book. And in parallel with my story, many young people in Jamaica—and even people of my mother’s generation—are doing that too. They are turning back to the land, seeing it anew, in an emancipated way. They are recognizing the empowerment their forebears cultivated through tenure, with all its fraught inheritances, through connection.

Which is how I can answer your question about relationality. Relationality in this book is framed through this complex nexus of sensation, affect, and inheritance we call “History.” It shapes the ecology of the book.

This book clearly has multiple audiences. There’s the intimate audience of your family and the land itself, but also an audience of Jamaican people, Caribbean people, those who have left the Caribbean and come back or not. There’s an even broader audience too. I wanted to ask you about the decisions that you made in order to be in relationship with all of those audiences.

There are moments of translation that provide context, allowing audiences to understand how things are related to the European metropole or the British Empire or the broader work of capitalism and land. I see you in the book drawing out relationships (even if they’re submerged or suppressed) and possibly opening up the way for accountability and even tenderness. Could you talk about this process of translation and holding space for multiple audiences in your work?

Why translate at all? First, as you suggest, the crucial question is whether to translate in the first place. I decided to keep translation minimal—to let it be the exception rather than the rule. It’s a delicate balance: you write a book partly to invite readers into your world, yet you also want them to take a step into that world themselves. You open the door, but they must walk in. Part of welcome is exchange, and so I want readers to feel part of the relationship, exercising their own curiosity, their own agency, because part of what happens when you encounter a name for something is that you enter a world. You realize that names themselves are stories. They carry the history of a community. That’s one of the things the book is showing, and the text has to enact it, make it tangible.

The book also highlights a way of knowing in the plant-human relationship—something that might feel new to some, but for many will be deeply familiar. And this is where translation always returns as a stake. Whether you do it or not, it’s still there. Every writer, I believe, writes with an audience in mind—even if only unconsciously. You decide who the ground-zero audience will be. For me, it was often the “insiders,” the people who already live within this epistemology. They’re rarely addressed as the central audience, so I felt it would seem important, even empowering, for them to recognize themselves as the assumed listeners. And this is particularly important in spaces where you’re often told your knowledge isn’t “scientific” enough, or in fields like “nature writing,” where I’ve often felt that my own perspectives on nature—what it means, how it functions in life—have not been centered. So yes, I lean toward centering those voices and experiences. And given my subject matter—this re-storying of so-called “small” spaces, rejected zones and landscapes, the earth, the grung (as we call it), and the people who live close to it—it was important to me to speak from that voice, and to that ear. I don’t want the people of Coffee Grove to feel like they’re sitting off to the side, watching their stories being used but not being able to take part in the conversation.

And I don’t believe readers necessarily want to have their hand held. That can be frustrating. It removes their agency, it diminishes the felt truth of a world, it takes away the joy of discovery. I trust the intelligence of my reader. I trust the universality of literature itself.

It’s also true that there are moments when I feel I’m speaking directly to certain people. You mentioned the ancestors: there are moments when I feel I am leaning toward them—ancestors who never lived to see this book published, who never had the chance to articulate their beauty or their soul within the literary space I now have access to. I often imagine myself in a big yard, at a community luncheon or a party where the sound system is playing, pulling up a chair beside an elder while the noise of the crowd carries on around us. We’re speaking quietly to each other, intimately, while the larger conversation continues. The book itself is the big noise, but within it, there are these private whispers. Sometimes that whisper is directed to Coffee Grove itself, sometimes to Caribbean people, Jamaican people, people of the African diaspora. Sometimes it feels intimate, sometimes collective.

And yet, literature always opens onto the universal, even when it begins in the deeply specific. There are also moments when I lean toward a broader audience—those who may not have any relationship to the Caribbean, or who may not even recognize their colonial or neocolonial relationship to the region. Sometimes that leaning takes the form of an urging, sometimes a quieter, I hope more tender, invitation: to look, to see from my eyes, from our eyes.

This book is multigenre. There is poetry here, there is travelogue here, there is memoir and personal essay here. How did genre show up for you as a guide, as a teacher, or as an obstacle at any point?

From the beginning, I was thinking about hybridity. The book gathers history—archival research, oral history, documents—and folds these different forms into personal story. It connects them with critique, with philosophical reflection, with meditations on writing in the presence of soil. I was drawn to the etymology of digression and how it resembles walking—losing your way, but finding depth in the detour. What I’m doing isn’t digression exactly, but it’s the shifting of modes and tones, the willingness to let different forms of writing coexist within a chapter whenever the work itself seems to call for it.

At times, I thought, Why can’t I just write a straightforward memoir? But the truth is I couldn’t, not for this project. This book arose at a particular, recent juncture of my life, when the questions I was asking were as important as the story that carried them. A conventional memoir arc—moving neatly from struggle to triumph—would have felt false, too tidy. I wanted instead to dwell in difficulty, in uncertainty, to refuse the smoothing-over.

That’s why the structure is hybrid and experimental: because it makes room for risk, for fracture, for the unresolved. It’s the coming-together of different modes—novelistic scene-building or character portrayal giving way to philosophical reflection or critique. Those shifts are what make it the hybrid creature that it is. Where the poetry is most strongly felt is in the interludes between chapters. Sometimes it’s literally a poem, sometimes an aphorism—little things that pull you briefly out of the flow, pauses for breath along a journey.

It was a grapple. Every book I write involves grappling of some sort. Grappling implies risk, and with risk comes the possibility of failure. But that possibility of failure isn’t collapse—it’s productive. It’s what keeps the writing alive, precarious, on a knife-edge. It becomes something that opens new ways of seeing and connecting.

I see The Possibility of Tenderness as a textual ceremony. We both had the gift of being in a ceremony called the Bocas Lit Fest a few months ago in Port of Spain, Trinidad, and you were in conversation there with our chosen elder and teacher Erna Brodber—the writer, sociologist, and activist. I saw in the book the intergenerational and ancestral encounter of being on the land of your grandmother, being in the home that your mother was restoring, and being in the archives. How does ceremony show up for you? Do you feel you’re inviting people into it when they read this book?

The book speaks about the wisdom of my ancestors, expressed through the connections they’ve formed with the soil. Writing it was a way to honor them—and was, in that sense, a ceremony. As in much of my writing, I’m in dialogue with the dead, inviting my ancestors into the work. In the book, I even write: “I write to preserve the dead.” I speak to them, ask them for their guidance. When you call the dead to witness, to take part in the creation and presentation of the work—that’s a ceremony.

It’s also a ceremony of lineage, for the elder makers who cleared pathways I now walk. Those whose work I rise on. Like Erna Brodber—still with us, still continuing her work. At Bocas in Trinidad, that felt so relevant and direct because she was in the room—I was sharing the stage with her. And Olive Senior was there too.

Seeing this work as lineage feels important. And I’ve realized something: it’s the names of women that I call, both blood kin and wider kin.

You had the idea for this book; you went on your journeys in Jamaica and pondered these questions about going home; at another stage, you wrote and edited and revised this book, working with publishers, working with the questions and queries of copyeditors; and now you’ve launched it. What have you learned during this process? How has your perspective been blessed by these different vantage points? How are your future visions and intentions informed by those experiences?

It has made me a better writer and shown me that I can pursue my inquiries through different modes. Each stage has taught me something: walking the land in Jamaica made me realize that dreaming itself is part of ecology; revising with editors taught me to trust hybridity, to let the book be memoir, essay, poetry all at once; and sharing it with readers has shown me that a book lives far beyond you, that people bring their own histories of soil and migration to it. That’s been the blessing—to see the work open onto others’ stories, to see it resonate from Taiwan to Zimbabwe, from Canada and the United States to New Zealand and the United Kingdom.

The process has also allowed me to realize that fiction is an excavation tool, that it opens other uses for me. And that’s where I am now: still getting dead people to talk, but through fiction.

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Jason Allen-Paisant is an award-winning poet, writer, and fellow of the Royal Society of Literature whose work explores intimacy, memory, and the afterlives of colonialism. He earned a doctorate in medieval and modern languages from Oxford University, after working on theater from the English- and French-speaking Caribbean. His sophomore poetry collection, Self-Portrait as Othello, won both the Forward Prize for Best Collection and the T. S. Eliot Prize in 2023. His newest book, The Possibility of Tenderness: A Jamaican Memoir of Plants and Dreams (Milkweed Editions, 2025), is a hybrid memoir and lyric meditation on migration, kinship and the soil, and relearning intimacy with the self. He is also the author of Engagements with Aimé Césaire (2024), a work of philosophy that thinks with Césaire’s poetics of revolt to ask what it means to be human after colonialism. Allen-Paisant is a professor of critical theory and creative writing at the University of Manchester, an associate editor of Callaloo, and currently a fellow at Columbia University’s Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris.

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Featured image: Photo of Jason Allen-Paisant by Ferrante Ferranti.