![]() ![]() It was there, at 5.30am in the morning outside a nightclub, that he saw a woman so beautiful he felt he had to cross the road to introduce himself to her. In the book, he asks: “Why does offer up so easy a template for the shame produced in my body?” One poem ventriloquises a family gossiping about their white daughter’s relationship with a black man, just as Desdemona’s did about hers, as if to show how little has changed in four centuries: “they think / it’s going to pass this fascination with the dark-skinned boy surely / she’ll come around find someone of her kind when she is sated.” The last four words come straight from the play – they’re Iago’s.Īllen-Paisant fell in love with French at school, and moved to Paris for a post-graduate degree. ![]() “I was glad that this play existed, because I felt like he was giving me a glimpse into a world that’s not recorded in history books with any care or depth.” But, at the same time, Othello feels more like “a container for a certain set of ideas” than a three-dimensional character. “I felt – weirdly and eerily – how wonderful for Shakespeare to write a play where the protagonist was a dark-skinned foreigner!” He points out that we still see vestiges of Early Modern Moorish culture in Europe – the architecture of the Alhambra in Spain, those rings with “miniature heads of turbaned Moors in black marble” still popular with Venetian jewellers – but rarely read about their lives. It was at school that he first read Othello. He hasn’t lost that “superpower”: when he recited from Self-Portrait as Othello to a thousand people at the Royal Festival Hall on Sunday night, you could have heard a pin drop. “I loved words, words in my mouth, the feel of words coming out of my body.” Over a cup of tea, he suddenly launches into Walter de la Mare’s The Listeners (“‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller…”). If he read poems by Wordsworth or the Romantics aloud, he could hold the whole class’s attention. She grew up in the empire – she would sing these songs, and somehow they exerted a fascination.” He is, of course, aware of the irony of this, as anyone familiar with his work would realise.Īt school, he discovered recital was his “superpower”. Just the line ‘Rule, Britannia! Britannia rules the waves’ was a big thing for her, because that’s what she sang going to school. She would recite poems, Bible verses and song lyrics for him, “singing everything from the hymns to Rule, Britannia… I think those things nourish your imagination. But it’s funny how people can still love knowledge, and transmit that.” We certainly had the Bible, but it wasn’t a bookish house. Because of the people we were, in the kind of district I grew up with, we might have one letter – C – of the Encyclopedia Britannica on the bookshelf. It was his grandmother who kindled his love of poetry. He spent the rest of his childhood moving between his grandmother and mother’s homes. It’s sort of the black peasant restraint.” We bear, bear bear, we bear, we get along with it. ![]() People endure things and don’t talk about them. “In my milieu, in my family environment, people don’t talk about things… There is this odd kind of muteness. At the age of five, he was dropped off at the house of a woman who turned out to be his biological mother, without a word of explanation. His father had “never been in the picture”, so he was initially raised by his “Mama” – who he later learnt was actually his grandmother. Now a lecturer at the University of Manchester, Allen-Paisant grew up in rural Coffee Grove, Jamaica – “an unspoilt place,” he says. The story he was unable to tell”) with Allen-Paisant’s own life story, which takes him from a small Jamaican farm, via Paris, to Oxford, where he took a doctorate, dressing in tweed and doing his best to blend in with “the public school boys”. It weaves together an imaginative response to Othello (“What Shakespeare did not write about. His father’s absence runs through his second book Self-Portrait as Othello, which has now won both the UK’s major poetry awards, having picked up a Forward Prize last year. We sit down to talk on Tuesday, and as soon as our conversation is over he’s off to catch a flight to Ethiopia, to meet his estranged father for the very first time. It’s a momentous week for the 43-year-old poet and critic. After winning the richest award in British poetry on Monday – the £25,000 TS Eliot Prize – Jason Allen-Paisant couldn’t sleep for excitement, and found himself pacing the dark, freezing London streets, in “a confused vortex of emotions”. ![]()
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