Jason Allen-Paisant's 'Self-Portrait as Othello'

Jason Allen-Paisant’s collection Self-Potrrait as Othello is in a four-century-long tradition of authors responding creatively to Shakespeare’s plays to tell their own stories. Sophie Duncan’s Looking for Juliet: The Lives and Deaths of Shakespeare’s First Tragic Heroine identifies some of these based on Romeo and Juliet, and a recent example in fiction is Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet. For Othello you could look at Toni Morrison’s play 2011 Desdemona.

Allen-Paisant’s collection takes many different angles to look at his own identity, and Othello’s. The collection definitely needs to be considered as a whole; while some individual poems could stand on their own, they are really designed to be part of that whole. There are so many voices, languages, dialects and forms here, creating in the end a kind of stained glass effect through which light often shines unexpectedly.

In the opening poem, ‘Ringing Othello’ the poet asks

Presumptuous to think
that I could make you speak.
Who am I?

He finds your silence is a haunting and so

I conjure you
furiously.

He needs to find out who he himself is before he can conjure his way into Othello’s life, efforts which are shown mostly in the middle section of the book.

The first is set in his earlier life in Jamaica and then there is his move to Europe (Paris, England, Prague, Venice). The poems directly about Othello include five ‘Self-Portraits’ (typically in the jagged nature of the collection, V comes before IV) and deal with his experiences as a Black man at the heart of white European culture, first addressed in the earlier ‘I’m Going to Paris at Last’.

The third section largely returns to Jamaica: he recalls his grandmother Mama’s death, and how his own mother did not ring him with the news. So a collection which starts with the poet thinking about ‘Ringing Othello’ concludes with the lack of a call, the lack of a voice. And in the affecting ‘To find Mama’s Voice’ he searches his Dropbox account and old devices for that precious sound:

I may have inadvertently
captured the sound
back when I didn’t think
her voice would be everywhere
and yet nowhere to be found.

In ‘The Last Time’ his image of her is at Sunday church wearing a cotton dress:

You’re wearing your yard slippers
Likewise I say nothing
Think of the breaking of the shell
we call self.

It is the fragile and uncertain self that Allen-Paisant is exploring in this book, and attempting to see whole and true. It is a challenging and thought-provoking self-portrait.