Chapter 8 Tongues in trees and sermons in stones: Jason Allen-Paisant’s ecopoetics in Thinking with Trees

Studies on the environment have historically been relegated to physical, chemical, meteorological and quantitative findings which are embedded in earth sciences and resource management. Landscapes and nature are therefore viewed as biomechanical matters to be controlled and used for economic gain. However, when one considers what cultural and creative workers in the Caribbean (and South America) have done with nature and the valences of explanations that move beyond the physical terrain, closer scrutiny is constrained. The specific historical backdrop of British imperialism in the West Indies encapsulates the deterministic cycles of degradation, extinction and extreme violence which maimed and slaughtered both human and ecosystems. A significant part of empire’s outworkings comprised the rise of new global trade networks whose industrial practices generate other calamities such as the devastation of small economically fragile island societies, the objectification of agrarian-based communities, the intensification of forest destruction which exacerbate the islands’ vulnerability to rising sea levels and higher land temperatures, and other embodied structures of supremacy that are linked to a capitalistic world-economy. The Caribbean natural world, despite its violent colonial history, continues to spread and proliferate in an entirety that exists outside of human control, thus providing us with proof of the resilience of Caribbean space. In his introduction to The Womb of Space: The Cross-Cultural Imagination, the Guyanese writer and philosopher Wilson Harris asserts that the Caribbean landscape contains ‘a live tapestry – of the universe … of black holes … of nameless entities [and] … gods’.¹ He specifically notes that ‘the land is a spectral carcass’² in which legends are reborn and ‘clothed in colour and music … of the forests, skies and earth’.³ This is very much about the death of Indigenous culture and the remnants of races and cultural myths in the New World which seep into the landscape. Harris is conceptualising a medium and aesthetic expression that has come to convey the syncretic and vibratory nature of Caribbean space. He is concretely mapping the continuity of life that appears to have vanished in the New World through the intuitive imagination. His paradigm eschews the idea of the universe as flat. Rather, motion is seen in the context of stones that prate, woods that move, bubbles of the earth and pools of water that secrete with ancestral form. This provides a critical image of interconnection and enfolding relationships which is effectively spatialised in Allen-Paisant’s first poetic collection, Thinking with Trees.⁴ The poems touch on migration, genocide and unspeakable sufferings while finding a way to anchor the beauty that emerges through the enduring natural world.

Jason Allen-Paisant is a nature communicator and tree knower. He develops this sensibility while feeling the limits of being a black immigrant and living in Leeds. Europe is a type of mausoleum and there is a need to interpret the present in light of every fresh discovery of the meaning through a deep interaction with nature. More importantly, his work addresses the intersections of race, class and the environmental conditions that affect people groups in the Caribbean. He responds to the landscape (both Caribbean and English) as extensions of his sense of belonging, exile and ancestral connections. In Britain, the omniscient poet-narrator experiences a curtailed existence,⁵ hardened by the fact that the Transatlantic slave trade has endured for over three centuries and was thorough in its methods, most of which are directed towards the restriction of human potential and the reduction of life forms to tools and objects. In this regard, Allen-Paisant gives voice to the black body in green spaces and brings into focus the kind of geographical and psychological binary of Britain and Jamaican, fixity and change. For example, he ruminates on who has the right to walk in the park and the performativity of it, and simultaneously raises the questions of who controls space and who has the right to be ‘naturally’ free. It is within this context of an estranging British milieu that he retreats into the cover of the forest and tunes into a profoundly meaningful Caribbean sensibility where the woodland exudes peace, agency and the right to be free.

This chapter therefore advocates for a greater reflexivity and a deeper understanding of human beings and their varied relationships with the natural world through discursive representations. Narrative should not be read as a neutral enterprise that is detached from life but should be engaged to produce new analytical insights and meanings of the world. Caribbean criticisms have long been engaged with the importance of temporality, the plural unity of life forms, mythic and Indigenous approaches to bodies, things, animality and trees, as well as their signifying functions in language. It constrains a viewing of the political agency of writer-activists such as Allen-Paisant and the communities he represents insofar that they been erased from official memory particularly on a planetary scale. Such an inquiry merges social analysis and critique with close attention to textual detail and social advocacy – a combination that, as Rob Nixon’s book, Slow Violence, has demonstrated, opens up new avenues for interdisciplinary research which links with theories of environmental justice.⁶

For Allen-Paisant, this becomes the process of telling alternative versions of the Caribbean self, history and the Caribbean natural world. This alternative retelling is a core characteristic of postcolonial discourse which is significant in projects that challenge representations of the planet as singular – a trend that the poet deems to be deeply unsustainable. Elleke Boehmer’s observation is useful in which she contends that ‘postcolonial literature … is writing that sets out in one way or another to resist colonialist perspective’ and to insist on ‘symbolic overhaul, a reshaping of dominant meaning’.⁷ Allen-Paisant conceives trees as a symbolic source of alternative power to contest economic and neoimperial machinations of power. The poet’s interest in legend, old ceremonies, cosmic consciousness and ancestral worship marks a return to a lost kingdom of instinct. This in/quest expresses itself in terms of his interest in syncretic religious and Caribbean mythologies, which are undergirded by ideas of oneness of being and inner serenity. Nature becomes an ally that will regenerate, proliferate and move against new territorialisation and erasures. A deep analysis of the poems ‘Cho-Cho Walks’, ‘Vein of Stone Amid the Branches’, ‘Twilight in Roundhay’ and ‘For Those Who Steal Away’ will show that Allen-Paisant is indeed cultivating a praxis of radical listening – of tuning in to the sound, vibrations and rhythms of the earth. This encompasses a leaning on folk-based traditions to advance the point that his line of sight is contingent among many worldviews.

The poem ‘Cho-Cho Walks’ illustrates the sense in which the landscape tells a story of the way that cultural value and memory are attached to place. More specifically, Allen-Paisant articulates a framework to get at the meanings Caribbean people attribute to the environment that are based on ideologies, beliefs, myths and experiences. In ‘Cho-Cho Walks’, connection with nature in the Caribbean is ordinary, everyday, uncomplicated and matter-of-fact. The poet-persona avers: ‘there is no doing here | […] hearing is just walking | […] becoming flesh of the flesh of the leaves | walking with caterpillars on all fours’.⁸ As he ruminates on his boyhood, the persona remembers the core element of his Jamaican culture that rarely needs articulating as it is taught experientially and by rights. The associated images and references to ‘hiding’, ‘silence’ and ‘walking with caterpillars on all fours’ disclose his conceptualising of the land as an extension of Mother Earth that is further determined by his instinctive crawling activity. This intimate connection and childlike motion signify forms of initiation into self-knowledge and new awakening linked to an idea of place and community. Interestingly, an intergenerational responsibility and lesson are established in which the speaker’s grandmother engages the methods of relational respect with the forest: ‘Mammy carried a machete in her hand Spanish Bill | to part the succulent weeds to ask them to excuse us’.⁹ This provides a clear visual anchor, which helps the speaker to access the deeply personal character of memory. As his grandmother decentres her human self, she tunes into the sensibilities of the vines. Her parting of leaves with reverence is not an act of payment; it is a way of acknowledging that a mutually respectful relationship exists and which affects processes in the material world. There is an additional patient and mindful practice of embodied and meditative interaction which is echoed in the lexical signifiers of ‘walking’, ‘hearing’, ‘bending’, ‘hiding’ and ‘becoming’.¹⁰ The theme is cosmic harmony that cannot be derived from destructive and material systems of dominance but is aligned with an elemental power. Since ‘hearing’ is equated with the activity of ‘walking’ and with the appearance of human ‘shadow [that] bend with those of the vine’¹¹, one can plausibly discern that existence is determined as an environmentally saturated one. The poem itself becomes a meeting place – one that might support healing and unified ascent through the bedrock of these intersecting experiences.

This symbiotic ontological position resonates with Caribbean Indigenous worldviews that are based on a direct relationship with the Earth as a source of knowledge and meaning for human life and community rather than the hierarchal relationships of exploitation characteristic of Western cultures. For the Caribbean’s First People, trees are considered persons and teachers. Marisol de la Cadena notes that several South American (Andes, Atacama, Aymara and others) and Caribbean Indigenous traditions (Macusi, Warrau, Taino and Kalinago) subsist on the deeply felt ideology that the land is both an ancestor and guide:

Earth-practices enact the respect and affect necessary to maintain the relational condition between humans and other-than-human beings that make life in (many parts of) the Andes.¹² Other-than-humans comprise animals, plants and the landscape. The latter […] is composed of a constellation of sentient entities.¹³

On similar detail, the distinguished Brazilian anthropologist, Eduardo Viveros de Castro, having spent the last four decades of his life researching the ontologies of the South American and Caribbean First Peoples, asserts a conception of ‘ecosophic knowledge’¹⁴ that comprises co-evolution and reincarnation patterns between human communities and the natural world. Like de la Cadena, de Castro contests epistemological binaries that perpetuate segmentation between species within the context of the Caribbean’s First Peoples communities. These thinkers are signposting an interactive awareness and responsibility between human communities and nature. It provides an important complex knowledge-system wherein plants, animals and ancestral energies operate seamlessly in everyday human practices. This is ontological pluralism in practice. It offers a position that is essential for managing assumptions regarding nature and the categories of being in the world that shape human action and eco-ethical consequences.

Whether defined heuristically as ‘Western’, ‘Eurocentred’ or ‘modern’, the ontology underpinning dominant environmentally based practices is argued to rest on a longstanding hierarchical premise in which only humans possess intelligence and mind, and everything nonhuman does not. This premise which reflects the Cartesian mind-body dualism reifies the subordination of other-than-human phenomena from viable, pre-existing relational fields and reduces them from convivial subjects to isolated objects. Whether found in policy mechanisms like payment for ecosystems services or governing ideas like the green economy, such approaches are anchored in the reduction and commodification of the natural world and elide the rhizomatic, entangled cosmos of Indigenous communities and societies that subsist on inter-species treatise and agreements. A reckoning is thus performed in Allen-Paisant’s discourse which becomes apparent in the inherent relationships in and between all beings and elements in the universe, across time and space. As the speaker remembers ‘becoming flesh of the flesh of the leaves’,¹⁵ he is documenting a process whereby he moves towards self-identification with the landscape he describes. Nature is internalised insofar that it becomes poetic currency and the framing of the landscape is driven by tensions between present-day experience and cultural memory. When he begins to think with the help of trees, he enters into a different world from the one that is proposed in Leeds. Such ontological framings constrain us to see nature as expansive and agential while enabling a recognition of how reality is continuously enacted and transformed in practice. Withdrawing himself from this deep reflection of his boyhood, the poet returns to the present and crafts an extension of Jamaica’s living heritage based in Coffee Grove with the trust that the trees in Leeds would be receptive to the intention motivating these gestures. As Allen-Paisant continues to seek out a grounding of the self in roots, sights and sounds that move away from the egotism and materialism of the Western world, he methodically interrogates how nature oscillates between relative pastoral innocence and nuclear activity.

In the poem ‘Vein of Stone Amid the Branches’,¹⁶ we encounter a mind which has known nature’s cycle and one which looks at an age of high technology and longs for the opposite. Interestingly, the poem’s epigraph references Giuseppe Penone – the Italian artist and sculptor whose work has long examined the interface between nature and culture. Penone’s art takes to nature as the primary inspiration for new ideas, in which a careful elaboration of earthly shapes and forms reveal the essence of matter. Penone is known for his reconciliation of the organic earth with human touch. Allen-Paisant’s allusion to the icon of the artist calls attention to the process of ethical creative activity within a milieu of high apocalyptic activity. Beneath the poem lies a fear of environmental erosion in which the tangled lianas of the thick rainforests have been replaced by the atomic power of civilisation. The line, ‘tree makes nuclear reactors [and] shopping malls’¹⁷ is a polemic at commercialism and the subjection of the natural world to market value. The poet seems to be asking – what happens when the semi-primal consciousness of the Caribbean migrant in exile is faced with the asphyxia of the contemporary concrete, metropolitan city? How does one, beginning as a colonial, break the circle of repression and reprisal? What creative action brings the necessary release from this wheel? The poet grapples with the sense in which his most innermost being has been invaded by the city’s iron. Hence, the paradoxical ‘uranium trees mate in nuclear forests’¹⁸ where the natural and organic world (‘trees’, ‘forests) has been penetrated by the manufactured and inorganic (‘nuclear’). Here, the speaker-poet witnesses the elevation of Western materialism into nuclear factories, and skyscraper – as evoked in the image of the ‘trailer crane bulldozer’¹⁹ and mushroom cloud. What precedes the first half of the poem is a remedy to facing the full stress of modern life. Allen-Paisant envisions a symbolic recovery through spirituality. The response, as enabled by his retreat into nature, is testimony, sermon, prophecy and an invocation of Afro-Caribbean cosmologies that value a symbiotic relationship with the natural world and its secretions of mythology. This is manifested with the first image of the tree as ‘a rite of presence’²⁰ which provides us with a direct clue that the ‘tree’ which is being destroyed by bulldozers is an ancestor.

One way of thinking through the ecological ramifications of this notion is to consider Tim Ingold’s idea of symbiosis, as outlined in ‘The Temporality of the Landscape’.²¹ In this essay, Ingold introduces what he calls a ‘dwelling perspective, according to which the landscape is constituted as an enduring record of – and testimony to – the lives and works of past generations who have dwelt within in’.²² The landscape is, in Ingold’s view, a constructed and enduring record of history. The true nature of the landscape, described by Ingold as ‘heterogenous … a contoured and textured surface’²³ replete with diverse energies, resonates throughout Allen-Paisant’s poem. Such an appreciation of nature will place it beyond its physicality and convert the trees to an enduring energy or talisman, endued with memory and power to protect its community against future evil. Such is Allen-Paisant’s enduring dream and commitment in the face of a grim-capitalist-intensive reality. The question that ‘Vein of Sone Amid the Branches’ poses is how does one extract a sense of the sacred out of an ongoing history of evil? How does such a history nuclearise when the very word ‘nuclear’ (repeated thrice by the persona) implies that the process of fission and reaction will involve a physical and spiritual torture that is emphasised historically in the Caribbean experience? Allen-Paisant turns to a transhistorical and transcendent vision to locate a sense of continuity and reverence amidst a reality of destruction. He declares: ‘but since this is conjuring tree/but since this is a vodou tree | but since this is a hoodoo tree | but since this is a medium | psychic science tree | magic spirit tree | it will not harm’.²⁴

The word ‘but’ is ambiguous. It serves as a pointer to and intensifier of the statement which succeeds it. Initially, the poet begins his polemic with a victimising image of nature and high capitalist activity when he asserts: ‘think of a factory | and it appears | let the word nuclear press you | with its weight | uranium trees mate in nuclear forests | make trailer crane bulldozer fission’.²⁵ It is a process which he cannot control but imagines an alternative voice of resistance which challenges this reality. The voice is enveloped in a magico-religious sensibility that can only be released via chant²⁶ and memory. The staccato lineation and unpunctuated phrases (common to all of the poems) weigh both attention and strain. More overtly, the poet is setting out to identify the exact texture of a mood and of moments of history which contained both the supernatural fervour and desperate hope of the exploding folk. The principles of Vodou and Hoodoo denominations are recast as complex and curative. Vodou broadly encompasses a worldview that is adept in its search for higher grounds and purpose in life. As an ancestral religion that has its roots in continental African Dahomey cults, it is a key element of Haitian consciousness, which provides moral coherence through common cosmological understandings.

Patrick Bellegarde-Smith’s encompassing definition of Vodou sheds light on the manner in which Allen-Paisant deploys it as an epistemological device to express the syncretic nature of Caribbean identity and realities:

Vodun is a coherent and comprehensive system and worldview in which every person and everything is sacred and must be treated accordingly. In Vodun, everything in the world – be it plant, animal or mineral – share similar chemical, physical, and/or genetic properties. This unity of all things translates into an overarching belief in the sanctity of life, not so much for the thing as for the spirit of the thing.²⁷

Creating dissonance in nature’s polyrhythms, disturbing the harmonious flow of things, and bringing about division in the community, are all acts which represent moral transgression in the Vodou world. ‘Vein of Stone Amid the Branches’ embodies this complex interconnection between the sacred and the secular while also illuminating the organic functional aspect of the religion that regulates chaotic actions. Harold Courlander’s commentary further exemplifies Vodou’s functions and pervasiveness:

Vodou permeates the land, and, in a sense, it springs from the land. It is not a system imposed from above, but one which pushes out from below … Vodou is strong and it cannot die easily … You cannot destroy something with such deep genuine roots. You may warp it, twist it, make it crawl along the ground instead of growing upright, but you cannot kill it … [especially] in light of the inner history of the [African] race.²⁸

According to Courlander, this inter-connectedness with nonhuman life signposts a deep Afro-Caribbean sensibility that values a symbiotic relationship with nature and its secretions of mythology. Allen-Paisant is thus concluding that the African bloodline can never be severed since a process of reversal takes place through the ancestor tree that nurtures his creative spirit. Channelled through form, spiritual energy becomes art – hence, there is a dramatic reenactment of memory that is cathartic. These are the ichor and incense of the survival moment traditional in the Afro-Caribbean and in this poem. The poet extracts from rituals (still very much alive in the Caribbean) various motifs, symbols and images relevant to his act of possession. One of the fundamental characteristics of Vodou and Hoodoo²⁹ is the control of energy. This is epitomised during ritual occasions in which the priest or houngan in Vodun ceremonies controls the powers which ascend from the underground up the lightning conductor of the central pole in the hounfort (temple). Comparatively, Allen-Paisant exercises the same control in the process of creating his poem. For example, beneath the poet’s use of repetition with its conventional enthusiasm and gusto, lies a ritual intelligence. An incantatory, rhythmic voice is evident in the lines: ‘but since this is a conjuring tree | but since this is a vodou tree | but since this is a hoodoo tree | but since this is a medium | psychic science tree | magic spirit tree’³⁰ which stress the endurance of nature that pivots itself on a spirit-perception.

By turning to ideas of the numinous, the speaker embodies a desperate commitment to revolutionary reprisal for all that the long history of colonisation mutilates. The spirit of revolution ignites the landscape, wind, wave, creek and forest. The importance of repetition as an aesthetic expression is that it tightens the bond between individual and group and affirms an acknowledgement of an enduring ancestral presence that is rooted in the environment. Under pressure, the natural world begins to prophesy, to evoke legend, myth and dread omen out of the materials of everyday horror. The trees are not inert. They secrete a potential life which may be restored by invocation, meditation and the artistic imagination. The poet performs a leap in the imagination where ruins are recognised as totems. In this sense, vision is never just vision, but a part of a larger kaleidoscope of intention, sensation and relationships.

The poem draws to a close in celebrating the spiritual characteristics of trees which will not harm but heal and nourish the senses. He states ‘you will stand underneath it | and close your eyes | and when you open them | you will be in the world again’.³¹ Trees bring internal awakenings, and despite their ecological rape, their instrumentality prevails. By finding value in the spiritual and numinous, the poet reorients our critical gaze. It is a redirecting of our conceptual lenses from imperialist framing of the landscape as inert. The postcolonial ecocritic Elizabeth DeLoughrey states that among other things, imperialism led to the conceptual erasure of first knowledge systems and the ‘erection of a hierarchy of species’ that is evident in race, class and gender.³² This hegemonic schema is again rehearsed and visualised in the ‘uranium trees [that] mate in nuclear forests’ and the ‘trees [that] make shopping malls’.³³ Metaphors of specie objectification characterise empire’s imagination and its self-proclaimed legitimising authority for specific ideological conceptions of territory. However, Allen-Paisant rejects this reading of nature as finite and limiting. He concludes with questions posed outside the anthropocentric view and advances the endurance of natural systems beyond the human. Trees are conceived of their temporal dimension in relation to the questions of memory and spiritual knowledge of the past. In this articulation of rehabilitating the landscape, Allen-Paisant gestures to a different knowledge system, as linked to African and Caribbean magico-spiritual traditions that envision a democratic and nonexploitative relationship between human communities and the land. An understanding of how contemporary Caribbean poets in the metropole are using rhythm as image to conjure up, as effectively as any word picture, the energies and real presences that are latent in the environment, can enable us to explore our own spaces in fresh ways by expanding our notion of technique and form.

The idea of continuity is also evident stylistically and rhetorically in the poem ‘Twilight in Roundhay’ and is a nod to the St Lucian laureate, Derek Walcott. Allen-Paisant asserts:

I dream the red sun of Coffee Grove

in this sky crisscrossed […]

to see a bird gliding in the milky wave

of the yam vines […]

while the goats’ hooves prance on rough asphalt […]

kerosene oil makes dark burnings in the air.³⁴

Several interesting ideas emerge but what is most apparent is the poet’s evocation of Walcott’s 1990 epic poem Omeros. The resonances with the laureate’s notion of in-betweenness as a lived process are undeniable. Characteristically, the twilight (as in the title of the piece), the bird that glides and makes criss-crosses in the sky, the smoke that encircles the asphalt road, the yam vines that curl and the goats that make tracks on the road are major images in Walcott’s Omeros.³⁵ This sort of discovery is the most tangible proof of the existence of a continuum. The network of allusions indicates that art has become for Allen-Paisant, the expression of private tensions. His task has become one of rescuing experience from the turbulence within and investing it with verbal shape. It is a movement that heralds an intersection of the private with the communal and is a marriage of the surreal with the concrete. More specifically, the vast themes of history and politics of identity which Walcott had long grappled with, on the one hand, and the private turmoil in which he wrestled with belonging to both European and Caribbean traditions seem to overtake Paisant. The ‘wave’³⁶ that is referenced in the fourth stanza is symbolically the Atlantic and it connects with the idea of the poet’s own middle passage to the metropole. To contend with the sense of alienation which pervades the collection (since Leeds ceases to provide constant spiritual sustenance that is necessary for the Caribbean poet), Paisant looks to his predecessors for hope and inspiration. The poet is therefore relying on the graces of inheritance. In this articulation, the observation of the esteemed Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite is useful in which he argues that art becomes ‘a very learned and conscious procedure’.³⁷ Like Walcott at the start of his epic, Omeros, Allen-Paisant is preoccupied with the journey from the secret forest of the heartland’s unconsciousness³⁸ to the rhythms of Caribbean waking life and society.

There is an obvious wrestle between dream and reality in this poem. The ‘dream’ in the third stanza suggests a journey through the deep waters of the unconscious and there is a shift from the aloneness of exile in Britain to the exuberant rhythm of the Caribbean. Furthermore, Leeds is measured, judged and rejected by the tropical eye which recognises England as a symbol of cold Western rationalism. The juxtaposition of the ‘silence [of] the light above | the cold lines from aeroplanes’ in the West Yorkshire sky with the warmth and soft glow of the Caribbean ‘kerosene oil’³⁹ lamps convey a sense of the being buried under a burden of time which is often overwhelming in the metropolitan city. Allen-Paisant, much like Walcott, is engaged in recalling an amber landscape of another life and shares in the bleakness and bitterness of exilic living. His instinct is to recognise a need to re-enter a ceremonious and folk-based past. Consequently, he attempts a descent into memory to unearth a rich ancestral identity. It is a journey back from the deadly void of modern Europe toward an old-time innocence of pastoral celebration. For example, the visual images of the ‘red sun of Coffee Grove’, the ‘roads of smoke’, the ‘bird gliding in the milky wave | of the yam vines’, the auditory stimulus of the ‘goats’ hooves [that] prance on rough asphalt’ and the olfactory image of the fragrant ‘kerosene oil’ can be associated with a paradise of primal innocence.⁴⁰ The search for an Adamic renewal finds support in the poetic methods he employs. Interestingly, there is semi-autobiographical first-person narration which provides the skein of a chronological narrative around which the entire collection is constructed. There is a personal voice whose function is partly to name a distant home-based society by constantly describing the village (‘the people ribboned in darkness’), its people and customs (‘the shepherd’s machete scrapes the ground’) or analysing the social structure of rural Jamaica. Every word is loaded. There are anecdotes (also evident in the poem ‘Cho-Cho Walks’), which reveal an understanding of the oral tradition that undergirds the Caribbean. The poem is thusly a lyrical meditative passage, whose major themes are memory and history, while the tonal effect is one of transition and motion within a context of timelessness. A lack of punctuation adds to the theme of fluidity and like the communication of trees, necessitates an idiosyncratic grammar in which a personal journey is accommodated via memory.

Most significantly, ‘Twilight in Roundhay’ describes a search through the landscape for a sense of rootedness. The desperate need to belong is echoed in the line: ‘The bird is comfort | a conversation going on | between me and all I see | I will learn to name this me’.⁴¹ There is a thrice reference to the bird which invokes its function as guide (a spirit of the air) and is a space where the poetic imagination dwells. It is an image that connects with the creative process. Moreover, the lines reflect an effort to confront the inner self that can only be summoned in the warmth and energy of the Caribbean. The poem itself thus becomes a kind of cryptic shorthand, hieroglyph and riddle of an ambiguous process hence the fluid association of ideas, images, allusions and word echoes. Here is a version of the poet who talks about a return to the tropics, a descent into the first, Adamic man which marks a movement back to the green beginnings of the world. It allows him a way out of his trapped vision of a deformed world. There is hope in the poet’s grounded grasp of both a great heritage of Caribbean craftsmanship and a rooted, earthly and essential spirituality that surrounds him, albeit via memory. That the entire poetic collection is entitled Thinking [and not Walking] with Trees is significant to the discussion at hand as the poet reconsiders and re-roots the black body in an alternative space – whether through memories of a pastoral childhood, nature, ecology, the woods in Leeds or the Anglophone Caribbean poetic tradition. There is an obligation that turns into an imprecation in ‘learn[ing] to name this me’.⁴² The negotiation between sensitivity and force is apparent throughout the collection, as the poet skilfully navigates the boundary between relief and tension. As with ‘Vein of Stone Amid the Branches’ in which he foregrounds the material consequences of history and in ‘Cho-Cho Walks’ where he reclaims the memory of lived freedom in the Caribbean landscape, Allen-Paisant in ‘Twilight in Roundhay’ is uncompromising when digging down through the undergrowth of imperial forces. He certainly succeeds in replanting new narratives on the same soil where old colonial and toxic ideologies used to, and still, reside.

This residual characteristic of nature is further embodied in the poem ‘For Those Who Steal Away’. It begins with a salutation to the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, which has its origins in the clandestine gathering of a congregation in Charleston, South Carolina, until the end of the American Civil War. In this poem, Allen-Paisant connects the roots of the Saint Mary Parish AME Church in Jamaica with its American counterpart. Anita Scott Coleman’s mapping of space and its interface with the movement of the black body is useful in this regard. Coleman in her essay, ‘Arizona and New Mexico – the Land of Esperanza’ charts the contradictions of the free African’s experience onto the ‘boundless space’ of the American West.⁴³ While the vastness of western geography indeed signifies freedom, possibility and ease of movement, Coleman opines that black migrants still struggled against discriminatory odds. She observes, ‘here and there goes negroes, likes straggly but tenacious plant growing, nevertheless, though always in the larger towns. Becoming fewer and fewer in all of the remoter hamlets and towns they are as sparse as rouse bushes upon the prairies’.⁴⁴ Interestingly, Coleman’s botanical image casts African bodies as transplanted specimens whose patterns of migration both empower and imperil black survival. As Coleman’s ‘tenacious plants’ – embodied as the African subject – contend for a claiming of Western soil as their own, they receive only limited access to the ‘life-giving ozone and revivifying sunlight’ that, she argues, shines liberally upon the region’s white seekers.⁴⁵ Nevertheless, the transplanted African American community managed to survive in isolated and vibrant patches. By contextualising the black migrant experience against that of white migrants who travelled westward in search of land and a space to call home, Coleman probes at deeper cultural anxieties regarding black survivability during the period of the Great Migration. Interestingly, Coleman’s critical formulations dovetail with Allen-Paisant’s argumentation of the African subject’s search for a home in ‘For Those Who Steal Away’. Like Coleman, Allen-Paisant’s devotion to different botanic motifs (‘my guide in roots’, ‘underland of spirits | running through slavery and | ports of blood | connecting roots of AME | Philadelphia Baltimore New Orleans | […] running through these Saint Mary hills’),⁴⁶ metaphors of transplantation and wilderness imagery untangle the historical nuances of black migration that proliferate both within and beyond the context of enslavement.

Moreover, the poet’s meditation on the relationship between landscape and narratives of belonging or displacement enables a reading of black identity not just in terms of politics, but also in terms of spatial relations and questions of environment. His spatial turn to the formation and proliferation of black spiritual communities in Philadelphia and South Carolina in the 1800s, for example, signposts the point that space is endemic to the black body whose entanglement with processes of migration fundamentally resists fixity. This unfolding, transgeographical and intergenerational narrative of social and cultural relationships that are preserved across space and time is illuminated when the poet declares in his epigraph:

The African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) was founded in Philadelphia in 1816. Emmanuel AME Church (Mother Emmanuel) was established when the congregation in Charleston, South Carolina, met in secret until the end of the American Civil War. In Saint Mary, Jamaica, the ruined building of an AME church can be found at the site of a former sugar plantation, in the dense forest near Kwame Falls. As stated on the plaque on its front wall, its leader was one Mrs. F. Aicheson. On the plaque is inscribed the date ‘3rd June ’20’.⁴⁷

Here, Allen-Paisant debunks assumptions that Afro-communities in the diaspora are devoid of kinship ties. The epigraph demonstrates that the relational vision of survival was steeped in bodies, personalities and black revolutionary leaders whose interdependence was grounded on a spiritual network enabled through an interconnection with the landscape. There is also an unmistakable gendered inflection that the poet imbibes in the imagistic descriptions of black women’s bodies enmeshed in their surroundings: ‘women are born from rock […]. | Mrs F Aicheson | is covered by ruins […] a guango rises from the body | of praying mothers’.⁴⁸ In these images, the black female body is indistinguishable from the unbounded landscape and it confirms the force and spiritual ecology that constitute Allen-Paisant’s crafting of an enchanted universe. This harkens to Vodoun cosmology (as previously argued) where emphasis is placed on an intergenerational nexus that exists in the material world. Since a history of migration and movement is rehearsed, the poem requires an alternative mode of hearing – a reverent one – as the poet begins his pronouncements. In the restaging of these active maternal presences in nature, he is presenting the Jamaican landscape as a metabolic entity. Thus, Caribbean space turns on the axis of cosmic integrity and is moving into a wider syncretic spiritual continent. The language of ‘wind and leaves’ that ‘keep memory’ and the ‘guango sapling: that pieces “through the belly”’⁴⁹ affirms the text’s circular logic. Allen-Piasant is also signposting an imaginative ethics of interaction. Here, vines and wind become nearly synonymous with the black body in transition and evoke a broader nascent transition toward social and cultural belonging vis-à-vis the material world. Furthermore, metaphors of transplantation recall the logic of rootwork inherent in the plantation context in which ideas of maroonage and socio-territorial movements took shape. Historical mobility and agency are therefore repurposed to suit a new context of migration and social mobility in Allen-Paisant’s discourse.

Midway through The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois offers a striking vision of emergent Afro-diasporic communities across the globe. He notes: ‘Now a rising group of people are not lifted bodily from the ground like an inert solid mass, but rather stretch upward like a living plant with its roots still clinging in the mould’.⁵⁰ Spatialised in Du Bois’s botanical image of rootedness and upward growth is the poet’s reference to Mrs Aicheson’s act of successfully transposing the fierce ethos of the Philadelphian church into a Caribbean context. The stanza’s language of an ‘understory’⁵¹ establishes this deep interconnection and belongingness to a broader ecology. The aim is, in part, to engage the landscape as a vessel of communal, cross-cultural and historical negotiation. As part of his contemplation of home and mobile geographies, Allen-Paisant routinely tropes on roots and the sense of being uprooted from one plot of soil and replanted in another. Despite the inherent violence found in processes of transplantation and migratory patterns, the poem climaxes with an image that completes the text’s vision of a matrix enlivened by permanent interpersonal and spiritual bonds. This is embodied in the image of the ancestral ‘souls’ that reside ‘inside trees’.⁵² Undeterred by the terror of chattel slavery and its violent aftermath, the speaker feels enveloped by a cosmogram-like circle in which he accepts a profound generational connection that can only be reawakened through a psychic relationality with the landscape.

To participate with nature, as Allen-Paisant has done, is to participate in the sacred. Himself a pilgrim, the poet learns of place on its own terms and provides multiple epistemologies to encapsulate a broader range of perception. Through innovations in poetry, he expresses a reparatory vision of the cosmos in which the divine, the human and the vegetal interlock and provide prophetic contours with liberatory focus and theoretical rigour. Thinking with Trees undoubtedly moves into an expansive terrain of sacred traditions, ancestral pools of reflections and spiritual portals to subvert the stigma and perceptions of soul sickness and cultural impotence. As a fluid and complex collection, Allen-Paisant’s poems advocate for moving away from the limitations and fragmentations of modern, anthropocentric perspectives steeped in Western paradigms, and call for increased environmental empathy and holistic interactions with nature. In this mindfulness, one may begin to move in empathetic relations with the planetary environment we live in and by extension, with our human selves, for we, too, as the poems in the collection demonstrate, are nature.