Arundhati Roy on Fiction in the Face of Rising Fascism

https://truthout.org/video/arundhati-roy-on-fiction-in-the-face-of-rising-fascism/

Interview 
Politics & Elections  

Arundhati Roy on Fiction in the Face of Rising Fascism
by Laura Flanders
December 31, 2018
Truthout

VIDEO: https://youtu.be/opeXClLEdcs

ARUNDHATI ROY

(b. November 24, 1961)

“How to tell a shattered story by slowly becoming everybody. No, by slowly becoming everything.” That’s the line that stuck with me from The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, the latest book by one of our favorite guests, Arundhati Roy. Roy’s strength as a writer — and what she does that so many of us struggle to do — is weave many stories into one fabric, without diluting the integrity of those stories. I’ve spoken to her often about her writing on capitalism, nationalism, solidarity and resistance. In this conversation we’ll talk about all those things again, and visit her new novel against the backdrop of anti-Muslim violence and landmark changes for queer people in her home country of India.

Laura Flanders: You dedicate your book The Ministry of Utmost Happiness to the unconsoled, and I believe that we are unconsoled in this moment. But I do worry that we in the United States, as you’ve alluded, become inured, become maybe muddied in our seeing, in our thinking, because there’s so much coming at us at all times. Insofar as you have a take on what’s happening here, where do you think we are? And then obviously I want you to talk about home and where India is, because India we barely see at all.

The thing is, people spend so much time mocking Trump or waiting for him to be impeached. And the danger with that kind of obsession with a single person is that you don’t see the system that produced him. You don’t see that, obviously, there was something about those eight years of Obama’s presidency that created Trump and if we just keep obsessing about this one person without seeing what would happen … what would happen if he wasn’t there tomorrow and Mike Pence came? Would it be better? You know? The kind of havoc that has been created in the world when I think about it now, between Europe and America increasingly, the simple truth is that these economies can only function by selling the weapons that they manufacture. Weapons which you cannot even imagine that the human mind can conceive of and they are doing the selling and we’re doing the buying.

To keep that economy going, you need a world at war, or almost at war, or just about to go to war, whatever it is. Forget the past, but just look at it from 9/11 onwards. How many countries have been destroyed? Europe is now in chaos also because of the refugees and so on. But what is creating it? How is it possible to continuously believe that you can destabilize country after country after country and anything good is going to come of it?

Is India destabilizing or stabilizing in a scary way?

India, it’s hard to say. This year’s going to be very important here.

How so?

Because the elections are coming next May and we’ve had a situation where somehow, since 1925, the goal of the Hindu nationalists was achieved in 2014 when Modi came to power with this absolute majority. In a way I was grateful for the absolute majority because there wasn’t anyone else to blame. There isn’t anyone else to blame for the chaos that has been unleashed. But what is very worrying is that, again, I keep saying you have to look and we have to find ways of keeping up our understanding of what’s going on. Two years ago Modi appeared on TV at 10 o’clock at night and announced that 80 percent of Indian currency was illegal from the next morning. That was like taking a baseball bat and breaking every single citizen’s spine.

They called it “demonetization.”

That’s right. We don’t even have a word in any Indian language for it. But then when you do that, regardless of the economic implications, what you’re doing is you’re sending a message saying, “I can control you at all points, every single one of you.” Now there’s another huge thing which they are trying to bring into legislation called the Aadhaar card where every citizen’s private information, biometrics, all of it is going to be put on a unique identity card. Now, as you know, these databases are being hacked. People’s private information is being bought and sold. Information is gold now. That is a form of surveillance and control that is there forever. Once they’ve got it there, you can’t undo it.

So, these are things which are impossible to wrap your head around. You have the whole new media now. For example, I’m not even talking about Facebook, I’m not even talking about Twitter. I’m talking about a messaging service called WhatsApp, which is very, very big in India. And at one point all of us used to use it because it’s encrypted and the information [is] not available to the authorities. But now you have these kind of WhatsApp farms where fake news, fake videos, and videos that are meant to create communal conflagration are deliberately being sent around. So you have a situation where the only way now that Modi is going to win the election again, is to create massive communal strife between Hindus and Muslims, and so on. Or what they call a limited war with Pakistan, as you know, both are now nuclear neighbors. But the systematic sort of administering of hatred, a manifesto of hatred, is the basis of these people.

We wonder about that here in the US, too. Once that hatred has been unleashed, is the individual required, if Modi doesn’t get elected or doesn’t get an absolute majority in 2019…? Is that the end of it? I mean, there was an eight-year-old girl kidnapped, raped, and murdered, Asifa Bano, recently. We can talk about who did it, et cetera, but what killed her? How do you reel that back?

The thing is that there are so many different kinds of rape, right? You might have a group of … [rapists who kill] a child, but do they then have huge processions [of] people supporting them? Do they have demands that they be released or that the investigation doesn’t continue or that the investigation is handed over to people whom the majority community “trust”?

As happened in this case.

Yes, as happened in this case, but it keeps happening. I mean, there was another person who was arrested for raping, a sort of god man. There were massive protests in his favor. There’s another god man called Asaram Bapu. He was convicted of rape. There had to be security alerts in three states because it was now a question of people supporting him. You see? It’s not just that one community rapes and the other doesn’t. It isn’t that. I’m talking about the public support that comes out. And then there’s sort of [a] ritualistic, almost satanic element to it. It isn’t just rape and kill, but there’s something so terrible about it that you wonder, what is it? What is it? And you read it. I mean she’s one child, but it’s happening all over now. And sometimes I wonder, is this something that requires the sacrifice of the most beautiful thing, which is a little girl? Is there something more to it than just carnal lust and brutality?

Is there? How do you see it?

I don’t know. Because we are living in this world of feudalism and all kinds of strange beliefs. I don’t know. I mean, I really don’t know. I don’t know how to think about it. None of us know. We are all unable to understand how things have come to this.

Except you are able to talk about it because this entire book is you talking about it.

True. It’s me thinking about it, mourning about it, and then finding how much beauty still does exist in the saddest places. How much strength and power still exists. I have in the last 20 years spent time in what people would consider to be the darkest and most hopeless places, but they have not been dark and hopeless. There are people struggling against it, fighting against it, speaking against it. And I don’t mean in a shallow sort of sloganeering way, but as a way of life. As a deep, dense understanding with poetry and music. Each of these things has such a deep history. The poets that ordinary people in the book recite, love, and whose shrines they go to, to lay flowers. You look at the power of that. People don’t forget their poets, however much violence is done.

Is that what brought you back to fiction?

What brought me back to fiction was just that I had become, as I keep saying, like a sedimentary rock. I have these layers and layers of looking at things. In non-fiction, I have argued, I’ve fought, I’ve driven myself, and other people, crazy. But the complexity of it — the humor, the love, the maverick-ness, the poetry — all of that was accumulating too. I’ve been writing it for 10 years. I was not interested in writing just about one particular class. Just this whole ocean of languages, beliefs, religions, intimacies and anarchies. The fact is that we are facing majoritarianism, which is actually bordering on fascism — not European fascism, our own variety of it. Yet India is a land of minorities. A land whose people are divided formally into castes, religions and ethnicities. People look at India and think it’s … archaic, but society lives in a grid. This book is about people who somehow are off grid and through that off grid-ness, you shine the light on the grid and you look at it, wonder about it.

Maybe we put our hope in the wrong places. Are we wrong to put our hope in democracy, elections?

Well, right now at this point in time, I am not one, though I have been one of those people who has all this time said how little difference there is between the various political parties. But today in India, we are facing a situation where if the BJP comes back in 2019, I don’t think there’s going to be anything left of what we thought of. With all its flaws, it’s not that you’ll be voting for a friend, but just for the enemy that you want to have. So I don’t think we can afford to leave any spaces unchallenged and unfought, including the elections. But if all of us think that by defeating Modi or by impeaching Trump things are going to be OK, we got to have some extra iodine every night.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR AND INTERVIEW SUBJECT: 

Suzanna Arundhati Roy (born 24 November 1961) is an Indian author best known for her novel The God of Small Things (1997), which won the Man Booker Prize for Fiction in 1997 and became the biggest-selling book by a non-expatriate Indian author. She is also a political activist involved in human rights and environmental causes. She has written seventeen critically acclaimed books.

Bibliography: Arundhati Roy

Fiction:

The God of Small Things. Flamingo, 1997. ISBN 0-00-655068-1
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. Hamish Hamilton, 2017. ISBN 0-24-130397-4

Non-fiction:

The End of Imagination. Kottayam: D.C. Books, 1998. ISBN 81-7130-867-8
The Cost of Living. Flamingo, 1999. ISBN 0-375-75614-0
The Greater Common Good. Bombay: India Book Distributor, 1999. ISBN 81-7310-121-3
The Algebra of Infinite Justice. Flamingo, 2002. ISBN 0-00-714949-2
Power Politics. Cambridge: South End Press, 2002. ISBN 0-89608-668-2
War Talk. Cambridge: South End Press, 2003. ISBN 0-89608-724-7
An Ordinary Person's Guide To Empire. Consortium, 2004. ISBN 0-89608-727-1
Public Power in the Age of Empire. New York: Seven Stories Press. 2004. ISBN 9781583226827.
The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile: Conversations with Arundhati Roy. Interviews by David Barsamian. Cambridge: South End Press, 2004. ISBN 0-89608-710-7
The Shape of the Beast: Conversations with Arundhati Roy. New Delhi: Penguin, 2008. ISBN 978-0-670-08207-0
Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy. New Delhi: Penguin, 2010. ISBN 978-0-670-08379-4
Broken Republic: Three Essays. New Delhi: Hamish Hamilton, 2011. ISBN 978-0-670-08569-9
Walking with the Comrades. New Delhi: Penguin, 2011. ISBN 978-0-670-08553-8
Kashmir: The Case for Freedom. Verso, 2011. ISBN 1-844-67735-4
The Hanging of Afzal Guru and the Strange Case of the Attack on the Indian Parliament. New Delhi: Penguin. 2013. ISBN 978-0143420750.
Capitalism: A Ghost Story. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014. ISBN 978-1-60846-385-5[94]
Things that Can and Cannot Be Said: Essays and Conversations (with John Cusack). Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016. ISBN 978-1-608-46717-4
The Doctor and the Saint: Caste, Race, and Annihilation of Caste, the Debate Between B.R. Ambedkar and M.K. Gandhi. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017. ISBN 978-1-608-46797-6

ABOUT THE INTERVIEWER:

Best-selling author and broadcaster, Laura Flanders interviews forward thinking people from the worlds of politics, business, culture and social movements on her internationally syndicated TV program, 'The Laura Flanders Show.' It airs weekly on KCET/LinkTV, FreeSpeech TV, and in English and Spanish in teleSUR. Flanders is also a contributing writer to The Nation and YES! Magazine ('Commonomics') and a regular guest on MSNBC. She is the author of six books, including The New York Times best-seller, BUSHWOMEN: Tales of a Cynical Species (Verso, 2004) and Blue GRIT: True Democrats Take Back Politics from the Politicians (Penguin Press, 2007). 'The Laura Flanders Show' first aired on Air America Radio from 2004 to 2008. Follow her on Twitter: @GRITlaura.

 

Arundhati Roy On the Occupy Wall Street Movement and the Renewed Fight for a New Political Imagination and Language

Arundhati Roy, speaking at a Harvard conference in April, 2010. (Photo: jeanbaptisteparis)

http://www.truth-out.org/arundhati-roy-people-who-created-crisis-will-not-be-ones-come-solution/1322765555

All,

Arundhati Roy is one of the most important, creatively dynamic, and consistently courageous public intellectuals, writers, and radical activists of our time in the world and a major personal political and intellectual hero of mine. Roy never fails to address in a very lucid, eloquent, and independent manner the major concerns, issues, and crises facing our planet today and she is a tireless and relentless force in the global struggle to defeat the contemporary ravages of capitalism, racism, sexism, and imperialism. She is also one of the finest WRITERS--period--of the late 20th/early 21st centuries...

Kofi


Arundhati Roy: "The People Who Created the Crisis Will Not Be the Ones That Come Up With a Solution"
Wednesday 30 November 2011
by Arun Gupta
The Guardian UK | Op-Ed

The prize-winning author of The God of Small Things talks about why she is drawn to the Occupy movement and the need to reclaim language and meaning.

Sitting in a car parked at a gas station on the outskirts of Houston, Texas, my colleague Michelle holds an audio recorder to my cellphone. At the other end of the line is Arundhati Roy, author of the Booker Prize-winning The God of Small Things, who is some 2,000 miles away, driving to Boston.

"This is uniquely American," I remark to Roy about interviewing her while both in cars but thousands of miles apart. Having driven some 7,000 miles and visited 23 cities (and counting) in reporting on the Occupy movement, it's become apparent that the US is essentially an oil-based economy in which we shuttle goods we no longer make around a continental land mass, creating poverty-level dead-end jobs in the service sector.

This is the secret behind the Occupy Wall Street movement that Roy visited before the police crackdowns started. Sure, ending pervasive corporate control of the political system is on the lips of almost every occupier we meet. But this is nothing new. What's different is most Americans now live in poverty, on the edge, or fear a descent into the abyss. It's why a majority (at least of those who have an opinion) still support Occupy Wall Street even after weeks of disinformation and repression.

In this exclusive interview for the Guardian, Roy offers her thoughts on Occupy Wall Street, the role of the imagination, reclaiming language, and what is next for a movement that has reshaped America's political discourse and seized the world's attention.

AG: Why did you want to visit Occupy Wall Street and what are your impressions of it?

AR: How could I not want to visit? Given what I've been doing for so many years, it seems to me, intellectually and theoretically, quite predictable this was going to happen here at some point. But still I cannot deny myself the surprise and delight that it has happened. And I wanted to, obviously, see for myself the extent and size and texture and nature of it. So the first time I went there, because all those tents were up, it seemed more like a squat than a protest to me, but it began to reveal itself in a while. Some people were holding the ground and it was the hub for other people to organise, to think through things. As I said when I spoke at the People's University, it seems to me to be introducing a new political language into the United States, a language that would be considered blasphemous only a while ago.

AG: Do you think that the Occupy movement should be defined by occupying one particular space or by occupying spaces?

AR: I don't think the whole protest is only about occupying physical territory, but about reigniting a new political imagination. I don't think the state will allow people to occupy a particular space unless it feels that allowing that will end up in a kind of complacency, and the effectiveness and urgency of the protest will be lost. The fact that in New York and other places where people are being beaten and evicted suggests nervousness and confusion in the ruling establishment. I think the movement will, or at least should, become a protean movement of ideas, as well as action, where the element of surprise remains with the protesters. We need to preserve the element of an intellectual ambush and a physical manifestation that takes the government and the police by surprise. It has to keep re-imagining itself, because holding territory may not be something the movement will be allowed to do in a state as powerful and violent as the United States.

AG: At the same, occupying public spaces did capture the public imagination. Why do you think that is?

AR: I think you had a whole subcutaneous discontent that these movements suddenly began to epitomise. The Occupy movement found places where people who were feeling that anger could come and share it – and that is, as we all know, extremely important in any political movement. The Occupy sites became a way you could gauge the levels of anger and discontent.

AG: You mentioned that they are under attack. Dozens of occupations have been shut down, evicted, at least temporarily, in the last week. What do you see as the next phase for this movement?

AR: I don't know whether I'm qualified to answer that, because I'm not somebody who spends a lot of time here in the United States, but I suspect that it will keep reassembling in different ways and the anger created by the repression will, in fact, expand the movement. But eventually, the greater danger to the movement is that it may dovetail into the presidential election campaign that's coming up. I've seen that happen before in the antiwar movement here, and I see it happening all the time in India. Eventually, all the energy goes into trying to campaign for the "better guy", in this case Barack Obama, who's actually expanding wars all over the world. Election campaigns seem to siphon away political anger and even basic political intelligence into this great vaudeville, after which we all end up in exactly the same place.

AG: Your essays, such as "The Greater Common Good" and "Walking with the Comrades", concern corporations, the military and state violently occupying other people's lands in India. How do those occupations and resistances relate to the Occupy Wall Street movement?

AR: I hope that that the people in the Occupy movement are politically aware enough to know that their being excluded from the obscene amassing of wealth of US corporations is part of the same system of the exclusion and war that is being waged by these corporations in places like India, Africa and the Middle East. Ever since the Great Depression, we know that one of the key ways in which the US economy has stimulated growth is by manufacturing weapons and exporting war to other countries. So, whether this movement is a movement for justice for the excluded in the United States, or whether it is a movement against an international system of global finance that is manufacturing levels of hunger and poverty on an unimaginable scale, remains to be seen.

AG: You've written about the need for a different imagination than that of capitalism. Can you talk about that?

AR: We often confuse or loosely use the ideas of crony capitalism or neoliberalism to actually avoid using the word "capitalism", but once you've actually seen, let's say, what's happening in India and the United States – that this model of US economics packaged in a carton that says "democracy" is being forced on countries all over the world, militarily if necessary, has in the United States itself resulted in 400 of the richest people owning wealth equivalent [to that] of half of the population. Thousands are losing their jobs and homes, while corporations are being bailed out with billions of dollars.

In India, 100 of the richest people own assets worth 25% of the gross domestic product. There's something terribly wrong. No individual and no corporation should be allowed to amass that kind of unlimited wealth, including bestselling writers like myself, who are showered with royalties. Money need not be our only reward. Corporations that are turning over these huge profits can own everything: the media, the universities, the mines, the weapons industry, insurance hospitals, drug companies, non-governmental organisations. They can buy judges, journalists, politicians, publishing houses, television stations, bookshops and even activists. This kind of monopoly, this cross-ownership of businesses, has to stop.

The whole privatisation of health and education, of natural resources and essential infrastructure – all of this is so twisted and so antithetical to anything that would place the interests of human beings or the environment at the center of what ought to be a government concern – should stop. The amassing of unfettered wealth of individuals and corporations should stop. The inheritance of rich people's wealth by their children should stop. The expropriators should have their wealth expropriated and redistributed.

AG: What would the different imagination look like?

AR: The home minister of India has said that he wants 70% of the Indian population in the cities, which means moving something like 500 million people off their land. That cannot be done without India turning into a military state. But in the forests of central India and in many, many rural areas, a huge battle is being waged. Millions of people are being driven off their lands by mining companies, by dams, by infrastructure companies, and a huge battle is being waged. These are not people who have been co-opted into consumer culture, into the western notions of civilisation and progress. They are fighting for their lands and their livelihoods, refusing to be looted so that someone somewhere far away may "progress" at their cost.

India has millions of internally displaced people. And now, they are putting their bodies on the line and fighting back. They are being killed and imprisoned in their thousands. Theirs is a battle of the imagination, a battle for the redefinition of the meaning of civilisation, of the meaning of happiness, of the meaning of fulfilment. And this battle demands that the world see that, at some stage, as the water tables are dropping and the minerals that remain in the mountains are being taken out, we are going to confront a crisis from which we cannot return. The people who created the crisis in the first place will not be the ones that come up with a solution.

That is why we must pay close attention to those with another imagination: an imagination outside of capitalism, as well as communism. We will soon have to admit that those people, like the millions of indigenous people fighting to prevent the takeover of their lands and the destruction of their environment – the people who still know the secrets of sustainable living – are not relics of the past, but the guides to our future.

AG: In the United States, as I'm sure you're aware, political discourse is obsessed with the middle class, but the Occupy movement has made the poor and homeless visible for the first time in decades in the public discourse. Could you comment on that?

AR: It's so much a reversal of what you see in India. In India, the poverty is so vast that the state cannot control it. It can beat people, but it can't prevent the poor from flooding the roads, the cities, the parks and railway station platforms. Whereas, here, the poor have been invisibilised, because obviously this model of success that has been held out to the world must not show the poor, it must not show the condition of black people. It can only the successful ones, basketball players, musicians, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell. But I think the time will come when the movement will have to somehow formulate something more than just anger.

AG: As a writer, what do you make of the term "occupation", which has now somehow been reclaimed as a positive term when it's always been one of the most heinous terms in political language?

AR: As a writer, I've often said that, among the other things that we need to reclaim, other than the obscene wealth of billionaires, is language. Language has been deployed to mean the exact opposite of what it really means when they talk about democracy or freedom. So I think that turning the word "occupation" on its head would be a good thing, though I would say that it needs a little more work. We ought to say, "Occupy Wall Street, not Iraq," "Occupy Wall Street, not Afghanistan," "Occupy Wall Street, not Palestine." The two need to be put together. Otherwise people might not read the signs.

AG: As a novelist, you write a lot in terms of motivations and how characters interpret reality. Around the country, many occupiers we've talked to seem unable to reconcile their desires about Obama with what Obama really represents. When I talk to them about Obama's record, they say, "Oh, his hands are tied; the Republicans are to blame, it's not his fault." Why do you think people react like this, even at the occupations?

AR: Even in India, we have the same problem. We have a right wing that is so vicious and so openly wicked, which is the Baratiya Janata party (BJP), and then we have the Congress party, which does almost worse things, but does it by night. And people feel that the only choices they have are to vote for this or for that. And my point is that, whoever you vote for, it doesn't have to consume all the oxygen in the political debate. It's just an artificial theatre, which in a way is designed to subsume the anger and to make you feel that this is all that you're supposed to think about and talk about, when, in fact, you're trapped between two kinds of washing powder that are owned by the same company.

Democracy no longer means what it was meant to. It has been taken back into the workshop. Each of its institutions has been hollowed out, and it has been returned to us as a vehicle for the free market, of the corporations. For the corporations, by the corporations. Even if we do vote, we should just spend less time and intellectual energy on our choices and keep our eye on the ball.

AG: So it's also a failure of the imagination?

AR: It's walking into a pretty elaborate trap. But it happens everywhere, and it will continue to happen. Even I know that if I go back to India, and tomorrow the BJP comes to power, personally I'll be in a lot more trouble than with the Congress [party] in power. But systemically, in terms of what is being done, there's no difference, because they collaborate completely, all the time. So I'm not going to waste even three minutes of my time, if I have to speak, asking people to vote for this one or for that one.

AG: One question that a lot of people have asked me: when is your next novel coming out?

AR: I have no answer to that question … I really don't know. Novels are such mysterious and amorphous and tender things. And here we are with our crash helmets on, with concertina wire all around us.

AG: So this inspires you, as a novelist, the movement?

AR: Well, it comforts me, let's just say. I feel in so many ways rewarded for having done what I did, along with hundreds of other people, even the times when it seemed futile.

• Michelle Fawcett contributed to this article. She and Arun Gupta are covering the Occupy movement nationwide for Salon, Alternet and other outlets. Their work is available at occupyusatoday.com




ARUN GUPTA
Arun Gupta is the editor of The Indypendent.