The poet reconnects with the landscape of the May Day Mountains in Jamaica where he grew up in a personal story of migration, race and rural life
An award-winning poet living in Roundhay Park, Leeds, Jason Allen-Paisant spent his early childhood living with his grandmother in Coffee Grove, a hilly rural district of Jamaica which was cut off from basic amenities such as electricity and water. Seen through the eyes of a child, Coffee Grove was, he notes, “both a tiny place and a huge planet”. There he developed a close relationship with the local plant life through climbing trees, picking fruit and helping his grandmother harvest yams on the “grung”, the local name for their small plot of land.
Allen-Paisant later yearned for pastures new, moving first to Paris and then to Britain to study at Oxford. His dream of upward mobility had become a reality, yet in the UK he noticed his interactions with nature were few and far between. He came to realise “just how much class keeps people in Britain from the privileges of land and soil and also keeps them from the tenderness that comes with forming kinship with the earth”.
