What links do you see between your work as a novelist and your socio-political activities?
I don’t sense any great dissonance between the two. And anyway, I respond badly to living life in a single register. There are some things it’s easier to say in non-fiction. Certainly, though, anyone who reads [my novel] The God of Small Things who had never read any of my political writings would be left in no doubt what side I’m on.
How would you describe your politics? And what part does feminism play in your convictions?
I don’t bother to label myself: I leave that to others. For me personally, feminism means being in a position to have choices — and I don’t mean choices between shampoos. I think that in all these issues one writes about — models of development, the ”war on terror” — it’s the vulnerable who are hardest hit, and that means the chances are higher they will be women.
It’s sometimes said that the women’s movement has fragmented, compared with the heyday of the 1960s and 1970s. In recent anti-war protests, for example, it’s the voices of various social movements — the Anti-War Coalition especially, in this country — that have been most clearly heard.
I think it’s true that the notion that women have won huge victories is an illusion — though not entirely so. But should women have separate protests against the Iraq war? Since I’ve been here, and meeting people who don’t know me, I’ve met amazing levels of macho chauvinism, big-boyism: it’s taken a lot not to burst out laughing sometimes. We’re also faced with the bimbo women more than one could ever have dreamt possible. It’s consumerism feeding into feminine insecurity. All you need to be paranoid is to know the facts …
Last year the Indian Supreme Court gave you a one-day sentence and a fine for contempt of court. [This followed Roy’s opposition to the Narmada Dam in the state of Gujerat because of the displacement of 200 000 people by rising waters, among other problems.] Salman Rushdie wrote recently that the court wanted to ”show that it could be magnanimous and had taken into account that Arundhati Roy is ‘a woman’”. Can you describe your experience of gender relations in India?
The court also said it hoped I’d return to the path of literature. And it complained I wasn’t behaving ”like a reasonable man”. I can never answer questions about gender in India. It contains both the freest women and the most oppressed women in the world. Our huge emphasis on non-violent resistance does mean, though, that in any exercise of violence women are immediately marginalised.
In South Africa, the women’s movement seems to have weakened since 1994, partly because many powerful activists have been co-opted into government and have been effectively silenced. Can we learn from the strong Indian women’s movement?
I think co-option is true not only of women but of people. The same thing happened in India after independence. Whether it’s possible for
one society to learn from another’s mistakes, I’m not sure. There are many prominent women politicians in India — but they’re usually someone’s daughter, someone’s wife … [By contrast], many of the resistance women are women who made it on their own.
You wrote recently that United States President George W Bush ”has placed on full public view the working parts, the nuts and bolts of the apocalyptic apparatus of the American empire”. You concluded this empire ”could be disabled quicker than the pundits predicted”. How?
Basically this whole thing is about breaking open markets, about hegemony. We can’t do anything about US military might now. We have to think about people’s sanctions. Target certain products one by one, and boycott them. We can’t win this war by marching and dancing. The point is to put a spanner into the works of consumerism: not to stop consuming, but to consume less — to know what will be enough.
What do you think of the media’s treatment of the war on Iraq?
What the anti-war movement has succeeded in doing is determining the form of how we’ve been crushed — we’ve made them drop their masks and do it in all their nakedness. The media too has been stripped of its dignity now — I mean, those ”embedded” journalists! Obscene.
Where’s the most significant left-wing activity to be found nowadays?
We need to watch out: when CNN shows us the US/Iraq conflict, it’s not as though that’s the only thing happening. We mustn’t be distracted when they want us to be. The traditional left must match the pace of change or die. When we talk of globalisation, remember there’s nothing pristine for us to return to. We need to understand the links between corporate globalisation and fundamentalism: both push people into parochial spaces. When we talk of deglobalisation, yes, but of what? Capital, yes; corporates, yes. But we need to globalise justice, treaties and so on.
What’s the importance of place and location in your fiction?
It’s ironic that if you’re very specific, you’re universal. If you try to barter that, you become an exotic.
How well do you know this country?
This is only my second visit — and only my second to Africa, too.
What possibilities exist in south-south dialogue as a way of circumventing the usual flow of power from north to south?
We should insist on refusing to think in nationalisms. I wouldn’t consider living in the US or Europe, but coming to South Africa, I’m more at ease here. I’m able to understand the uncertainty and that’s always attractive. We always come from uncertainty and broken cultures.
Can we look forward to seeing you here more frequently?
I had no idea I was known here at all. I’m very interested — any prejudice will do! Ya, I’ll be back often.
‘We need real civil disobedience now’
”How can we cause maximum trouble?” asked Arundhati Roy. ”There won’t be an ultimate victory, but a constant war between power and powerlessness.”
Speaking at a packed public meeting convened by the Palestine Solidarity Committee (PSC) and the Anti-War Coalition at Wits University this week, Roy shared a platform with representatives of the Treatment Action Campaign, the Freedom of Expression Institute, the Anti-Privatisation Forum and the PSC.
The normally staid ambience of the university’s Senate Room sparkled last Wednesday night as available seats rapidly filled and hundreds of people crowded the aisles. To enter the august chamber, they’d walked past a gallery of sombre oil paintings depicting the all-white, nearly all-male visages of former vice-chancellors.
The all-women panel inside was merely the first of the enlivening contrasts. The audience was the next, with an extent of representativeness and a verve of political engagement that the venue is unlikely to entertain regularly.
”We need real civil disobedience now,” Roy said, ”not just spectacles such as marches and dancing.”
To understand global power, we must make links, she said. ”Argentina has been decimated by the chequebook; Iraq by cruise missiles. So what is this democracy being brought to Iraq?” she asked. Installing a new leader who seems to have a history of embezzlement and rewriting Iraq’s tax and other laws before ”new democracy” arrives means that ”when democracy comes, it’ll be ineffective”, she said.
In South Africa, ”democracy is undermined by the global order”.
And in India, ”democracy has actually accentuated differences”. There are ”huge questions about democracy” in her own country, Roy said. We are now witnessing ”imperialism by e-mail. Formerly, whites had to cut through jungles and get malaria and so on. Now local governments do that [imperial] work.”
Privatisation and globalisation ”separate politics from the market, and that removes from poor men and women their last weapon — their votes”. At the same time, Roy insisted that she is not opposed to globalisation per se.
”I’m pro the globalisation of justice, for example. It’s what is globalised that’s the debate.”
Illustrating this, she told the meeting that she grew up in a small, isolated village in India characterised by familiar problems of prejudice and narrowness. In that context, ”I wanted e-mail, I wanted to be able to say, ‘I’m having a bad time and I want out.’”
What we must do ”is eliminate distance — between the people and real power, those who make the decisions, such as the corporations”.
We must contest and resist nationalism: ”Flags are what governments use to shrinkwrap people’s brains and use as readymade shrouds to bury the dead.”
The corporate media is the ”bulletin board of power. If we talk of free speech, we must ask: ‘For whom?’ The platforms have been privatised — that is, the very institutions of democracy have been corrupted. Even language has been taken away from us: ‘deepening democracy’ or ’empowering’ us usually mean privatising water, for example.
”The world’s purpose is to use language to mask intent. As a writer, I want to shorten the distance between language and intent, between language and thought.
”We must talk of the politics of permanent resistance,” Roy concluded, ”not of governance. We don’t think we’ll win, but we’ll have a bloody good time patrolling the borders of our own happiness, our joy.”