Jason Allen-Paisant – On Being a Black Body in “Nature”: A Walking Lyric
“On Being a Black Body in ‘Nature’” is a lyric hybrid that combines poetry and essay. One might call it a “lyric essay”. Weaving the musicality of poetry into the more rationalist tone of the essay affords a blending of genres, voices, languages, and selves, and a coming together of different fragments of life and experience in new and interesting ways. The lyric essay embodies a form of mobility suited to my migrant experience, that of a Black West Indian living in Britain more than sixty years after the first Windrush arrivants. In this piece Dr Jason Allen-Paisant tackles questions that arise at the intersection of landscape, race, and history. The lyric essay as creative inquiry provides a liberating rhythm through which he can navigate these questions.
Further Reading:Allen-Paisant, Jason (2021). “Reclaiming Time: On Blackness and Landscape”. PN Review 257.
Allen-Paisant, Jason (2021). Thinking with Trees. Manchester: Carcanet.
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