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Stateside with Rosalea

An Interview with Arundhati Roy (Not)

Getting somewhat big for my boots, I wrote to Arundhati Roy's agent to ask for an interview with the author when she was in the Bay Area recently. The request was declined. So, instead, I went to see her being interviewed by the journalist David Barsamian on stage at a local auditorium. And then interviewed myself.

::When did you first hear of Arundhati Roy?::

It was in 2002, when the student who addressed the graduating class at UC Berkeley concluded her speech by quoting something that Roy wrote on a napkin when a lunch companion asked her what she meant when she said the only dream worth having is to dream that you will live while you're alive and die only when you are dead. I next noticed Roy's name when she was awarded the Lannan Prize, and in 2003 I heard her speech to the World Social Forum in Brazil, when it was replayed a couple of months later on the day of the huge worldwide mobilisation against the impending US/UK invasion of Iraq.

::What attracted your interest?::

Roy's incisive and almost poetic use of everyday language to present hugely persuasive arguments in favour of people not just lying down and letting the tanks roll over them. It was such a refreshing change. So much of what you read and hear in the States is born out of a need for academics to be published in order to keep their tenure at universities. Every week, it seems, someone has a book out that is supposedly a definitive statement of one side or the other of a question, but it's all a crock as far as I can tell.

Who would even notice those people, let alone their opinions, if it wasn't for the education industry being so intertwined with the book publishing industry being so intertwined with the newspaper industry being so intertwined with the television industry? In fact, most people don't notice them. But someone with the command of language that Arundhati Roy has, plus her physical commitment to the causes she champions in India - to the extent of doing jail time - makes people sit up and take notice. She has the Ah ha! factor.

::Tell me about the event you went to?

It was a fundraiser for KPFA Radio, the station that broadcast Roy's 2003 WSF speech. KPFA is the local station of Pacifica Radio, which originated in the conscientious objection movement in WWII. Pacifica is listener supported and has an interesting, albeit internally turbulent, history. But it's always been socially aware; so much so that in 1970 the Texas station KPFT had its antenna blown up twice by the Ku Klux Klan.

The event was held in a 3,500-seat auditorium and was sold out in a matter of days. While waiting in the line to get in the door, a group of us got into a conversation about The State of Things here in the States, and in typical Berkeley fashion it was a somewhat eclectic group - being of Kiwi, Mexican, Eastern European, Caribbean, Asian, and South Asian origins. One woman was from the state that neighbours Roy's home state in India, and she was able to tell us how "Arundhati" is properly pronounced. No one here in the States pronounces it that way, not even the Pacifica people or the man who interviewed her, and who has interviewed her several times.

Of course, since Arundhati Roy never corrects people's pronunciation of her name, I was left wondering whether our informant was perhaps mistaken. (How colonial was that!!?)

::Who interviewed her?::

His name is David Barsamian, and you can check out a sample of his interviewing style in a book called The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile, which features four long interviews he did with Roy between February 2001 and May 2003. I picked up that book along with Roy's latest one, An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire, in the lobby before the event I attended.

In the States it's a common format to have a journalist interview a newsworthy personage on stage and have people pay twenty bucks to go see it. It'll normally be recorded for radio broadcast and/or be broadcast live. They'll usually have folks walking through the audience handing out file cards to people who want to ask a question themselves, and those will be moderated by the interviewer and asked at the end of the evening.

::Did you take notes?::

Uh-huh. Shall I read them to you? There's not many.

::Sure, go ahead?.::

"AR in red dressing gownish thing." Yeah, she looked like a vibrant tropical flower. Barsamian, I think, commented on how she's called upon to be "the Barbie Doll of trippy hope." My note-taking leaves something to be desired. Was it him who said that? Was the word "trippy"?

::[laughs] Don't you know to take a tape recorder?::

Ah, not allowed. Nor was photography, but the picture that came out of my tiny flashless internet camera was so emblematic of what Arundhati Roy speaks of that I just have to share it.

In Ordinary Person's Guide she speaks of the bright circle of light which bathes the well-to-do in India, and says that outside this circle of light, farmers steeped in debt are committing suicide by the hundreds. It follows that the comfortably off in the Western world, including all the people in that auditorium, are in that circle of light too, while outside it there is much darkness.

"It's not enough to just keep feeling good about ourselves - we have to seriously strategise," she said, but when Barsamian asked her what the hallmarks are of a successful social movement, Roy didn't actually answer except to say that women suffer the effects of globalisation the most so they are usually the strongest.

She referred to two types of struggles: 1) people vs. their own states, and 2) people struggling for self-determination vs. territorial lines established by colonial powers. But she also referred to new struggle, new racism and new genocide. The new struggle is the sort that is happening in Iraq, where resources have been taken over and people are struggling to gain back local control of them. The new racism is where puppets are used to take control of nations that are thought of as inferior and in need of management by the West. And the new genocide is the creation of conditions that lead to mass death without actually going out to kill people.

"The opposition party doesn't even do you the service of opposing." Here she was talking about US politics. Of course, Roy comes from a country where oppositional politics is the norm, being based on the Westminster parliamentary system, so it's very clear to her that the Democrats are part of the problem, not the solution. "Demonising Bush loses the possibility of seeing that both Tide and Ivory Snow are owned by Proctor and Gamble."

Referring to herself as "someone who lives in the subject nations," Roy asked, "Are we looking to challenge the system or not? Democracy and voting in elections is not the true exercise of public power. Public power can only be exercised by a dissenting public." Successful democracy is "a question of believing in oppositional politics and a matter of keeping power on a short leash."

She is well aware that the vast majority of people don't even accept that there is an empire or that they're being used by it. It is the task of writers, artists, filmmakers to bring the empire into a corporeal form so that the scales fall from TV-saturated eyes. "Expose the mainstream press for the boardroom bulletin that it is." The world is not just a choice between a malevolent Mickey Mouse and the Mad Mullahs.

But theatrical resistance can't be the only form of resistance. "We can reinvent civil disobedience in a million different ways." A different way of looking at the world is what we're looking for and art is good for this, Roy said.

"Terrorism is the privatisation of war. But you can't condemn terrorism if you don't condemn the violence of war. The alternative to terrorism is justice, but the poor don't have time to wait for it." So, even if Kerry wins this election, "don't let Kerry have time." The soldiers of both the US and Iraq are being asked to give their lives for a victory that will never be theirs if continuing poverty and injustice is the only outcome.

The evening ended with Arundhati Roy reading from her Booker Prize-winning novel, The God of Small Things.

If you would like to do at least one small thing to loosen the grip of empire on all our lives, check out the Green Festivals, which will be held in Washington DC, at the DC Convention Center, on September 18-19 and in San Francisco at the San Francisco Concourse, November 6-7. All the green/fair economy needs to get started is some momentum. See www.greenfestivals.org.

::Excuse me... I'm still here. What was it that Arundhati Roy wrote on the napkin at that lunch you referred to in the beginning?::

Oh, when her companion asked her what she meant by living while you're alive?

::Yes.::

"To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget."

-ENDS-

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