Astonishing Snowfall: Jason Allen-Paisant in Conversation with Luke Dunne

Jason Allen-Paisant is a Jamaican poet and scholar. Self-Portrait as Othello, his second collection, won both the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Prize, the two most prestigious British poetry awards (which seldom reach a consensus) and his work has received a host of other awards and nominations. He is currently the Professor of Critical Theory and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester.

His first book of poems, Thinking with Trees, dealt with feelings of disquiet and dislocation which arose from experiences in nature after moving to the U.K, whereas Self-Portrait dwelt on the relationship between migration, history and the family. Allen-Paisant revisits all the above in his latest book, The Possibility of Tenderness, a memoir which reflects on his time visiting family in Jamaica. Prose lends Allen-Paisant the space and flexibility to work through much of what has driven his work as a poet at greater length. One of the main pleasures of this book is returning to Allen-Paisant’s poetry with more context. The figures of ‘Mama’ and ‘Mommy’ (his grandmother and mother respectively) who glimmer tantalisingly in Self-Portrait become fully fledged characters here – wise, wry, tough women whose influence on and importance to Allen-Paisant is self-evident:

Hello, Mama, I’m here, I’m back with you after many long journeyings. Are you satisfied with what I’ve become?

I met Allen-Paisant while he was in Berlin to talk about The Possibility of Tenderness. Since I’d caught him halfway between projects – Snow, a book-length poem, will be published next year
– we found time to discuss both.

j

Tell me a bit about Snow?

Snow is a book-length poem, though even as I say book-length poem, I begin to think about the form. Well, it is a book-length poem, but it traverses different forms. One feature of the book-length poems that most excite me – Eliot’s The Waste Land, H.D.’s Trilogy, Aimé Césaire’s Return to My Native Land – is that they rediscover themselves as they go along. They change their modes of combustion. That’s how they keep you on your toes. There’s this excitement in the way they leap into flights of lyricism, or drop down into moments of hush, only to go off again in some other emotion or tonality. If you think of The Waste Land, all the different ways it wakes you up. It’s constantly shifting.

A good chunk of Snow is prose-poetry, which is not something I’ve done much before. There are vignettes which might occupy half or three-quarters of a page, and sometimes there will be a series of them which is followed by poetry in verse. One thing which defines the form is the use of the white space. There’s so much that space, or silence, can do – a hush, whiteness, erasure. More generally, this quiet in the reader’s mind as you skip from one chamber of emotion to the next is very important. Han Kang’s White Book was an inspiration formally early on, and while I wouldn’t say I’ve stuck super closely to that, there are reminiscences of it.

Thematically, the book talks about Snow in a real sense. Its launching pad is an actual snowfall that I witnessed. As the book begins, you are inside a snowfall that has just happened, that has erased the roads, that has covered the speaker’s backyard and the woods behind. It’s an eerie snowfall. The speaker says that this one feels different somehow. Something new is coming. The first line of the poem is: 'It was a Wednesday morning when we woke to news of the coming of the Messiah'. The Messiah is one of three protagonists, along with the speaker and a curious plumed snake.

Curiously, the speaker is fairly disembodied, unlike some of my previous work. His presence is more lyric perspective than autobiography. Where his embodiment is felt most is in his erotic relationship with the snake, who is his lover.

The Messiah’s arrival is indecipherable from the arrival of this astonishing snowfall, whose meanings the poem is interested in tracking. In the course of this journey it reminisces about experiences of snow in memory, but it also goes through experiences of snow in history. The second part, which is called ‘Thaw’, is particularly focused on what happens when the snow melts, both physically and metaphorically. In a nutshell, the book wants to use snow as a medium through which to read both history and the contemporary period. it’s a journey through snow literally and metaphorically. I’m looking at the now, but snow allows a way of thinking about the 20th century in particular, and of what’s returning to us now – the return of fascism, in particular.

I wondered, as you were speaking about messianism, how that relates to The Possibility of Tenderness, and how important religion and spirituality were to your upbringing?

Hugely important. I know people who grow up in environments steeped in religious practices who pushed back against that, who desperately needed to find a way out of that, but I suppose there’s something in my psyche and personality that quite likes something that religion offers, this inner downiness, I’d call it. I hasten to say I’m not a religious person any more, I don’t follow the religion I was brought up in – the Church of God, which is a kind of Pentecostalism – but I think there’s something in my personality that is given to ecstasy, to worship (though now I worship stones and trees), that is given to flight, by which I mean the thrill of soaring away from yourself. When I enter the sanctum of a basilica or a cathedral or a Buddhist temple, this is what I find again and again: a way of travelling away from myself.

So, by moving away from the practice of religion, from monotheistic religion certainly, meaning a kind of exclusivity, the ‘rightness’ of one practice, and going more towards what I call spirituality – which is a porosity, a more open way of encountering the power of the universe. Now I feel that I’m in a place that is more right for me, in that I feel nourished by so many streams of thoughts. In recent years, I’ve read the Tao Ti-Ching, the Upanishads, texts from the Kabbalah, and I’ve been enriched by so many currents that it feels impossible to say I am a Catholic or I am a Muslim or I am a this or a that.

And there are so many currents from outside the monotheistic religions. I’ve spent some time in voudou and in Candomblé. There’s so much richness in the so-called polytheistic religions – which is kind of a poor term, because a lot of these religions we call polytheistic have been named this through a faulty Western gaze. Voudou is not polytheistic, actually. They believe in one God. They believe in a totality, and there are energies that represent so many faces of the monad. In Ife, we have a multiplicity of energies, not that different from Ancient Greece.

The other aspect of your question is that I can’t help connecting the history I came from and write about, whether that’s the broader history of plantation slavery, or the more intimate history of my family, that pushes me into the reclamation of this downiness. Downiness makes it sound like a passive state, except that it’s not, it’s an energetic rapport with the world, vitality in the face of so many pressures that want violence or pessimism or nihilism to dominate. As we live through crisis after crisis, what spirituality provides in all these different guises – in the world of plants, of ritual and these different forms of ecstasy – is simply that.

Alternative cosmologies, alternative living spaces, alternative relationships with the world which allow one to be amongst all the forms of violence, of war, of fascism, and have alongside it these spaces of thriving, of breathing, of deep resources of the imagination. People might meditate, go to raves, do psychedelics, but you’ve got to have something! If you are the sort of person who doesn’t sign up to the dominant order, this neoliberal reality, with all the tech bros, bullshit jobs and so on, if you’re not someone who is at ease in that world, you’ve got to have something.

I wanted to ask you a question about silence. Towards the start of The Possibility of Tenderness, there’s this striking description of you when you were very young, maybe five or so, spending time outside, in the grung, and how that was when you 'learned to love silence.' I wondered about how that connects to other silences you mention in the book – to do with subjects that weren’t discussed in your family, stories that weren’t told – and how these different forms of silences shaped you as a poet.

Perhaps the sort of silence that is essential to being a poet was necessary in the face of the silences within my family, the silences which emerge from violence – the aftermath of violent lives and experiences. In the book I talk about the women in my lineage, how they’re abandoned by men, and I link this to plantation society, to this general phenomenon within Jamaica at large. I talk about the violence of the plantation, of the colonial slavery which is our very reason for existing as Jamaicans of African descent. It’s a history that’s marked by these quite recent forms of violence that have palpable afterlives within the physical and social landscape, and so, confronted with violence societal and familial, I feel that the silence of poetry was and remains a safe-haven, a reparative mechanism, a mechanism of self-transformation. I’ve found that silence to be a huge resource for myself wading into that history, and I suppose that’s how they come to be juxtaposed in the book.

You mentioned my teasing out my formation as a poet, and of course that’s a long history, but I did want to go back to this boy at three, four, five years old, sitting under a mango tree while the grandmother toils at her different labours – sowing and tending and reaping and so on. It is a core image. The boy is waiting and that’s one of the first memories I have, of waiting in silence, and within that waiting is to be found a very intense soundscape – of beetles, bees, flying insects of all kinds, of the wind within the canopies of trees, within the shrubs, within banana leaves, yam vines. So there are different forms of music the wind makes as it moves. There’s the sound of crickets under that heavy sun that we try to avoid by getting into the shade. There’s a kind of sizzling as well of, is it the earth or within the leaves, a sizzling sound of something that’s alive between the spaces, in the air. Because it was a largely non-mechanistic environment, there weren’t a lot of trucks or cars or machines of any kind. You heard a lot, and the sound is amplified in my memory. Thankfully when I go back I can still find a lot of that, even in 2025 when I last went back.

As a peasant district that’s still shaped by the model of economy I described at the start of the book, it’s an environment in which sound is amplified and I wanted to describe that. It feels like a treasure, like something that’s slipping away. There may be people who read that book who won’t have known it, can’t identify with it, and for people who have, you feel it belongs to a world that’s slowly about to be no more. It’s an act of witnessing particular realities that go under the radar of literature. I think it was John Berger who spoke in an interview with Susan Sontag about writing peasant lives, and he spoke about the challenge it presents in literature. Peasant lives aren’t considered to be aesthetic, so there isn’t a language for them in high literature. In terms of my models, I’ve had to grasp for Annie Ernaux – she’s the closest I’ve come to finding the language to talk about it. It’s not exactly the same, but she’s the closest thing I’ve found.

I did want to ask about Annie Ernaux, actually. She’s someone you mention in the book as someone who has 'nourished your thinking'. What does her work mean to you?

It’s something to do with her having found a language for talking about non-literary lives. She writes about families who don’t make their way into literature. Obviously we’re not talking about the Dickensian model, about industrialised urban spaces, and moreover about the way the writer makes the urban poor their subject. That’s of huge value, I love Dickens, and it’s important to shine a light on the evils of industrialisation, but that’s not what we’re talking about here. What Annie Ernaux has brought into literature is writing about rural folk through their own gaze. That was a revolution.

She was able to see life through their eyes, to write about these affects, these sensibilities, that coming from a lower class shapes within you, what Bourdieu calls the habitus. Additionally, to write about the sensations of changing class. What it is to change class, as she herself has done.

And you described something similar in the book – when you move to Leeds in 2019, you say 'the change in my social class is evident.'

Exactly, and when you change class your family hasn’t changed class, your history hasn’t changed, so it’s that strange thing of still being tied to the class you’ve left. Ernaux was one of the first models to have written literature from the very centre of that experience, and has inspired people like Édouard Louis, Didier Eribon. There’s a whole slew of writers who she gave permission to. So Annie Ernaux is for me, and for the Nobel Committee clearly, a big deal in literature! Without wishing to sound hyperbolic, she reinvented what was possible. So in writing about my Jamaican peasant reality, with its language, with its sound, which is a big work, and not one I think is finished – bearing witness to a sound, to a feeling and to an aesthetic – Ernaux is, I think the most decisive influence.

What kind of effect has fatherhood had on you as an artist and as an intellectual?

I think it’s safe to say that without fatherhood, I mightn’t have written The Possibility of Tenderness. It emerges out of the experience of going walking with my first daughter, and being able to see the landscape through her. It made me think about Coffee Grove in the way that I did, in the sense that I was thinking through the lens of generations. Once you have a child, thinking about generations becomes visceral, because you have a mirror of yourself walking beside you. It’s an individual in their own right, but at the same time they allow you to see yourself. It’s the strangeness of that experience of having someone outlive you. It does make you think about your own parents a lot, and their parents before them. In my case, my grandmother was my parent because, as you read in the book, she raised me entirely for the first five years of my life, and continued to raise me afterwards in the sense that she was still very present. I spent holidays with her. I called her Mama.

Having a child makes you think about your own childhood and how you fall into a chain of generational links. So I think in that sense it is an essential component of the writing. Certainly in Self-Portrait as Othello it has a big role. It’s one of the main architectural columns of the book; the search for the missing father. In that book, the search is not only characterised as an absence, a lack and a violence, but as something which shapes the poetic sensibility. I don’t like the word ‘productive’, but it does become something creative, generative. To transform lack or absence into something that you can work with is a poetic work in itself. Obviously Othello himself, the character, feels like a father in the sense that he is, let’s say, a father within racialisation. I can’t think of a more enduring template for the reality of racialisation. Shakespeare, fortunately, has left this insight into the Renaissance and the fashioning of race. Othello is like a father, in a sense, of my project of writing.

There’s another sense in which I think about Othello and fatherhood, which is that he never does mention his father. He is a wanderer – last night I went back to this passage where Roderigo, in speaking to the council of the dukes and warning them against this man who Desdemona has run off with, saying ‘your daughter has made a gross revolt’, this 'extravagant stranger…of here and everywhere'. It paints the picture of a man who belongs nowhere in particular, who’s something of a roving character. The least we can say is that he comes from somewhere else. 'Extravagant and wheeling stranger'. That’s what provokes suspicion.

It makes me question something that I don’t think Shakespeare was invested in – where was this man meant to come from? All that Shakespeare gives us are clichés – heads growing out of people’s chests, magic, sorcery, that sort of thing. But of course he had a father. I’m also interested in the fact Shakespeare does mention his mother, and the only reference to her is the fact she gives him a handkerchief, which turns out to be the lynchpin of the drama, the most significant plotline – which is totally flimsy – that’s what Shakespeare uses as the lynchpin.

I think about mother, and the reason I mention the mother here, is that is what gives me grounds for describing this character around the maternal line. The play has a very paternal schema – Desdemona has done injury to her father – and when personally I feel the absence of that, I wanted to construct an alternative lineage that’s centred on the mother and that transforms the absent father, who becomes a quest – for poetry, for self-creation. The quest for the father is what drives the journey, a constant search for the father which, yes, has a sadness, but you almost get the sense that without that search and that yearning, this character – meaning my Othello – doesn’t exist. The intrigue of language, of the multiple things that might form a belonging, a lineage – it’s that might-ness that the character founds himself on. What might have been a source of sadness becomes a way of thinking about yourself differently. To say that you might have these multiple ways of tracing who you are. I find that exciting, as an alternative to this patriarchal accounting of lineage, which is all about power which is cognate to imperialist thinking – the language, the land.

I have two last questions, which I’ve borrowed from when Henri Cole interviewed Seamus Heaney a couple of decades ago. They’re a bit silly.

Silly questions are good!

If you could be an animal, which animal would you be?

Fox.

Why a fox?

I love their faces. It almost feels cheesy to use a word like ‘sly’ about foxes, but you can’t escape it – it’s furtive, it’s fleeing, and there’s so much mystery. You can only ever see them from a distance, so it almost feels like you’re in the chase already. And I love the lore about foxes, these Chinese tales to do with shape-shifting foxes, and Reynard the fox here in Europe.

If you could be a building, which building would you be?

Initially I thought about the Taj Mahal, but perhaps … well, there’s a church off the Piazza St Marco. I had such a powerful experience looking at the marble columns in this church. I was hypnotised just looking at them. I think I’d like to be one of those. Then I’d get to be in Venice – I can hardly think of a better place for a building to be standing.

Luke Dunne poet and critic from London. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Paris Review Daily, The New Republic, The London Magazine, The Stinging Fly and The Los Angeles Review of Books.