O

Judith Kiros’s O, translated from the Swedish by Kira Josefsson, is a rhizomatic rendering of Shakespeare’s Othello that defies the boundaries of genre, putting poems, lyrical prose, and literary criticism in conversation with each other. Kiros explores different aspects of the play through a contemporary lens, with a focus on racial and gender issues: 

In this play, a white man manipulates a black man, O, into murdering his wife. Later, O learns the extent of the white man’s treachery and responds by taking his own life. There is no other way out––he has become that which the white audience always suspected him to be. He has fulfilled his role. Curtain.

O challenges the notion of linearity both in its content and form. In her “Translator’s Note,” Josefsson explains:

Just as this book is not written with a center, it is not written for those subjects theoretically most comfortably positioned in the colonial center.

Although Othello is the connecting thread, the book includes other literary references, too:

FANON: “Look, a Negro!” FANON: “I came into the world filled with an urge to find meaning in things… 
and found that I was a thing among other things.” O wrote it; Shakespeare stole it.

Kiros’s language is playful and incisive, something the translator adeptly brings into focus,

her fair name 
was once as white 
as his idea 
of female virtue

The book abounds with reflective surfaces—mirrors, water, metal—and their kaleidoscopic effect underscores O’s capacity to shift and change throughout the book, while pushing against the limitations of fixed identities, 

O goes to stand in front of a mirror of polished bronze. He’s a
black woman. It’s simple math: if the colonized subject is a man,
he’s divided into two, but a black woman can shatter into at least
three parts. She’s a man, she’s a woman, she’s neither.