Self-Portrait As Othello
Jason Allen-Paisant
The second collection from Allen-Paisant reimagines Othello in the urban landscapes of today’s European cities, including London, Paris and Venice, querying how an early 17th century spatial and visual vocabulary about the dark-skinned male foreigner might speak to us today, and what responses we might have to it.
Portraying himself as Othello, a figure that is at once fictional and mythical, provides the poet with a defamiliarising lens through which to consider the issue of the Black male body, its presence, its transgressiveness and its vulnerabilities.
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. His first poetry collection Thinking with Trees (Carcanet Press, 2021) won the 2022 OCM Bocas Prize for poetry; his non-fiction book, Scanning the Bush will be published in 2024.
At what age did you know you wanted to become a writer?
I was thirty and had arrived at Oxford for the first year of my DPhil. It was in that experience that I realised that, whatever else I might do, I had to write.
What was your favourite childhood book?
Jamaica Labrish by Louise Bennett is the only book I remember reading effortlessly as a child. I was never a bookish kid, even if I loved words; as a teenager, I studied words out of the dictionary! The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas is the first book I definitely wanted to get to the end of (I read it in French). Then, because my best friend was really into The Hardy Boys, I started reading them and got hooked.
Which is your favourite book of recent years?
Pleasantview by Celeste Mohammed.
What three books would you take to your Desert Island?
I’d still be dreaming and writing while stranded, so here are the three I’d carry: The Collected Works of Aimé Césaire, Collected Poems by Lorna Goodison, The Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke.
What is your ‘if you don’t like this, you can’t be my friend’ book?
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.
Who or what have been your most important influences?
Aimé Césaire, Louise Bennett, Anthony McNeill, Léon-Gontran Damas
Which of the other shortlisted titles are you most excited to read?
Laura Cumming’s Thunderclap and Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger.
If you weren’t a writer, what would you be doing?
Probably being a herbalist.
