Self-Portrait as Othello

by Jason Allen-Paisant

Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023

Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023

Longlisted for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature 2024

Shortlisted for the Writers' Prize 2024

The Poetry Book Society Spring Choice 2023

A Guardian and The Irish Times Book of the Year

Jason Allen-Paisant's debut collection Thinking With Trees won the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for poetry and was an Irish Times and White Review Book of the Year 2021. In Poetry London Maryam Hessavi wrote, 'Jason Allen-Paisant is uncompromising when digging down through the undergrowth of our imperialist past – and yet he succeeds in replanting new narratives in the same soil where these toxic ideologies used to, and still, reside.'

The interlocking poems of his second collection, Self-Portrait as Othello, imagine Othello in the urban landscapes of modern London, Paris and Venice and invent the kinds of narrative he might tell about his intersecting identities. Poetic memoir and ekphrastic experiment, Self-Portrait as Othello focuses on a character at once fictional and real. Othello here represents a structure of feeling that was emerging in seventeenth-century Venice, and is still with us.

Portraiting himself as Othello, Allen-Paisant refracts his European travels and considers the Black male body, its presence, transgressiveness and vulnerabilities. Othello's intertwined identities as 'immigrant' and 'Black', which often operate as mutually reinforcing vectors, speak to us in the landscape of twenty-first-century Europe.

Genres: Poetry, Contemporary

88 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 30, 2023

Reviews

[Callum Morris-Horne · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this sophomore collection of interlinked poems, Allen-Paisant reconnoitres the liminal overlap between himself and Shakespeare’s Othello; reckoning with the formation of the black, literary ‘self’ and its imperialist, canonical inheritance as his modern Moor shimmies through the streets of Paris, Venice and London. As well as negotiation the code-switching, border-crossing intersections of his own Afro-diasporic experience, with deft, decolonial brushstrokes Allen-Paisant lyrically repaints the racist constructions and representation of black bodies within the history of art (reminiscent of Roger Robinson’s ‘A Portable Paradise’). Sounds like heady stuff, but this is all grounded in a playful sense of humour and unmistakeable heart. The Kehinde Wiley portrait used for the cover art is also fantastic and what initially, alongside the Shakespearean title, got my attention.

[Carmijn Gerritsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This poetry collection covers themes of race, ethnicity, history and Britishness through the intertextual reference t0 Shakespeare's Othello. As such, it plays around with an existing story and updates it to more contemporary socio-political debates. I thought the prose was very beautiful, and captured the essence of its argument well. I enjoyed the shorter poems more so than the extended ones, however together they creates a coherent whole. All in all, a big recommendation for anyone interested in Black British writing and critical engagements with race. Definitely one I will buying myself in order to research in the future!

[yi wei ;) · Rating 5 out of 5]

never has jumping back and forth between a text and Google translate been so interesting

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

(3.5) I found more to sink my teeth into here than I did with his debut collection, Thinking with Trees (2021). Part I’s childhood memories of Jamaica open out into a wider world as the poet travels to London, Paris and Venice, working in snippets of French and Italian and engaging with art and literature. “I’m haunted as much by the character Othello as by the silences in the story.” Part III returns home for the death of his grandmother and a coming to terms with identity. [Winner: Forward Prize for Best Collection; Past: T.S. Eliot Prize and Writers’ Prize shortlist]

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

lil reread. so so precise ,, enjoyed even more this time round



a Voice !
I have a suspicion this is one of those collections that people will underestimate because it achieves what it does from a few steps back. A real Moment that you almost have to chalk up what has been happening as it goes along to begin to feel what the overall looks like . beautiful writing on black masculinities too, ?in what felt to me a fresh vein

all to say I like it & its much-loved cover is right.

[Declan Hickey · Rating 5 out of 5]

If only it were longer!

[Hanneleele · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nüüd lugesin seda lausa kaks korda järjest, valvasin 5 tundi garderoobi :) Raske on midagi põhjapanevat öelda, vajaks võib-olla veel mõnd lugemist (valjult) ja mõtlemist, immigrandikogemusest ja võõras olemise kogemusest, sellest, kuidas on olla ainuke mustanahaline terves teatrisaalis või muuseumis kui mustpeade portreed välja arvata, ületada rassi- ja klassipiiri olles kodukülast Pariisi kõrgkooli jõudnud... Elulooline ja ühe inimese elust suurem ühteaegu. Väga haritult mõjub, ja mitte ainult selle pärast, et sõlmpunktiks on Othello. Samas on tekst selline voolav, mitte kirjakeelne, miskipärast arvan, et esituses kõlaks ehk võimsamalt kui lugedes.

[Lewis Isbell · Rating 4 out of 5]

i read it twice waiting for the film to start

[Tarandeep Kang · Rating 5 out of 5]

So very beautiful! An interrogation of Black Britishness as well as masculinity. Also reflections on the connections between Shakespeare's Othello and Italian (Venetian) art in the life of a Jamaican born Oxford student. Much that resonates on finding one's place, and fitting in. I imagine this will be an especially fruitful one for a reread!

[Christopher M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A series of interlinked poems exploring the race and identity of the narrator through comparisons to Shakespeare's character and Venetian art as he travels the world. Compelling. Poetry's expensive, though, isn't it?

[sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

i need to find a place to be spectacular
in this place i am too many things and
life easier when you singular.

[Elliot · Rating 4 out of 5]

Part long poem, part essay on race, Self-Portrait as Othello seems to have as its thesis: 'What Shakespeare did not write about. The story he was unable to tell'. But as with the most striking creative critical works, the revolution of ambiguity leaves this story open to infinitude. Allen-Paisant uses self-referencing ekphrasis to write both the self of the present, and the self of history, recounting experiences from Paris to Venice, dancing to slavery, all bound up in the figure of Othello, who is no longer the work of Shakespeare.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Finish: 01.04.2024
Title: Self-Portrait as Othello (35 poems)
Genre:  Poetry  (79 pg)   April 2024 #NationalPoetryMonth
Author: Jason Allen-Paisant
Rating: A+++


Conclusion
A life's journey in poems...starting with the
his humble beginnings in Jamacia,
his education at Oxford in England and École Supériure in Paris,
his travels to Prague, Berlin and Venice and
his homecoming  to Jamaica to bury his mother.
Portraiting himself as Othello
....Allen-Paisant considers the Black male body. 
Othello's intertwined identities as 'immigrant' and 'Black'
...speak to us in the landscape of twenty-first-century Europe.
Favorite quote: (pg 23):
"...the looks (of others) trying to find whitness in my blackness."

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

a damp room on the third floor
École normale supérieure
no sound in the hallway but in my blood
how sharply loneliness cuts the body

my woman walks o dirgefully beside me
O will always be a stranger here the thing is the bloody
thing is I didn't realize it didn't
realize that Black was a different language"

I often talk in my poetry reviews - using Anna Akmatova's 'Requiem' as an example - about the poet as witness. But I never talk enough about the poet as translator. Not as translator in the linguistic sense but in the sense of translator their experience. Perhaps it is the same thing as being a witness and I'm trying to be too clever. And perhaps it is patronising to ask a poet to help us understand an experience that we never can.

I'll never understand what it is like to be black in a white dominated world. A world where my representation is conditional and where my body is/was a product and that how that body is seen is affected by its representation in art and literature. Where my existence in the past is painted by people who colonised and exploited the bodies and lands of my ancestors. He talks about Veronese's 'Feast at the Home of Levi' and notes the presence of black people in the paintingL

All of a sudden, with Veronese's hedonistic canvas, one enters
a time without really entering it. The painting becomes a joke
on the viewer. A door to a chamber is shown without any
key whatsoever to access it. One's only consolation is to say,
I have seen that we were here, so normally here, in another time...

And where my existence in the future is conditioned on whether the person creating that literary future remembers that we exists. I remember being struck by something Whoopi Goldberg once said about seeing Uhura in Star Trek. It was the first time she'd seen someone like her in the future. And I'd never had to think about that because people like me were ALWAYS in the future. And it finished off any small doubts I might have had that representation matters.

Now, that makes this collection sound like that it 'just' about representation and identity, which it isn't. It is a large part of the collection, but there is also an emotional core there based around loss and absence. I should not that the collection is divided into three sections. The first section seems mostly about him. I should hesitate here because I'm making the dangerous assumption that the voice of the poems is the poet himself.

And all of that discussion about themes shouldn't hide the fact that this is beautiful poetry with memorable imagery. I particularly liked the idea of 'the shame fly' "droning jabbing at my temples" for example.

I absolutely recommend this. I wish I had the brains and time to write a better review explaining all the things this collection made me think about. But I don't. Read it. You'll thank me for it.

[Treegum · Rating 4 out of 5]

One of the bits of criticism that was thoroughly in my mind while reading ‘Self-Portrait as Othello’ was a line from T.S Eliot’s essay ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca’: “About anyone so great as Shakespeare, it is probable that we can never be right; and if we can never be right, it is better that we should from time to time change our ways of being wrong”. Ultimately, I found ‘Self-Portrait As Othello’ to be an amazing exploration of identity and a divided psyche, however, I was left slightly disappointed in Allen-Paisant's reinvention of Othello, as instead of really provoking new questions about Othello it seemed that Othello was more of a broad canvas on which Allen-Paisant communicates his fractured psyche.

Plot/Themes:

The narrative of this anthology has been compared to Telemachus’ Ithaca in the review for the T.S Eliot Prize for Poetry, as ‘epic’ in style. I think that the overall structure of the anthology is well constructed to be an ‘epic’ exploration of identity, where Allen-Paisant attempts to find an identity in Europe, conforming to an identity expected of those in France or the Czech Republic before overcoming and reacting against these expectations in poems such as ‘Punted Down The Cherwell’, where Allen-Paisant effectively gloats over the fact a white man is rowing him down a river:

Look at them teeth and how they white

As I sail down the river Cherwell

With a white man punting my punt



The ambiguity of simply describing the man’s teeth and not the reaction is just one of many interesting ambiguties of this anthology. Yet, after this victory, we see Allen-Paisant turn away from the grander questions of identity politics and back to his home of Jamaica, and to the personal subject of his mother’s death. I think that it provided a stark re-contextualisation of the poet’s obsession over identity.

Ekphrasis:

Perhaps the most pressing question for someone considering this anthology is Allen-Paisant's ekphratic experiment in portraying himself as Othello. According to him, Othello is limited by the perspective of the time, and as a result isn’t characterised to his full extent. To remedy this, Allen-Paisant does a masterful blend between his own psyche and that of Othello’s, giving him a background of being from “the River Gambia”. Allen-Paisant is able to emulate Othello’s psyche in a variety of ways, from repeating phrases of which he describes himself and his father, “bois d’ebene”, to emulating the obsessive repetition of phrases that is seen in Othello’s dialogue towards the play. Poems titled ‘Self-Portrait as Othello’ alternate between the author’s and Othello’s imagined background. In the place of an obsession over possession and honour is an obsession over identity. In this way, I wouldn’t say that the poem gave me a great re-interpretation of Othello, I didn’t find the interpretation of Desdemona being an exploiter of Othello particularly convincing, but instead enabled an incredibly potent exploration of identity. As well as this main ekphrasis of the poem, Allen-Paisant frequently has ekphratic elements in his poetry to find evidence of an African history in Europe. Such can be seen in ‘The Picture and the Frame’, where the invention of Veronese’s ‘Feast at the Home of Levi’ originally imagining The Last Supper in a European context mirrors the invention that Allen-Paisant is going to undertake.

In regards to Allen-Paisant's technical skill, the poems in this anthology have a remarkable variety, from controlled stanzas and metre with occasional rhyme to prose poetry that takes advantage of the white space of the page and to sonnets, I welcomed the range of form which often correlated with the emotional status of the speaker. I also thoroughly enjoyed the uncomfortable sibilance and general soundscape that was constructed in the first part of the anthology, almost bridging sexual taboo with the taboo of Allen-Paisant trying to move beyond his African heritage.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the experimental nature of this project, and in the wider sense of communicating isolation I think it is fantastic. Furthermore, I wasn't as impressed with Allen-Paisant's slightly pretentious goal of creating a ‘history of the black body’, inspired by books such as ‘A Map of the Door of No Return’, whereby he can come to absurd conclusions such as

“I knew the abscence

Of our fathers had to do



With the affliction of

Leaving



With that

Door of No Return”.

[Dominic H · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kehinde Wiley’s ‘Willem van Heythuysen’ portrait stands imperiously (or faux imperiously) on the cover of this collection which Allen-Paisant describes as ‘a poetic memoir…a lyric exploration of the dramas of migration and border crossings.’ The cover does appropriately set a tone for a volume which is alternately confident and doubting, angry and fearful. The unifying idea based around an exploration of the character and identities of Othello is a really fertile framework for Allen-Paisant’s considerable talent. The contrasts and variety, conflicting emotions, questions, are brilliantly explored from poem to poem.
For example:

...This is Othello’s life-
trying to beat the odds
And what is asked of him

To be more fair than black
If virtue no delighted
beauty lack

Is from ‘Othello Walks’. The very next poems ‘Self-Portrait as Othello II’ sees Allen-Paisant wondering

What does it mean to be more fair than black?
Education speech dress learning. You have the brawn
Of an intellectual rude boy sturdier in brain-work
than in war. Know streets and livity talk Shakespeare

Baudelaire Dante and Nietzsche talk sound system. What actually
is the language of where you’re from?

This type of beautiful and disquieting questioning is the core tone of the collection. It *is* lyric and as technical exercise generally dazzling. But it is also so expressively wraught with emotion that at times it is almost unbearable:

...and yourself
is two beautiful dark-skinned children
just innocently sitting on a bench waiting
not bothering anyone, just waiting &
you want to weep because they are so beautiful

This volume has haunted me ever since I have read (and reread) it. I am in awe of someone who can conjure so perfectly, so painfully. I wholeheartedly recommend this book.

[Conor]

I'm interested in how the three parts of this book interrelate. I struggled with the first: its sense of placelessness, of quick, persistent movement away and apart, was a captivating way to start, but the surfeit of European names and places, and the obscure connection to Othello the play and the character, meant the movement lacked momentum. The second was clearer and cooler. The poem about Allen-Paisant's anatomy was not just a sharp, challenging poem. It also felt like a clever microcosm of how the rest of the section, with its numerous spare attempts at self-portraits, make the author-narrator disintegrate rather than cohere.

The third and last was, for me, by far the strongest. Each poem was crystal clear, not at the expense of but in the service of rich, painful ambiguity. Maybe that's just the kind of poem I like, or fits neatly into what I think a poem should do. But another of its virtues, and something that improved my sense of the collection as a whole, is how those final delicate elegies continually and cumulatively accrue the debris of history and heritage scattered over the previous sections. That way, the theme of the loss of Allen-Paisant's mother, as well as his father, approaches (the play) Othello's investigations of race and self-ownership obliquely and really very poignantly. Slow to start but I look forward to more.

[S P · Rating 3 out of 5]

'Ringing Othello' (p13)

How could I resurrect you to speak,
when your burial is in no ground
that I can pilgrimage to, except that
I have been to Venice and known
you walking in that place, as if something
had been left undone. Presumptuous to think
that I could make you speak.
Who am I?

But I feel sometimes
that our destinies conjoin, that your life,
unfinished, is lived also through mine.
Your silence is a haunting, brothers are wanting,
people are waiting to hear. I conjure you
furiously.

**

from 'The Picture And the Frame' (p41)

Without any witness (writing, inscription, books, legends) tying that time to the present, all the stories have to be invented—reinvented [...] The intervening history of the representation of my body in text.

**

from 'Door of No Return' (p70)

I.

There is a first namelessness,
an absence of territory, of
land of water of rock;
the second is the haunting of the first.

I bear his name, meaning
stories without a body;
he disappeared before I was born.

Disappearing is part of our way in the world;
we understand this world through disappearance.

[Kelly Furniss · Rating 4 out of 5]

Self-Portrait as Othello is the second book that I have read by Allen-Paisant. After reading his other nature inspired book for my bookclub I was interested to see this award winning poet tackle other more personal issues.
In this book through interlinked poems we analyse the role of Othello and what he represents.
We imagine Othello in the urban landscapes of modern London, Paris and Venice and invent the kinds of narrative he might tell about his intersecting identities. Self-Portrait as Othello focuses on a character at once fictional and real, this is then played out alongside our poets insight into experiences of Black Britishness and the perceptions throughout history, art & literature.
The poems touch on a personal & emotional level, it's about identity, representation, questions, loss absence &vulnerability.
I enjoyed the experimental contrasting nature of this book, the intertwined identities as 'immigrant' and 'Black'. For a short book it's big, bold, powerful and captivating, many times I reread sentences to dissect the messages. It speaks to us in the landscape of twenty-first-century Europe and leaves you in awe and thought. .

[Shaza Abdalla · Rating 2 out of 5]

probably would’ve been good idea to read Othello first lol


This collection was cohesive and had a lot of good moments. I read the first poem in the bookstore and bought it on the spot. Unfortunately, the rest of the collection did not resonate with me consistently. I enjoyed parts 2&3 more than 1, mostly cause I haven’t been to Europe that much.

This gives me the impression that it’s a good book because it was good when I got the references. Unfortunately, I mostly didn’t. Still very moving at times. I might revisit it in a while, I feel like I’ll like it better.

It was also impressively cohesive and thematically consistent. Some of the structural stuff was a bit too experimental for me, though.

All in all, I just didn’t feel like I was the target audience. The writers perspective was so lucid and authentic and I just couldn’t connect with most of it.

[jptrgirl · Rating 5 out of 5]

SELF-PORTRAIT AS OTHELLO is the first anthology i’ve read from allen-paisant, and won’t be the last. a complex poetic insight into the role that othello not just plays, but has come to represent, alongside an insight into the poet’s Jamaican heritage, as well as how Black men are perceived throughout art, literature, history, and experience, allen-paisant paints a beautiful anthology, full of rich comparative metaphors and colloquialism. the anthology is set into three parts, each with a complex balance of essay fragments and poetry, and the warmth and beauty that emanates from each poem is outstanding. read in one sitting, and already cemented as one of my favourites - a truly brilliant piece of literature.

[Rol-J Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

As I traversed the pages of this collection, I couldn't help but think that Allen-Paisant's journey in Europe, as a young Black man, were very similar to my own. I couldn't help but relate to having to assert your own worth, while also being a spectator to prejudices affecting others, and feeling helpless. I couldn't help but relate to the family dynamics and the personal conflicts of defining home as a nomad. Allen-Paisant laid his life bare on these pages.
Overall, this was a brilliant collection. A little more esoteric than Thinking with Trees, but once you find your groove, you will realise its brilliance.

[Camille · Rating 5 out of 5]

Een speculatieve collectie van gedichten over een herbedachte Othello in een modern landschap. Een terugblik naar ons koloniaal verleden. In het hoofd van Jason Allen-Paisant kruipen.
mijn ergernis naar het nog steeds aanwezige ongemakkelijke racisme komt weer volop naar boven.
Een spel met taal dat super kwetsbaar en emotioneel was op bepaalde momenten en echt iets geraakt heeft bij mij. Lees het gewoon..

[Apina_lukee_kirjoja · Rating 4 out of 5]

Figuring out how you and your body fit into the world. What the presence of your body means to others (i.e. white patriarchy). Asserting your agency coming from a generational trauma of no agency. Who are you in the world, Othello?

[Courtney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. Impactful and amazingly written!

‘and nobody should be wrong to be/ so beautiful in this world/ & that beauty lies there knowing one day it will lift/ itself from their bodies/ like a question’.

[Tom Collingridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

About 6-8 great poems in here, which isn't a bad ROI for any poetry book

[Erica Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant, loved it. Big and broad and powerful and very personal. ❤️

[Rohan Wolsey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stone-cold banger.

[Muhammad Rajab Al-mukarrom · Rating 4 out of 5]

This poetry book just won TS Eliot Prize 2023 three days ago, and this morning I found his poems very interesting.

[Stephanie Dargusch Borders · Rating 4 out of 5]

A slim collection that’s shortlisted for the writer’s prize in poetry.