Self-Portrait as Othello

Jason Allen-Paisant

From Shelf: T.S Eliot Poetry Prize shortlist 2023

This second collection from the 2022 OCM Bocas Poetry Prize winner re-imagines Shakespeare's Othello for the modern age, intertwining the identities of 'immigrant' and 'Black'.

Shortlisted for the Writers' Prize 2024. Longlisted 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.