Y
ear of the Ox
by Andrew Brooks
ISBN: 9780645761689
Reviewed by DŽENANA VUCIC
Like all good communists, Andrew Brooks is an historical materialist as well. So much has been apparent across his work: his Dante-inflected exploration of solidarities in hell, Inferno (2021); the eclectic anthology-cum-study-guide Homework (2021), co-written with his longtime collaborator Astrid Lorange; and his work with Lorange publishing pamphlets and short books through Rosa Press and organising exhibitions and collaborative projects through Snack Syndicate. Though distinct, each of these projects is committed to a collectivist, anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, anti-racist vision of the world, a vision that depends on a keen awareness of material and economic conditions as primary social forces and indeed, as the primary drivers of social change. As Brooks notes in the preface to his latest collection: historical materialism ‘helps us understand how we might intervene in the world—it is a method oriented toward action’ (ix). The same can be said of the collection, Year of the Ox, which is poetry orienting itself, overtly, unambiguously, rousingly, toward revolutionary action: ‘the poem,’ after all, ‘is a maroon that births, and is birthed by, revolution’ (66).
The work is divided into two parts, ‘Year of the Ox’, and ‘Dream Gig’, with the former taking Brook’s Chinese zodiac animal, the ox, as a loose throughline, collating images and moments across ox years to chart ‘the movement of history’ (xi). The year of the ox is ‘the year of crisis’(23): it is the year of the massacre on the slave ship Zong; the year of Australian federation; the year of the first oil crisis; the year the Workplace Relations Act (1996) allowed union workers to be muscled out from the docks; the year that OPEC was born. Not every event Brooks points to happened in the year of the ox per se—Australia became a federation in January 1901 and OPEC went into effect in January 1961, both technically belonging to the year of the rat—and of course, crises happen every year, build on one another and accrue (federation may have been in 1901 but the colonisation of so-called Australia began in 1788, at the tail end of the year of the goat). Exactitude is not the point; it’s the shape of the thing that matters. In plotting the movement of oxen history, Brooks isn’t creating a timeline so much as a sprawling and idiosyncratic celestial map, a personal-political cosmology of interlacing constellations: capitalism and its handmaidens, colonialism and imperialism; systems of extraction and exploitation; latex and palm oil, margarine and coffee; the body and its desires; pop songs and philosophers and Vin Diesel’s Los Bandeleros (2009); figs, campari on ice, olive oil and ‘what is good / as narrated by his daughter Arvind Rosa’ (3). There is crisis, yes, but also: pleasure, friendship, solidarity, a choir of comrades; ‘there is no score but there is always / singing,’ (18).
History comes thick and fast. Brooks is didactic in spirit—he is a lecturer after all—even as he resists explication through form:
Despite what they say, core always learnt from periphery—
import security as a verb, export security as a noun. Too bad
perfect grammar is an illusion that generates its own enemies.
(31)
This isn’t propaganda, Brooks isn’t telling the reader what happened and what to think about it. Rather, at the line break, he invites us to learn alongside him ‘in between / the rows,’ where ‘the shape of a fragile / utopia’ can be understood ‘as the study of our enemies / and our pleasures’ (20). Caught dancing between Rosa Luxembourg and Janet Jackson, Brooks has an academic’s tendency to veer into the theoretical, sprinkling in quotes even as he misattributes them, all the while resisting the scholarly urge to indoctrinate in favour of lingering with the sweaty bodies and egg yolks passed mouth to mouth. There’s no need to lecture here; like Janet Jackson says, ‘the masses are in reality their own leader, dialectically creating their own development procedure’ (14). This isn’t propaganda, it’s an invitation to the classroom, to the commune: ‘Come in, it’s open’ (15, 17).
From this rootedness in the historical materialism of crisis and struggle, ‘Dream Gig’ arises like a surrealist dream of revolutionary action. The action in question is poeticised as the invented band Marxist Traitor Child, who take to the stage over and over again, either reinventing themselves or being reinvented by others under their name: grindcore band, cover band, amateur choir, collective scream. Here too, examples of revolutionary struggle are scattered between references to songs and movies, theorists and poets: the Bandung Conference and the Haitian Revolution sitting beside Mariah Carey’s ‘Emotions’ and Miley Cyrus’s ‘We Can’t Stop’, all of it held together by Marxist Traitor Child’s ungovernable set list. Over and over, Marxist Traitor Child takes to the stage, looking to history to make the kind of art that, per the Ann Boyer epigraph to this poem, can ‘make a new world’.
This is not to say that there is some kind of neat division between theory and praxis being expressed here. The order might suggest a logic of chronology (first theory, then praxis), but Brook’s doesn’t. He knows well that the two require each other: ‘a material imagination depends upon material actions; each extends the possibility of the other’ (ix). What is true is that theory alone won’t get you any closer to revolution since ‘you can study the choreographies we once found scrawled on the side of a petrol pump—Spain ’36, Algiers ’60, Watts ’65, Paris’ 68, Italy ’77, Brixton ’81, L.A. ’92, Cincy ’01, Redfern ’04, Cairo ’11, Ferguson ’14, Baltimore ’15, everywhere—but that doesn’t mean you’ll know how to dance’ (54). No, to dance you have to start moving. This is the dream Brooks offers us: begin on page one with the body—cold, fronting winter with its hungers and desires—and wake with a ‘noise that shakes the entire world out of police realism,’ a ‘shriek that promises the accumulation of affinities and pleasures and genders’, a ‘body made to move — in ecstasy and pain and tenderness and violence’ (67).
Brooks is not prescriptive about what this movement ought to be except that it must take history with it, and, ideally, there ought be singing. Marxist Traitor Child, for example, takes ‘The Internationale’ and makes it their own, makes Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth their own, remixes the ideas of leftist struggle to make something new of their own: ‘The wretched shall inherit the earth,’ Brooks declares, ‘if we only can begin to think the unthinkable,’ but the thinkable is not a bolt from the blue, it is ‘born of our rubble’ (56).
Brooks scatters this rubble, these unthinkables, along with their potential lines of flight—paths of thinking towards the unthinkable—throughout. On the subject of making things our own, for example: early in the collection, Brooks enumerates a list of culturally-loaded objects and in so doing throws into relief the disparity between rich and poor: ‘Take the spindly little arms of a fennel frond in flower, / so expensive so sweet,’ he writes, and ‘Take the stream of tiny bubbles / rushing to the surface… the alchemy of cultures eating sugars’ (21). These, we are asked to ‘take’—take as in consider, yes, but also: take as in expropriate, as in take back.
When he turns to the now, Brooks doesn’t delineate any particular struggle but gestures expansively towards contemporary polycrisis, and to what comes alongside it. He presses on so-called Australia’s colonial present to note: ‘We want to pay the rent, or rather, we want a total reworking of the definition of rent’ (57). To think the unthinkable here, Brooks has already given us an early clue: ‘It’s not about the house but the copied key … not about the number but the infinite divisibility’ (11). There’s enough to go round, so much is clear, if only we turned from colonial-capitalist forms of property relation and towards modes of communality. Here too, the question of expropriation is relevant.
Other unthinkables, Brooks gets to sideways and with a devastating bait-and-switch: what could have been, what we’ve settled for. At protests, one is permitted to speak but not if they say the unspeakable:
the magic words:
to the motherfucking sea.
Readers are primed — we know that ‘from the river’ comes before ‘to the sea’ and so on the next page, when ‘The new century kicks off with a Free’, we expect the enjambed line to read ‘Palestine’. Instead, Brooks gives ‘Trade Agreement’, a flick-knife underscore of the mathematics at play in questions of Palestinian statehood at the same time as it is a glimpse into an alternative reality: what movement might bring us. This is not a wild leap. Brooks, like Marxist Traitor Child, insists on ‘a coherence… that can sustain what hasn’t been written yet’, because ‘What is a line break if not a space for just this kind of intimate cohabitation?’ (55).
This is searing, fervent poetry. A poetry of and for the protest, the union meeting, the Paris Commune, the October Revolution, and the Bandung Conference. It is a poetry of togetherness and communal struggle, a poetry of ‘we against us’ (67), which is also a poetry that knows ‘the condition of possibility is our own impossibility,’ (56), that demands that we remember we are not merely subject to history but indeed, the subjects of history.
DŽENANA VUCIC is a Bosnian-Australian writer, editor and critic based in Berlin. Their work has been published in Australian Book Review, Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite, Meanjin, Overland and Sydney Review of Books, among others. Their debut collection, after war, is out now.