An extract from ‘Tongues: A Memoir of Dysfluency’

Jason Allen-Paisant

19.

On the photos he’s taken, everything is slippery or slick. The pictures have the brightness of rain water, of reflective surfaces. The landscapes, mostly coastlines and their swards, while wild and sombre, have a quality of light that comes from the freshly fallen rain illuminated by what daylight there is, tame but less aqueous than in England. The light is also the landscape. Every landscape is its own daylight, and the rewards of this one is the charm of the heathery moors and the granite rocks that lie amongst them, forming the sharp cliffs, blending into them as into so many earthen shades of red, pewter and violet, and the particular charm of this rain-drenched landscape under the sunlight, a kind of silver. Lemké likes to think of this as a ‘sombre light’. There’s a lot of stone in the photos. With different textures, different colours, of varying degrees of smoothness and size. ‘The photos are organic’, is the description he imagines for them. He’s been interested in trees, as usual. Photos of upturned roots reveal to him his interest in dark zones—he hadn’t thought of this before. There’s the exposed, upturned roots of a pine tree blown down in a recent storm. At a glance, these roots resemble sharp knife blades; they’ve intertwined with the granite rock present on the coastline, so much that they seem to have fissured the rock as the tree fell, tearing off the part of it that had bonded with the tree itself. Things seem to have existed under pressure in the darkness for some time. As usual, he’s been interested in what he can’t see. What he can never see often seems far more interesting to him than the things he might see. 

20.

A part of the exercise was probably this vulnerability that came from nakedness, he thinks. Why didn’t he get naked in the outdoors more often? Not since he was five… How much has he lost by not being naked with the breeze, with the hooting of owls, with the juice of herbs and roots sluicing over him, in open ground, under the trees?

      He dashes the grainy water over his head over and over. Its admixture, a secret tightly guarded by the healer. This ignorance is also healing, he muses to himself. To not know is itself a kind of bath; an immersion, to give himself up, trusting, to the healer. He can feel the grains sticking to his forehead as the water, cool, streams down over his body, leaving him appeased.

        Suddenly, he’s out of his body, watching himself. It’s a film. Why should this suddenly feel so unreal? He’s standing in a cinder block cubicle, among the baobab trees. Suddenly he notices it. He’s looking at the acacia trees surrounding him in the savannah. In Africa: it was a place just like the one he’d learned to think of as Africa since he was a child. A place of quiet but fervid mystery. Now he’s here. Is he seeing what he’s been prepared to see, he wonders, as he suddenly awakens out of his activity to realise that here, indeed, is where he is. The savannah. The brown, dusty earth that would feel desolating, were it not for the trees sparsely spread across it. He’s reached a certain Africa for the first time, and he’s very naked. Abject, as he squats, with his asshole poking up into the sky, to scoop the water from the basins. The air against his asshole is as fresh as the water, as crisp and invigorating.

          One. Two. Three. The wishes pronounced over and over, over each basin.

          The amount of water he can scoop with his hands is paltry. It isn’t the point of the exercise, he figures, though the plant-healer-man names it a bath. You could not be submerged, and it feels like there’s some amount of symbolism in the exercise, which seems as important, if not more, than the actual dowsing of himself with water. But he takes his time here. He cannot drag himself away. The water feels infinitely available. He wants it to be unending—until he feels he’s collected in himself all the life that this moment has to offer.

21.

Standing inside a tree was not an idea he’d formulated, except, perhaps, years ago when reading fairy tales. The bats squeaked at the top of the dank cavern and Lemké appreciated the coolness and protective silence of the interior as he ran his fingers over the cavern’s wall. He felt the thick layer of dust and, underneath it, the rough, muscular bark of the baobab disguised by a smooth sheen of skin. Lighting the room with his phone’s camera, he thought that the tree’s skin resembled an alligator’s. He felt cut off from the earth, on a planet whose existence he’d never suspected.

        The hole itself was raised off the ground, so that a child wouldn’t have been able to see inside it. To enter, you had to contort your body. Head, then twist, then one leg, then go in, second leg following. Some time from now, perhaps in a few hundred years, this cavity will have closed up again, returning the tree to the way it was at the beginning. But for the last three centuries it has been open, allowing people like himself to enter, and providing a resting place to the bats that pollinate the tree’s fruit. For centuries, griots were also buried here, right where he stood in the tree.

22.

Here, I’m in communion with the dead ones,

he thinks. How could they elevate a stone of such weight?

Also: Why? As challenging as the question is, there may be

something of an answer. A passageway:

some ritual involved.

Was it ‘people’ who’d done it?

He goes under, journeying—stooping—through a darkened,

enclosed tunnel.

Then re-emerges. Sense of a clear purpose.

Ritual, says S.

The dolmen was oriented towards the sea.

More, it was like a creature looking out at it.

He walks underneath again. With trepidation.

Because of the weight of these gigantic rocks

that would crush him,

beyond recognition,

were they to fall.

He is anxious, despite

the realisation that they will not,

if up to now, after so many centuries,

including prehistoric time,

they had not.

What perturbs him

is the idea that they might.

The gusty winds out today that have him scared

to go near the cliffs on l’Île-Grand

won’t cause them to.

Neither will the winter storm that’s out.

Looking at the dolmen from the outside,

he notices that there are parts taller than he is.

More than its weight,

it’s the terror of its endurance

that inspires reverence—

the timelessness of something seemingly

so precarious. Suddenly,

he’s in the presence of the holy.

Who knows, he says to S.,

perhaps they had some form of technology

back then that we can’t

even imagine today.

And what is ‘then’ anyway, he muses.

Might ‘then’ not be before us, rather than behind?

For ‘then’—the time of this chamber—

is not part of History, as we claim.

Might this ‘then’ not then be in the future?

27.

For us, the sea becomes our geography, he thinks to himself. Consider that it’s the last thing we see when leaving home. This will explain why, despite not having grown up near the sea, the sea’s how he thinks of himself. Consider that he was aware, from the age of three, four, or five (when he had not yet seen the sea), that it was what he would need to cross in order to leave home.

       For years, he could see nothing but land, and yet, the sea was ever present in his imagination, or better said, a thing that he couldn’t name that was the sea. Is it simply the fact that water’s the first thing in our memory? Is it only for that reason that sea water is known to his body?

      He returns again to the rock on which he stood to watch the opalescent waves, to listen, to feel them again in his body with Ojunga. Today the waves are pewter. It’s winter, the sixth day of the year. Everything’s in the sea, they say, and the sea is everything, all of us, all of the universe. His hands are freezing. It is uncomfortable to hold the telephone on which he writes. But he stands on the same rock and watches the waves surpass him, reaching to the shore, swallowing him. Engloutir is the sound and texture of what they do to him. He tries to face down the sea’s aquaticness. Yet he’s becoming one with it, disappearing. It threatens to overwhelm his discernible form.

JASON ALLEN-PAISANT is a Jamaican writer and multi-award-winning poet. He is the author of two critically acclaimed books of poetry. Thinking with Trees won the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for Poetry and was shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. His sophomore book of poems, Self-Portrait as Othello, a Poetry Book Society Choice, won the UK’s two most prestigious poetry awards for 2023—the Forward Prize and T.S. Eliot Prize. Professor of Critical Theory and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester and Associate Editor of Callaloo Literary Journal, he has recently edited the Penguin Modern Classics edition of Aimé Césaire’s Return to My Native Land and written the introduction to the work. His other books include the philosophical treatise Engagements with Aimé Césaire: Thinking with Spirits (Oxford University Press). The Possibility of Tenderness, his first creative nonfiction book, will be published by Hutchinson Heinemann in 2025. Jason lives in Leeds with his partner and two children.