Arundhati Roy on India, Iraq, U.S. Empire and Dissent
…I think what happens is that — well, I don’t come to, you know, the U.S. that often, and like, for instance, this time I came to do an event with Eduardo Galeano, but I really wasn’t — I didn’t want to do any — except for this, I made it clear that I didn’t want to be working on this trip, because I want to think about some things. But I think it’s the opposite problem that I have. I think that there are many ways of shutting people down, and one is to increase the burners on this celebrity thing until you become so celebrity that all you are is celebrity.
For example, I’ll give you a wonderful example of how it works, say, in India. I was at a meeting in Delhi a few months ago, the Association of Parents for Disappeared People. Now, women had come down from Kashmir. There are 10,000 or so disappeared people in Kashmir, which nobody talks about in the mainstream media at all. Here were these women whose mothers or brothers or sons or husbands had — I’m sorry, not mothers, but whatever — all these people who were speaking of their personal experiences, and there were other speakers, and there was me. And the next day in this more-or-less rightwing paper called Indian Express, there was a big picture of me, really close so that you couldn’t see the context. You couldn’t see who had organized the meeting or what it was about, nothing. And underneath it said, “Arundhati Roy at the International Day of the Disappeared.” So, you have the news, but it says nothing, you know? That’s the kind of thing that can happen.
Actually, I’m somebody who is invited to mainstream forums, and I’m not shunned out. You know, I can say what I have to say. But the point is, Amy, that there is a delicate line between just being so far — you know, just being so isolated that you become the spokesperson for everything, and this kind of person that it suits them to have one person who’s saying something and listen to it and ignore what is being said, and I don’t want to move so far away from everybody else, that if you want to listen to me, then why don’t you listen to so and so? Why don’t you speak to so and so? Why don’t you get some other voices, because otherwise it sounds like you’re this lone brave, amazing person, which is unpolitical.
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