National poetry month demands some poetry reviews, and fortunately there’s no shortage of good poetry to engage with. Jason Allen-Paisant won last year’s T.S. Eliot Prize for his second collection, Self-Portrait As Othello. Allen-Paisant is originally from Jamaica, but also studied in Paris and earned his PhD in medieval literature at Oxford, and his familiarity with moving through these more rarefied, majority-white spaces in Europe prompts, in part, the identification with the figure of Othello that forms the center of this collection.
Self-Portrait As Othello really was the collection of last year, at least on the other side of the Atlantic and in terms of prizes: Allen-Paisant took both the Forward Prize for best collection and the T. S. Eliot prize. And one can see why: he juggles so much here, and does it so adroitly. Even just on the language front, you have Jamaican idiom (and touches of patois), various registers of English, as well as touches of Allen-Paisant’s fluency in French. His experiences studying in privileged, majority-white spaces in Europe made Othello a figure of renewed fascination for him, as someone who is often singular in those spaces in a lonely, radicalized way, and also as a Black man who marries a European woman (though Allen-Paisant’s wife is French, not Italian). The poems are fascinating not just as a glimpse into Allen-Paisant, however, but also in throwing fresh attention and nuance on the figure of Othello himself, a man whose singularity was bound to lead to insecurity, anxiety, and loneliness in ways that coalesce so tragically in Shakespeare’s play.
“…the very real thing
is that you should not have
too much, should not be
too large in this space.What is Iago but that—
the language controlling the play.” (from “Self-Portrait As Othello”)
For Allen-Paisant’s poetic speaker, too, the scrutiny, the complications of language can be exhausting. In the seminar class I am teaching, we read a novel by George Lamming and also his essay “The Negro Writer and His World,” where Lamming reflects (much like Du Bois before him) on how Black writers have not just a private world and a public world, but another dimension of the public world in which they are made aware of and navigate their race in response to the attention of others, and that there is an attendant weariness to always being a body before one gets to be a person or a mind. Allen-Paisant’s poems, like Lamming’s novel, set that to life in striking fashion.
“All I have is invention. All I could ever do is invent. I was tired of invention.
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There’s all the stuff that the European viewer can’t see, all the stuff they haven’t allowed themselves to see.
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The Moor remains invisible, despite the obsession with his body.” (from “The Picture and the Frame”)
This is a poetry collection that is perhaps to suited to everyone who is just entering the experience of reading poetry: it is difficult in places, and demands something of the reader, but it’s worth it. I’ve thought about it a lot since finishing it, and shared some of the poems with my students, too, who have also found it vivid and impressive. (Also, how good is that cover? What else would be appropriate but a Kehinde Wiley painting? Perfection.)