Featured image and gallery: Eden-Hopkins Fermo

Manchester Met’s GoGlobal Week initiative continued on Wednesday with an event featuring award-winning poet Jason Allen-Paisant and acclaimed writer and Contemporary Fiction Professor Monique Roffey.

Launching his first non-fiction book, The Possibility of Tenderness, Allen-Paisant and Roffey explored the themes of his memoir, dissecting his personal history and the way that the rural Jamaican village in which he grew up came to be so enmeshed with modern Britain.

Following a short reception, International Lead for English, James Draper opened the event with a brief introduction to the university initiative: “GoGlobal Week is a chance to celebrate Manchester Met’s amazing global community and ensure that all of our students have an international experience while they’re here. It offers colleagues the chance to come up with ideas for events, and when Monique came to me with the idea for this one, I immediately said yes!”

He added: “It’s an honour to have Jason come to Manchester Met to talk to us about his work, and especially to give us a sneak preview of The Possibility of Tenderness before its general release date. The themes of the book and the story Jason is telling through it, are a perfect fit for GoGlobal Week, and choosing tenderness over anger is such a powerful concept for us to take out into the world.”

Diving into the discussion, Roffey began by asking Allen-Paisant about the origins of his book, its blend of “politics, sociology, history and personal narrative”, and how it took shape. Allen-Paisant credited his hometown, Coffee Grove, a small village in central Jamaica, for “shaping [his] artistry, the writer and thinker that [he is] today,” touching on the significance of place in his writing.

He went on to discuss the struggle of form, joking that he eventually landed on memoir because “it seemed the easiest thing”. However, Allen-Paisant spoke with assurance when explaining that, while a memoir, the book is less a chronicle of his life but more so about “looking back reflectively, playing detective and getting maps out of the National Archives, having to ask difficult questions of family members and tread the land.”

Through the writing process, Allen-Paisant shared how he discovered more than the factual character of archives – he “profoundly understand that [his] little hillside district is connected to England and to the reality that [he] lives in.”

While The Possibility of Tenderness grapples with weighty themes – Jamaica, England, and the deep historical entanglements between them – Roffey praised Allen-Paisant’s ability to express these complexities with candour and gentleness. She said: “Part of the pleasure is that the reader doesn’t experience the heavy lifting. You’re a poet so it’s really easy to read, it’s very aesthetically light and the language of it creates an immersive experience.”

Encouraged by Roffey’s words, Allen-Paisant read aloud an excerpt from the book, the chosen passage detailing the return to his grandmother’s Post Office in Jamaica after 25 years away. The audience listened silently as Allen-Paisant retold this memory, recalling his surprise at the tiny building and its makeshift quality – embarrassed at his inability to conjure no better word than “Frankensteinian” to describe the place he learned to be at home.

Shifting focus from place to nature, the conversation moves to explore Allen-Paisant’s connection to land and plants. Inspired by a conversation with an English botanist, The Possibility of Tenderness explores Western cultures’ dissociation from the land and the botanical lore shared between Jamaica and Britain.

This conversation, he explained, was the moment in which he began to really identify the similarities between these two nations, the common folklore surrounding rosemary standing out. Roffey interjected, citing a “massive loss of our DNA” thanks to capitalism and industrialism but still feeling an innate connection to nature, a desire to walk barefoot in the grass.

Allen-Paisant’s spiritual attachment to the earth became abundantly clear throughout the course of the evening, not just as a result of his family’s deep connection with plants but as a tool of perseverance. “There’s an impulse of life there that’s irrepressible,” Allen-Paisant said, describing the pull of the land. “In this impulse that draws me to the soil, I find ways of living through, if not beyond, the constraints of racism. The stories I tell about the land are my ways of describing a new form of living while black in a country like Britain.”

Roffey and Allen-Paisant drew their conversation to a close with one final talking point: tenderness. He addressed the expectation of rage and anger in response to racism, that “beautiful expressions of rage can be inspiring and empowering,” but that The Possibility of Tenderness seeks to explore the empowering force of non-anger. 

Reflecting on his experience of this steady stream of “documented brutality” served up by Instagram and X; he discussed both the rise of growing anti-black rhetoric and the growing need for softness. “This general reset of anti-blackness, which would have prominent political leaders embracing and promoting police brutality against black bodies, has thrust into stark relief the need for tenderness, my need to reclaim it.”

Concluding the talk, Allen-Paisant shared with the audience his hopes for what readers will garner from The Possibility of Tenderness. He said: “I want people to really see their relationship with the earth in a new light, with the soil, and to think that we can all cultivate it and have a wholesome kind of living, each in our own way.”

Following the discussion, a short Q&A allowed the audience to engage with Allen-Paisant further. He addressed his practice of talking to plants, learning to look at the world with fresh eyes, and reclaiming the childlike ability to find beauty. He noted that “the narrative arc of the book is partly about [him] learning to see coffee growing through new eyes” rather than turning his back on his roots.

Jason Allen-Paisant’s book, The Possibility of Tenderness, will be published on 20 March 2025.