Self-Portrait as Othello
Through the figure of Othello, this collection layers migration, Black identity, the body, and theatrical self-portraiture. Voices moving across London, Paris, and Venice rise by moving between history and personal experience.
Work Information
Using Shakespeare's figure, it reconstructs modern migration and the experience of the Black body.
Self-Portrait as Othello rereads Shakespeare's Othello through the poet's own movement across contemporary Europe. Blending theatricality and introspection, it expands the tensions between historical prejudice and self-making in richly layered language.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Carcanet Poetry
- Published
- 2023-03-30
- Pages
- 80 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 21.5 x 0.9 x 13.4 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781800173101
- ISBN-10
- 1800173105
- Price
- 2926 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction
Shortlisted for the Writers' Prize 2024 Shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize 2024 Longlisted for the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature 2024 Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023 Winner of the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023 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.
Jason Allen-Paisant is a Jamaican writer and academic who works as a senior lecturer in Critical Theory and Creative Writing at the University of Manchester. He’s the author of two poetry collections, Thinking with Trees (Carcanet Press, 2021), winner of the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for poetry, and Self-Portrait as Othello (Carcanet Press, 2023). His non-fiction book, Scanning the Bush , will be published by Hutchinson Heinemann in 2024. Author photo by Jonathan Turner.
Reviews
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A stunning poetry collection about being Black, male and expatriate
I’ve seen and read quite a few perspicacious interpretations of Shakespeare’s Othello, but these meditations on what it means to be a man in a black male body in our times is the most resonant that I have read. Not just because of the superb skill and beauty of Jason Allen’s poetry but because it’s a portrait based on real experience, that I very much connect with, as Othello’s sister. Self- Portrait as Othello is a poetry collection that captivates with its great lyrical beauty and yet conversational tonality that makes its big themes feel intimate and everyday. It’s also a deeply moving poetic auto/biography that tells of journeys through disparate yet historically connected landscapes; England, France, Venice, the Jamaican countryside-- the restless, questing life of a Jamaican expatriate living at the many intersections of colonial histories and their aftermaths. Jason Allen allows us to walk with the main character as he criss-crosses many spaces between. Between memories of growing up with a nurturing grandmother and un-memories of an absent father. Between the seductions of success in the metropoles of the ex-colonial powers and his full awareness of how such success is false and danger. Between his love of words and sound that made him fall in love with the languages he loves, and his knowledge of the historical oppressions that brought those languages to his Jamaican door. Between love and distrust (including self-distrust) in the space where love comes to him. Between allowing himself to live in the power and passion of a single moment, and the haunting awareness of how his black male body is forever an object of suspicion, forever outsider in the very space where he is most immersed. One of the things I love about this book is that though it deals with these kinds of issues with raw, rare and beautiful honesty, there’s no victim syndrome here. The persona is not reduced to the either-or contradictions that the invention called race is always threatening to impose on Black people. He has a history and an inner and personal life that are not dependent on the race narrative imposed on his body. The home he left behind but never quite leaves is a place of trauma but also dignity and grounding. Everything that makes him rich as a person began there. Even long after we noticed that Shakespeare’s Othello’s trauma was not his jealousy (what did Othello have to be jealous about?), long after we realized it was about how race invented Man and Not-Man and Not-Quite-Man? in early modern Venice/England, we’ve hardly thought about the fact that Othello was his mother’s son, not his father’s, and that the handkerchief he carried like hope came from her. For this reason I read the parts about the persona’s grandmother in Self-Portrait as Othello, and the place she came from, over and over, and I am saying ‘yes, yes, yes’ and grateful. This collection is so rich. It's worth reading many times over.
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Disappointing.
I thought this was gigantically over-rated and a bit obvious.
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Delightful
Beautiful inspirational poems
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New poetry
with an interesting and clever take from a poet who is new to me
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Excellent
Eyeopening
Related Literary Awards
- Forward Prizes for Poetry Edition 32 (2023) ・Excellence Award
- T. S. Eliot Prize Edition 31 (2023) ・Winner