André Dao



Introduction to Andrew Brooks’s Year of the Ox

‘History,’ writes Walter Benjamin, ‘decays into images, not into stories’. And what is the image? It is ‘that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation’. Andrew Brooks’s Year of the Ox is a constellation of images in precisely this Benjaminian sense: it charts the movement of history, not with the logic of linear progress but the dialectic of historical materialism.

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A Book Which Is No Longer Discussed Today

To get to my grandfather’s bookshelf we first had to remove the strata of life-giving impedimenta that had built up over the last twenty years: oxygen tanks, IV drips, a hospital-style care bed; a certified, handmade icon of Mary and the infant Jesus, a Mary-shaped bottle of Lourdes miracle water, and another icon of Mary and child – Vietnamised now, with black hair and dark, almond-shaped eyes, dressed in the traditional silk robes of pre-colonial, independent Vietnam.

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