Trees feature very prominently in my work. I come back to them again and again. This has, I think, something to do with how I grew up: in a small village in central Jamaica called Coffee Grove. My grandmother, who raised me, was a farmer. Trees were all around. We often went to the yam ground, my grandmother’s cultivation plot. When I think of my childhood, I see myself entering a deep woodland with cedars and logwood all around. I think that that landscape has deeply penetrated my imaginary.
There was also a lot of silence in my childhood. The pristine and clean, wholesome nature in which I grew up was a kind of protected kingdom that allowed me to listen to the sound of things. The muscular guango trees were like beings among whom we lived. To be attuned to nature is like having a kind of silence. You hear things more, you listen to things – to the world.
Now that I am grown and I live near a forest in Leeds, England, I am renewing my connection with that reality. Here, trees represent an alternative space, a refuge from an ultra-consumerist culture, from the increasingly alienating materialism of the society.
Thinking with Trees, my forthcoming collection with Carcanet Press, speaks to a primordial instinct of thinking with the elements, based on the idea that nature is a part of us. It is not just acted upon, but acts upon and with us. In my mind, there is a melting of the conceptual difference between the human and the tree, the rock, the mineral, etc. The poetry trains its graze on what links us with the elements. What interests me is process: the composition and decomposition of objects, the ecologies that work to keep us alive, even when we are unaware of them. Occasionally, I am privileged to have a deep sensation of process and I leap into those moments.
The observation of process is a political act linked to a reclamation of time. It highlights the fact that racism pushes us into an attitude of always reacting: to hurt, anger, provocation, exclusion. This is a theft of time, a robbery of the connection that we are meant to have, as humans, with real life. In that sense, these poems are an expression of my taking time, in a societal context that creates the environmental conditions that disproportionately rob Black lives of the benefits of time: leisure, relaxation, mental and physical well-being, etc.
Long timescales remind us of our connection to ancestry and to Earth, a world that exceeds us. Short timescales remind us of the need to be in the moment, to affirm the fullness of our human existence. ‘Fallen Beech’ imagines very long timescales that extend beyond human lifetimes, while ‘On the First Day of Autumn’ is more concerned with the sensual experience of the immediate present – the sounds and smells and feeling of the forest. Both long and short timescales push me to reckon with the environmental conditions currently affecting Black lives, they make ever present histories of exclusion from leisure in Black experience (the slave ship, the plantation, the tenement yard, the prison industrial complex).
In these poems and in the longer book (Thinking with Trees), poetry is a way of reclaiming time, a way of reasserting one’s connection with the world. My personal history brings me to that political stance.
The use of gaps and spaces, as opposed to classic punctuation, is a visual enactment of the ruminative thinking that I am engaged in. It forces the reader to slow down, mirroring what we are supposed to be doing with nature – we can and should take our time with it.
*
These beeches are unclimbable
no furrows for feet
At home I knew a tree
by climbing it
Lost inside the guinep branches
I felt close to God
and I was hidden
in a place before birth
like a womb
nearing the sky
For hours I would imagine
I could turn into something else
one of those brown or green lizards
living up there.
The limbs of an old guinep tree
are suspended walkways
You travel with your belly
with your thighs with all your feeling
The thick muscular limb is a road
you hug your back is a caterpillar’s
legs knowing
the skin of the tree
insteps rubbing
the green moss
Travelling above the earth
I go searching for something
that both tree and lizard have
the ability to see things down below
things that never see them
folks that never think they are seen
because they never learn
to see the world from trees
To have money
is to have time
To have time
is to have the forests
and the trees
I look at my baby
mindsliding
in the sticky
film of the bud
rubbing her thoughts
between
fingers
and knowing the
purple lips of the
involucres in her mouth
And me am I living
my childhood all over
again?
For her a wood will not be
burned for fire coal
where the pig pen is
where you hide from your Mama
where you escape from scolding & rolling eyes
where the duppies live
where the madman lives
where wild animals stray dogs
and the unwanted go to die
And me am I living
my childhood all over
again?
a child’s way
of pinching flowers
a child’s way of touching buds
but what I had never known
this way of listening to the forest
Did Daisy
Miss Patsy’s eleventh child
and my playmate
even know her name
was a flower?
In Porus life was un-
pastoral
The woodland was there
not for living in going for walks
or thinking
Trees were answers to our needs
not objects of desire
woodfire
Catch butterflies
along the way to grandmother
on the other side of the yam field
Just don’t do something foolish
like lose the money or
take too long
so the pot don’t cook
before daddy reach home
There’s a way of paying attention to plants
a way of listening to trees
a way to hold a flower in your hand
now that I’m here in a park in England
and I stop when called by the pistils of a tree
There is something in the pink
that speaks so clearly to me saying
glad you stopped I saw you
from far away
I don’t even know
what they call it
but I want to know
what it tells me
about itself
its appearance
with thousands of others
on this tree
that up to April
seemed like death
Our parents and grandparents planted yams
potato slips reaped tomatoes
carrots and so on
Then market then money
then food then clothes
then shoes to go to school
Now I’m practising a different way
of being with the woods only
I try not to stray too far from the path…
The daisies glitter
at my feet
I enter
peel off the skin of my living room
It is October
and the light that falls
on the leaves
rises again
in a swell
while the red floor of the woodland
stretches like an avenue
through high maples and oaks
My feet press down into
the leaves and I wonder
how many seasons lie here beneath my feet
Here there is no enclosure
only cells
making sounds on a frequency so low in
a world distant
from words
unpossessed and full
summer’s day in quartz
ships’ smooth skin on water
broad beach of volcanic sores
a thousand selves
and more
around me the rocks are
petrified alligators
gorgeous in black blisters
they butt the wind
as if they could move again
and pounce with the tide
I watch their swift running
from among the dunes
and listen to the waves
rustle the leaves of stone
to my right the silver sand sings
a lone seaside pine on a butte
blooms into a parasol
my heart is a jumble of rocks
inside there are so many creatures
so many seas
are those reptiles running
another time moving
are the rocks a sea within a sea
I will sleep in the sand
in the rocks and the quartz that oozes
like sores from the skin of granite
the silver sand sinks and
I do not know how far I will go
and the rocks and the sea sing
about a time that is within
not mine in a voice too low
to my right the tropical sunshine
and the lone seaside pine
surrounded by the smouldering wicks
of rock samphire I have run to be here
far from home
the rain stings it is cold
my knees burn from clumps of fescue
as I kneel looking out to sea
Can we not from this height
hear ten volcanoes
spitting their lava to create the islands
and beside it we have a place to live
in god’s dust
I want to know more
about the roots that nourish the rocks
that keep them tall and flourishing
It’s time to write about daffodils
again
to hear a different sound
from the word
daffodil
Imagine daffodils in the corner
of a sound system
in Clapham
Can’t you?
Well you must
try to imagine daffodils
in the hands of a black family
on a black walk
in spring
A grey squirrel appears
under a beech sapling
smells its way closer
In the matted spikenard
I am not threatening it seems
the squirrel could almost
come to my feet
except
it catches my
too human gaze
so shifts course
goes off a different way
and as it goes
every controlled unspooling of the limbs
is a tenderness drawn inside me
a blanket of silk
the spell of its camber
disappearing into plush mounds of litterfall
*
JASON ALLEN - PAISANT is a Jamaican poet who lives in Leeds. His creative writing (poetry, memoir, critical life writing) addresses issues of time, race, class, and the environmental conditions underpinning Black identity. His poetry has been featured or is forthcoming in Granta, PN Review, Callaloo, BBC Radio 3’s The Verb, Stand and other venues. His first full-length book of poems is entitled Thinking with Trees. His other non-fiction projects include a book of personal essays titled Reclaiming Time. Jason is a Lecturer in Caribbean Poetry and Decolonial Thought, with joint appointments in the School of English and the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies at the University of Leeds, where he is also director of the Institute for Colonial and Postcolonial Studies.