Lauren Gee speaks with Dr. Jason Allen-Paisant, Jamaican-born lecturer of Caribbean Poetry & Decolonial Thought in the School of English at the University of Leeds. What began as a conversation around the parameters and repercussions of decolonisation ended as a conversation centering sanctuary, liberation and, quite simply, the art of ‘being’.
Lauren Gee: This last year has thrown up a lot, particularly around your field of decolonisation, what have you been working on?
Dr. Jason Allen-Paisant: I have just been thinking a lot about decolonisation and what is implied by decolonising your mind... not just for white people, but for us black people too.
I am working on a book, at the moment, called Thinking with Spirits, engagements with Aimé Césaire. Of course, it raises eyebrows, because of those two things coming together. Césaire and this idea of thinking with spirits. Césaire is typically thought of as more of a Marxist, militant, anti-colonial figure. But of course, people only think about militancy and anti-colonialism in one frame. The title of my book has to do with a conversation I’ve been having around animism. Thinking about animism, we cannot get around the fact that it is a fraught term laden with colonial baggage.
LG: How would you define animism?
JAP: According to Edward Tylor, who coined the term, it is the thinking and worldview of people who think that objects also have a soul or a spirit. The idea that the world is agential, and not just human beings - that rocks, that mountains, have this ensouled spirit. The idea is an accurate description of a lot of indigenous communities, including certain African communities. But it is a problematic term because from the get-go, when Tylor describes it and other anthropologists and ethnographers picked it up, it was seen as an inferior quality of these people.
LG: So, they saw it as primitive rather than a form of expanded knowledge?
JAP: Exactly, there is this anthropologist called Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, who says it’s the mindset of underdeveloped people. So that’s why it’s so problematic, because in the history of ethnography, it has been the mindset of White men studying other people. My work is around Haitian Vodou. I go to Haiti and spend time with Vodou people. I’ve been to Vodou ceremonies and been among them, trying to understand how their spiritual practice operates and what it means to them. I’m not saying I understand it all, but I am working on it. I am not persuaded that Vodou people and many of these communities would describe themselves as animists. So here I start to think, we need to liberate ourselves of the vocabulary White people use to describe us…
LG: The term animism seems to have the power to ‘other’? As though telling us they are something in relation to something we are not. Is there a hierarchy of knowledge implicit in the term?
JAP: Yes, there you go. Gina Athena Ulysse, a Haitian-American scholar once said “you’re studying us, who’s studying you?” [laughs] I have always been haunted by this question, I think that’s a part of decolonising, how we do our research because White scholars always give themselves this authority to study other people, and it presupposes that they have the conditions to understand other people even better than they understand themselves.
LG: Yes, it’s built on this assumption that their self-awareness is operating on a higher level.
JAP: Precisely, and I realise that is what's troubling sometimes, is that we, as Afroic scholars of colour buy into these toponyms, we start to work with them. At the moment, I am contributing to a collection of essays around animism, and I started to rethink my vocabulary, trouble the waters. So, I started to work with this idea of thinking with spirits, and I also sometimes talk about this idea of acting with spirits. Both have to do with this way of looking at how Caribbean spirit cosmologies view living and acting and thinking. I have realised that spirit is always present in how they view the world. For many of these spirit cosmologists, the human being is not simply flesh or matter, on one hand, and spirit on the other, it is always a fusion. You cannot separate them.
LG: The idea of a fusion in itself is not typically Western is it?
JAP: No, it’s not because it is not dualist at all. Going back to that preposition with, when you act with or think with spirits, you're not imposing your rationalism on the world. Instead, what you’re saying is that the objects and things around you also have an energy, agency and power of their own, such as rocks and rivers. You might be aware of the healing practices including Obeah, of which there have been a lot of new perspectives coming out recently. Historically, Obeah has been demonised.
LG: Would you say that is a form of internalised racism?
JAP: Yes, we’ve been taught in the school system in the Caribbean and through other avenues to detest and reject all those African spiritualities. It is integral to how the White man, the coloniser, gets us to devalue ourselves and to see him or the White system as superior. That’s a really critical aspect of how colonialism works and that is what I have been looking at over the past three to four years—excavating how white supremacy works through us, as Black people.
LG: Yes, it’s quite terrifying how we have the ability to passively perpetuate it through our own actions. This idea feeds into what you mentioned earlier about the unspoken effect of decolonisation on Black people. What have you noticed as the direct effects of this in Jamaica in the last year or so?
JAP: In Jamaica, it has definitely stirred up something. One thing that happened in the wake of George Floyd’s killing was that someone in Britain tweeted a picture of the insignia that the Governors-General in the Caribbean wear. It goes with the knighthood that they receive, a badge that they wear. On it is an image of a white angel, kneeling on the neck of a Black man. It is very shocking, yet, Governor General after Governor General in Jamaica, Black people, have worn it proudly. When the current Governor General was asked about it, he said that he had never noticed it. Initially, I didn't believe him, but after I thought about it, I said “I think he might be telling the truth”. I think there’s noticing and then there is noticing, and that sums it up. So, I use that example as something that Black people in Jamaica woke up to. It has caused Jamaicans to also become aware of what is happening in their own country, the fact that Black lives matter in a Black country too. I can’t emphasise this enough, that there is a lot of oppression of Black people in Jamaica and countries like Jamaica. When I say oppression, what I mean is masses of Black people, their lives are often seen as disposable, depending on where they live. Even in a Black ruled country, such as Jamaica, you have a lot of police brutality and state violence against Black people. Our lives are not valued in a system that still has a colour hierarchy, where lighter skinned people are often at the top pulling the strings. Sadly, we still have those internalised prejudices, that self-hatred always driving us to oppress our fellow people. You just never get to sit back and see what you are going through as abnormal, and it takes something such as the killing of a man, or BLM or even a pandemic for people to see that.
LG: This sparks a question I had about change. Must the catalyst for change always be death or suffering and the visibility of both? Can decolonisation in the modern world ever stem from joy?
JAP: I would say yes, decolonisation can and should centre joy, though, sadly, we do not allow that to happen often enough and we should do it more. What would that joy look like? Teaching our children to love their hair, telling our children stories about Black magic rather than White fairytales. I have my own children now and I am thinking about what stories I read to them and what images I show them. How do I make my daughter see herself in reading material and on screen so she ends up seeing that Black women are scientists too, that we have Black magic too, we have museums and lots of other things to be proud of?
LG: It sounds like visibility and representation are important ways to decolonise from a place of positivity. As a Black person who has grown up in a predominantly white space, I was drawn to afrofuturism through its sense of representation. Do you think afrofuturism has the potential to be more ambitious in all Black spaces?
JAP: The question is, would we use that term in all Black spaces?
LG: That’s very true!
JAP: Yes, there’s a kind of affirmation of self that you get in all Black spaces, that you just don’t get in White spaces or a White controlled space. In a Black majority space, you don’t always have to negotiate being yourself, you can just be. You don’t have that need to prove yourself. Space is a really important thing to thrive and develop your own thinking, and I think that’s my answer to your question. We don’t have to use afrofuturism, as such, because afrofuturism comes from a need to imagine the Black existence. That need is simply not as immediate or pressing in a place such as Jamaica, where you have a majority practicing black existence. At the same time, I think that what a lot of Jamaican writers do is write alternative futures, even if they don’t use the term afrofuturism. I’m thinking of Erna Brodber, for instance.
LG: They’re existing as a form of being rather than resistance, which feels different to the European context...
JAP: Yes, they inherited that from their ancestors and they perpetuate that. It is an interesting contrast between being and proving.
LG: I associate ‘being’ with passivity, and in many ways, as a Black person in a White space, I don't feel I have the luxury of being passive. Something I was reminded of amidst the debate around the statues, the way we passively look up to these monuments in urban spaces. What are your thoughts on what we should do?
JAP: Sometimes I wonder whether there is any way out of this conundrum of the statues. If you take them down or topple them, that’s a good thing in one way, but then when you topple them you don’t necessarily topple the mentalities that come with them. I think there is a good thing in toppling them, because racism has a very visual component to it. There is something to be said about the power of a statue of a colonial figure at the heart of your city. There is a power in removing them, but I think we need to think larger, we lose something if they are all gone, yet all that internalised white supremacy will still be there...
LG: Essentially, we are forcing it underground?
JAP: Exactly, and the thing that is pressing on my thoughts is that when a lot of people come together to topple a statue, it is out of desperation, and that’s something we must realise. It is when nothing is moving in the macrostructure, that this is all we can do, and that is why I am more sympathetic than not. To really do the ideal thing would be to take these statues down and put them in museums, because that’s what the museums should be used for, not for stolen loot.
LG: That’s made me think about our understanding and actioning of time as a collective. Something I struggled with during last year’s resurgence of BLM and the world’s reaction was oddly the sense of urgency. For me as a Black person, this sense of urgency has never been dormant, and I’m wondering how we can frame and hold urgency internally as a community whilst still effecting more institutional change?
JAP: My thinking is that we need to step out of urgency that we need to inhabit a different sense of time. As racialised people of colour, Black people, we need to somehow avoid going along with the discourses that are being shared around us, taking centre stage in the news and wider society. That different sense of time can be a kind of self-care.
Last summer, Khadija Ibrahim, a Leeds based poet and performance artist, organised this open space performance called ‘My body’s a protest for change’. The performance entailed a group of Leeds-based artists coming together in the city, with placards each bearing a statement that stemmed from ourselves, and standing still in designated spaces. It was a silent intervention and the power of the piece lay in the fact that our bodies were just being in certain sites that our bodies are often not imagined or represented in. The attention of passers-by was deflected on to our physical bodies, they were forced to stop and construct the narrative themselves, making them think about Black lives and about our bodies in the space. It was extremely liberating. We felt, at least, that we were doing something for ourselves. We are typically found explaining things to people, trying to get people to understand, trying to persuade people, and suddenly we felt an intense sense of self-affirmation and affirmation of each other. I find it always hard to describe the feeling I had in that moment because I felt that I was existing in a really powerful way.
LG: Something that I think we keep coming back to in this conversation is the power of being.
JAP: Well, yes. Finding that pocket to just be, for that decompression, that space is important. For a while now I have been thinking about the ways I write, work and think as an academic. Being an academic, they tell you, is about producing knowledge, but I am thinking now about who I am producing that knowledge for as a Black academic working in a White controlled space. Who is my knowledge profiting?
LG: Jason, thank you so much for speaking to me.
JAP: You’re welcome!
Lauren Gee is a writer and researcher who is passionate about the art of storytelling. Inspired by her Caribbean heritage, Lauren seeks to celebrate and bring visibility to Black communities, supporting creative projects, artists and academics that centres underrepresented voices and experiences. Committed to making the art and cultural sector a more accessible space, Lauren is engaged with community-based work and co-founded ccolourdrunkk a platform dedicated to black creatives and their experiences, she is currently working on an exciting new commission as Hackney’s Windrush Project Coordinator and can be reached at laurentaylorgee@gmail.com
If you’d like to help us keep sharing these stories and pay our writers - become a sustaining member!
If you’d like to have your story featured on our website - make a pitch!