"Go these days to any independent bookshop or art gallery or zine fair, and you may find yourself asking: where are the humans? Title after title is devoted to clay and stone, trees and flowers, the riverine and the botanical, gardens and allotments. They share a vocabulary: care, tending, grounding, rootedness, nourishment, regeneration. Nature, however battered, is held up as an antidote to morbid modernity, its alienations, its amnesia."
"The Possibility of Tenderness is also about nature, its setting Coffee Grove in the May Day Mountains of Jamaica. During Jason Allen-Paisant's early childhood there, it had no electricity or piped water. Neither beach idyll nor Trenchtown ghetto, its personality was shaped in large part by grung the local name for small plots cultivated by peasant farmers. Apples, guava, mangoes: here, for all the sweat and toil, was succulence."
Coffee Grove in the May Day Mountains of Jamaica had no electricity or piped water during early childhood. The place was shaped by grung—small cultivated plots producing apples, guava and mangoes, offering succulence despite sweat and toil. Local life includes herbalist Rastas, archived maps, and frequent conversations about the dead and tombs. The term forest is reportedly absent from local vernacular. Walking functions as a sensory practice, enabling smell and sound to reveal landscape details and connections to the past. Memories include how grandmothers and other residents moved through the hills.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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