AE10. "Everybody wants a seat at the table, until..."
Brother Q (FKA Andray Domise), columnist at Maclean's, on Caribbean-Canadian politics, US "Great Man" history & Met Gala Marxism
Click above to listen to my hour-long with Andray; also, here’s Revolutionary Tracks, a series of conversations with anti-imperialist artists that I co-host on Left Flank Vets; and last, here’s Movie Night Extravaganza, another occasional co-hosting venture and now your go-to place for socialist takes on movies, Hollywood, and endemic Hollywood liberalism
“Everybody wants a seat at the table until they find out they’re on the menu”
Urged by a broken hard-drive to reconsider my priorities as a writer, I made a mental inventory of the data I had lost. My most recent “work” had been these conversations I had had with knowledgeable people of repute, including many I wanted to publish in places other than here. Given that the laptop that crashed was the device with which I first moved to the US six years ago, I needless to say lost all writing I did during this period, which boils down to three manuscripts including my MFA thesis, as well as enough nonstarter pieces for me not to remember half. A mix of contest and magazine submissions, stuff from notes apps, and an annoying habit of emailing my friends anything remotely decent that I produced has significantly cut down losses. The last time I permanently lost the contents of a hard drive, I literally was and figuratively felt like I was leaving behind a nation’s worth. This time, I find myself looking entirely forward, resolving to become even more laser-focused in deciding to which future efforts I’d like to dedicate storage space.
However, at the tail end of the two months it took for me to afford this new laptop on which I’m writing this post, I jumped up at the chance to talk to Brother Q (FKA Andray Domise)—columnist at Maclean’s and dialectical materialist analyst on Twitter—taping the interaction on a borrowed device. My first encounter with Andray was on friend and former Jacobin video producer Forrest Miller’s podcast Movie Night Extravaganza, where after trying to understand the specific character of revolution Bong Joon-Ho’s Snowpiercer allegorizes, Andray commended the South Korean filmmaker for achieving the rare feat of consistently bringing Marxist analysis into the cultural mainstream. Without drawing an equivalency, can one find a parallel in the work of a Panafricanist Socialist who has a platform on a Canadian national publication? While acknowledging the positives of being able to reach such an elite audience, Andray seemed to embody a fatigue with which my dread identified, as he talked about how his commentary output decreased the more radical his politics grew. It was disheartening to discover that with wisdom comes disillusionment not only with the system but also with the struggle itself, although on the other hand, I came out of my (post) dinner with Andray more clarified about the nature of the beast.
Consider the irony, then, in the fact that it was a celebrity politician’s sartorial choice at a high-dollar event that got us talking. I’ll say here that my position on aesthetics is consistent whether we’re talking art, activism or astrophysics—function precedes form by lightyears. However, in an electorate getting programmed into politicizing vapid stunts thanks to “news” shows that play political party press kits on repeat merely flipping the jingle on the clip from outraged to laudatory depending on which channel you’re on, does the revolutionary organizer have to care about who they’re wearing at the red carpet? No matter how I compute it, the net positive I see being gained from such an endeavor is the attention it receives, to which both Andray and computer-bereft me from last week seemed averse when it’s so willingly bestowed; engaging in acts straight out of the playbooks of Shark Tank and Global Citizen sit well with neither of our asses disillusioned with finance and NGO industrial complexes. That said, Andray sees how helplessly the electorate is tied to performative politics that builds little more than individual brand as just a continuation of US “Great Man History,” which sustains the “Judeo-Christian tradition (whatever it means),” of a culture built around individual hagiographies while repeatedly undermining collective struggles that form the brick and mortar of social change. Will an “American socialism” be any different?