I’m Not At All Playing For Sainthood’
“All one does is to continue to write and say what one writes and says. Then the rest of it is a fallout that you have to deal with and realize and that the option is to shut up and go away. Is that what I want to do? I don’t know.”
“[W]hen you live in the United States, with the roar of the free market, the roar of this huge military power, the roar of being at the heart of empire, it’s hard to hear the whispering of the rest of the world. And I think many U.S. citizens want to.”
– Arundhati Roy,
The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile
with David Barsamian.
Arundhati Roy was catapulted to fame in 1997 when she won the Booker Prize for her first novel, The God of Small Things. She is trained as an architect, worked as a production designer and has written the screenplays for two films. Since then she has also become known internationally for her lyrical political writing in books like Power Politics, War Talk, and her latest, about to be released: An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire. Arundhati Roy was recently in the United States to publicize her book The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile, which is a series of interviews with journalist David Barsamian. KPFK’s host of Uprising. Sonali Kolhatkar, interviewed Roy in San Francisco on August 16th , 2004 and this interview appears here courtesy Znet
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Sonali Kolhatkar: The last time I saw you, you were in Mumbai, India. You were on a very big stage and you were speaking to tens of thousands of people at the World Social Forum and you were one of the few people who made a specific suggestion about boycotting a couple of American companies that were profiting from the war in Iraq and you got a lot of applause for it because that was sort of a rare thing – there were mostly platitudes at the WSF. Has anything come of that suggestion?
Arundhati Roy: Well I don’t know that anything has come of it concretely but I think people are working on that idea. How exactly it should be done is a difficult issue. But I would just like to repeat the fact that it’s really dangerous for us to limit our protests to purely symbolic spectacle and that we have to begin to inflict real damage and we have to be able to signal to these absolutely heartless multinational companies that they cannot function like this. And if we don’t do that, then we’re going to take a very big hit. We’re just going to be a comical movement of people who like to feel good about ourselves.