HAUS FÜR POESIE

In his second poetry collection, Self-Portrait as Othello (Carcanet 2023), Jason Allen-Paisant explores the legacy of an imperialist past through the lens of the legendary stage figure, reflecting Othello’s life trajectories into the present and reshaping them into a poetic autobiography. In doing so, he focuses precisely on what official historiography and Shakespeare’s portrayal persistently conceal or deliberately overlook. At one point he writes: “What Shakespeare did not write about. The story he was unable to tell.” Poet Roger Robinson notes that the poems are not only concerned with the formation of a literary self, but also with a compelling narrative of the body and its visual history. Allen-Paisant’s language possesses great lyrical and analytical force: “Nothing makes sense until it makes sense in the body, till the body is present at the making-sense.” The work addresses both the fetishisation of a Black body and its simultaneous erasure: “The Moor remains invisible, despite the obsession with his body.” Allen-Paisant will read from Self-Portrait as Othello and present previously unpublished poems from his forthcoming collection Snow.

The Swedish poet Judith Kiros approaches the Othello complex in her acclaimed debut collection O in a similar spirit, though with different poetic means. It is a genre-defying book that draws on a wide range of modes: from elevated lyricism to dialogic passages to essayistic reflections that illuminate the “Othello” phenomenon from multiple angles. “Over the course of the play people are forced back into their bodies, again and again. This is what we call a tragedy. The stage is a black frame, then white, then splattered with blood,” she writes at one point, and later: “Race and sexuality appear as projections, playing over the players like dark light. Through other eyes, the white woman becomes impure; the Black man becomes the Moor.” Kiros artfully deconstructs Iago’s racist invectives about the “black ram” and the “white ewe,” and presents Stage, Singing and Swimming Lessons as well as Swedish lessons for immigrants. Writer John Keene has described Kiros’s unusual and highly effective method as “riffing on Shakespeare’s Othello and ranging across all manner of the poetic and critical.” Judith Kiros will read from O as well as from her most recent book.

The poems presented at the event were partly translated specifically for Poesiefestival Berlin.

Moderation Léonce W. Lupette

The event takes place in English.

Funded by: Swedish Arts Council