Lucy Knight (The Guardian) writes, “He grew up in Jamaica, thinking his grandmother was his mother, learning how to read from a blackboard on her veranda. What does Jason Allen-Paisant plan to do now? Fly to Ethiopia to meet his father for the first time.” [Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to our attention.]
‘Let’s see what the adjectives are,” says Jason Allen-Paisant – as if to make it even more obvious that he is a poet – when I ask how he’s feeling the morning after winning the TS Eliot prize for poetry. “Great. Overwhelmed. Ecstatic. Privileged.”
Although you wouldn’t know it from his warmth and attentiveness, he is also very tired. The 43-year-old writer and academic couldn’t sleep properly after the ceremony and ended up taking a walk through London in the early hours of the morning. “It’s not that I wasn’t expecting to win,” he explains. He knows his victorious work, Self-Portrait as Othello, is a “strong book” – it had already won the Forward prize for best collection and is on the shortlist for the Writers’ prize (previously known as the Rathbones Folio prize). But “it’s mad”, he says, to be named the winner from a shortlist that included “at least two” poets whose work Allen-Paisant has taught to his students at Manchester university, where he is a senior lecturer in critical theory and creative writing.
Described by its publisher Carcanet as a “poetic memoir and ekphrastic experiment”, Self-Portrait as Othello imagines the backstory of Shakespeare’s character, exploring his experiences of immigration and Blackness via the poet’s own life. Allen-Paisant thinks one of the reasons it resonated with readers and prize judges is because “it balances several interesting questions”, exploring “masculinity, Black masculinity, and how that intersects with vulnerability. Which is not a conversation that’s had enough.”
Othello is also “in”, he informs me, citing productions last year at the Lyric Hammersmith and Riverside Studios in London. He, just like these productions, wanted to ask questions about the character that are not addressed in the play. (One poem in Self-Portrait as Othello is titled “What Shakespeare did not write about”.)
“It’s too easy to think that he just becomes demented,” says Allen-Paisant. “Is there some cultural baggage he’s carrying? Is there something in his background?” The poet also wanted to explore the identities that he and Othello share as men of colour, as immigrants. Allen-Paisant grew up in Manchester in Jamaica, born to a mother who was studying to be a teacher and a father who left before he was born. He lived with his grandparents, yam farmers, during his early years, in a small village called Coffee Grove which he describes in the collection as being “where hope is like the dry root of a red dirt rockstone”. [. . .]
This was when he remembers realising that his grandmother, who appears as “Mama” in his poems, wasn’t actually his mother. “It was actually a real trauma,” he says. His grandmother dropped him off at his mother’s house in what he believed to be just a visit. Then, while he was in he toilet, she left without saying goodbye.
Although she didn’t get much education herself, his grandmother made sure her daughter and grandson did. She was the one who taught Allen-Paisant to read “on her veranda with the blackboard”. She told him: “You gotta read your books! Take them books seriously.” Which, of course, he did, completing a degree at University of the West Indies in Kingston, then travelling to Montreal for the first year of his PhD in medieval and modern languages, before gaining a scholarship to complete his doctorate at Oxford, with a year abroad at the École normale supérieure in Paris. He had been writing poetry since he was an undergraduate, but at Oxford “something shifted and I started doing it seriously”. [. . .]
For full interview article, see https://www.theguardian.com/books/2024/jan/16/ts-eliot-poetry-prize-winner-jason-allen-paisant-interview
For a video of a reading, “Jamaican poet Jason Allen-Paisant reads from winning collection,” see BBC, at
https://www.bbc.com/news/av/entertainment-arts-67989379
Self-Portrait as Othello by Jason Allen-Paisant (Carcanet Press Ltd, £12.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com.
[Photo above by Sarah Lee/The Guardian: What Shakespeare missed … Allen-Paisant won for Self-Portrait as Othello, which imagines the character’s backstory.]
Lucy Knight (The Guardian) writes, “He grew up in Jamaica, thinking his grandmother was his mother, learning how to read from a blackboard on her veranda. What does Jason Allen-Paisant plan to do now? Fly to Ethiopia to meet his father for the first time.” [Many thanks to Peter Jordens for bringing this item to
