Self-Portrait as Othello

‘A son’s search for a father, an exploration of identity and a search for belonging’ – John Field reviews Jason Allen-Paisant’s ‘shimmering, dazzling’ Self-Portrait as Othello

Self-Portrait as Othello reads like an epic poem. It’s a son’s search for a father – for a male role model. It’s an exploration of identity and a search for belonging. It’s steeped in the Bible, the classics, in high and low culture. It fizzes with rhythm and rhyme at one moment and becomes introspective prose poetry in the next. The collection strobes with repetitions, like sunlight on water: nothing is moving, everything is moving; nothing changes, everything is changing.

The first of the book’s three sections feels like Telemachus’ Ithaca, evoking the security and stability of home and of family. The sequence begins in childhood: ‘I am five. I sit on the barbecue’ (the ‘Notes on the Text’ explain that, in Jamaica, a barbecue is a stone structure for drying coffee). However, it’s less about home than the long wait for an absent father. People fly past ‘like the whirlwind of a hurricane / but daddy was not in the wind’. Perhaps we’re in the Bible, in Kings 1:19, where Elijah, fleeing from Jezebel, takes refuge on Mount Horeb and waits for God to reveal himself. This suggests that, like Mount Horeb, the barbecue is just a place to wait and that, in the child’s mind, daddy is God. ‘Daddy’, that affectionate term, becomes loaded with pathos.

In ‘Self-Portrait as Othello I’, from the second section of the book, Allen-Paisant explores the limitations of the speaker’s language by collaging Shakespeare’s Othello. Iago, working to undermine Othello, is represented in sharp fragments as he warns Brabantio that ‘an old black ram is / tupping your white ewe’. How can Othello reply to this when, as the speaker notes, ‘The jealous white boy’s venom / was language’ [my emphasis]? Iago owns the message and the medium. Keith Hamilton Cobb’s play, American Moor (2020), offers a contemporary response to this scene, as it imagines an actor auditioning for the role of Othello. Cobb’s auditionee, like Othello, understands the requirement to self-censor – prejudice runs deeper than role and status. The auditionee breaks off to comment:

Shit, don’t I know it… in other words, ‘If I tell you mugs what’s really on my mind – sans the soft phrase of peace – y’all are gonna get your noses out of joint and say, “Oh oh! This n_____’s gettin’ all obstreperous n’shit.”’*

Othello being a valuable tool of the state counts for little. Iago’s is ‘the language / controlling the play’, Allen-Paisant’s speaker observes, understanding that ‘The very real thing / is that you should not be // too large in this space’. The page’s whiteness dominates and the distance between the lovers is stretched by a stanza break: ‘Venice aristocrat, // African soldier’.

Images and language ripple across the surface of this collection. In ‘The Picture and the Frame’, we are shown Carpaccio’s Miracle of the Relic of the Cross at the Rialto Bridge. In this painting from c.1494 there’s a black gondolier in the foreground, and another further back. African people have long been woven into the city’s DNA and ‘comfortably there’ too. The speaker concludes that ‘with ambiguity, I find myself stepping into a different history of representation. Ambiguity is a fucking revolution. It’s almost overwhelming.’ We revisit the scene in ‘Punted Down the Cherwell’, as the speaker finds himself ‘over the white man / in his own country’. The final stanza reverses the perspective of the Carpaccio painting as we see a white gondolier and his black passenger. ‘Look at them teeth how they white’. Are we looking at the punter? Are we seeing a smile? Let’s just enjoy the ambiguity… applied equally.

Towards the end of the collection, we meet the father in a sonnet. The son has mastered the pyrotechnic possibilities of the languages he speaks: ‘My father, I address you, as you crouch / in the dark corner.’ It’s the father who shrinks into the corner of the page. We’re back in the Bible too – in Lamentations – with the people of Israel weeping by the rivers of Babylon: ‘The Hebrews, we’re told, wept together / when they remembered Jerusalem, but how / does a multitude of orphans weep together / when each one speaks an alien tongue?’ Allen-Paisant’s speaker has gone a long way towards solving that problem by speaking in tongues, but the father remains silent.

Self-Portrait as Othello must be read and enjoyed as a whole. It’s a feast best consumed at one sitting. There’s a breathtaking simultaneity at work here and a review barely scratches the surface of its shimmering, dazzling beauty.

*Reference to Keith Hamilton Cobb’s American Moor taken from The Great White Bard, Farah Karim-Cooper (Oneworld, 2023, pp. 113–114).

Jason Allen-Paisant’s Self-Portrait as Othello (Carcanet Press, 2023) is shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize 2023. John Field blogs at Poor Rude Lines.