Diary: Jason Allen-Paisant, Plants and Dreaming
Did I know the concept of “getting bored”? The unhurried rhythm of the farm and poetry
Portrait of Mama taken at a studio in Kingston in the mid-1960s. Reproduced by permission of Milkweed Editions
When I was a child growing up in Coffee Grove, Jamaica, I knew trees through climbing them. If they were unclimbable, I looked at them longingly. I threw stones to down their fruit or cut bamboo poles to reach them. These were trees that fed us. We gave short shrift to the ones that bore no food. I counted them off on our way to grung—mango, coconut, guinep, breadfruit, star apple, guava. In Jamaica, grung is the small cultivation plots of peasant farmers, but it’s also our name for anywhere food crops grow … For me, grung was where Mama planted yams. Mama was my maternal grandmother, but I was raised by her, so that up till the age of five, I thought she was my actual mother …
Go now into the body of the five-year-old child, to look through his eyes. As soon as you come off the brow of the hill that leads to Mama’s grung and enter the vast clearing, there is the guango tree before you on your left. To get to the grung at the end of this track, we pass just under the guango then turn off to the right, through someone else’s pasture. We go up through this pasture to the common mango tree. The grung is before us—a half-acre of land.
Mama had knowledge of the grung. When there was help, it was minimal. She would pay to have the yam sticks cut and erected, and if the sticks weren’t to her liking, the men would have to bring new ones; she’d tell them off. A few times a year—in May, August and December—men would come to help when there was a huge amount of yam planting to do: these months were the best months for planting. Timing is everything for yams: different yams are planted at different stages of the moon, and they need different amounts of time— sometimes vastly different—to be optimally mature. There’s an inherited science when it comes to yam cultivation; you don’t just get up and say you’re doing it.
If I step over into my childhood memory, Mama is often clutching an almanac, quietly murmuring to herself. She’s sitting on her bed or on her wooden bench on the veranda muttering words whose connections I don’t fully understand: full moon, first quarter, second quarter, third quarter ...; dark night ... new moon; sinvinsen, mosella ... to dig; Afu fi go in dark night. To the child that I was these mutterings were like spells, and yet I knew—at three, four years old—that they were plans—instructions to self—for planting. Holding the almanac while speaking to herself seemed as much a “Mama thing” as her mulching the yam hills or training their vines; as her sourcing from friends the goat’s milk that she’d scald for me to drink in the mornings. I didn’t think about the significance of dates, moon cycles, and dark nights to the cultivation of yam, but I understood even then that hers was a technical and intimate knowledge of grung tings, and more specifically, an intimate knowledge of the yam. Yes, intimacy was how I thought of it: I was born into a world where the connection between people and their food, and the ground that produced it, was one of lavish care and intimacy. The feeling I had then—I can’t explain why—was that people spoke to the ground. Mama’s runic mutterings gave to the yams—afu, mosella, sinvinsen, barby, taw—a kind of mystique. Even now I think of yam as a mystery food.
