Review by Frank Plowright
The 21st century has seen a grim re-emergence from the shadows of the preposterous idea that some people are inherently superior to others due to skin pigmentation. It’s bolstered by poor leadership values, and in the USA by the idea that freedom of speech over-rides any accountability for what’s said, a process termed within My Beloved Other as weaponising cruelty. So what’s life like now for a biracial couple?
Nick Abadzis and Angela Watson have been partners for decades, first living in London and then in New York, and their personal experiences are interspersed with explanations of the cultural barriers shaping those experiences. It’s harrowing. Nick’s background is multi-cultural, but Angela’s is West Indian, and even without any noted occasions of them personally encountering violence, the sheer accumulation of incidents has to take a toll.
It’s most prevalent in Angela’s New York career progression. Good results running intensive family counselling to prevent criminal re-offending led to her being headhunted for another non-profit agency. Someone hired to give the impression of listening while a glass ceiling is maintained is a common employment ruse, but beyond the frustrations this example has the added element of racism. It generates an astonishing moment of insensitivity as a Zoom meeting concerning diversity is held during covid times, and a top tier manager logs in isolating on a luxury river boat.
Racism is discussed as historical precedent, taking in the British class system, personal experience from the 1960s onwards and Roberston’s Jam and their infamous Golly branding, which survived until 2001. The tone is anecdotal throughout, featuring lovingly told tales of parents and grandparents, with Abadzis varying the art to accommodate different eras and moods. The sample art pairs the style used on previous projects with a tidy all-ages comic pastiche, but also notable are techniques learned from a parallel career in corporate graphic recording, translating conversation into visual grammar. Will the world eventually communicate globally via emoji?
The episodic and personal nature, as well as artistic variety is important in softening a heartfelt topic that could otherwise degenerate into a rant appealing only to a small audience. There’s enough humanity here to ensure that shouldn’t happen, as charm and reason predominate. You’ll wish you’d been at one of Syl Watson’s early 1970s Caribbean dance shows or had the chance to chat with Pierre Abadzis about his peripatetic life.
Preaching to the converted is always a danger with politically divisive subjects, but at the end of the day this isn’t a grey area: racism is plain wrong. It’s wonderfully satirised at the end in a sequence of aliens visiting a destroyed and abandoned planet puzzled at self-invented rules increasing division and preventing focus on existential issues.
My Beloved Other is charming, amusing, intelligent, well reasoned and a repository of common sense produced by creators who’re humans, not statistical categorisations or cause for concern to people who it might be imagined have more important things in their lives to worry about.
