Arundhati Roy is the author of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and The God of Small Things, which won the Booker Prize and has been translated into more than 40 languages. She also has published several books of nonfiction including The End of Imagination, Capitalism: A Ghost Story and The Doctor and the Saint. She lives in New Delhi.
Following the Impeachment farce, our attention has been drawn in the news to Trump’s release from all constraints. His pogrom against all those who opposed him has begun and is accelerating. Politicians are calling this latest a “crisis of law and order!” Last night I felt a dreadful darkness descend on my heart. I found words enough to say to Anita: “We are now in a time when ‘they’ could come into our home and tell us to leave because ‘they’ want to live here—’they’ being the ‘lawless ones’ “.
This was an imagination of what becomes possible when “law and order” break down. These invasive thoughts (the lawless ones) enter from “beyond” the personal psyche and have a determinative effect on our actions. This is how it all begins, i.e. in the takeover of the personal psyche by invasive thoughts from “beyond”. Then the next day I came across an essay by Arundhati Roy, famous Indian author. I remember her poignant address to Americans after 911. She said:
But just to share the grief of history. To thin the mist a little. To say to the citizens of America, in the gentlest, most human way: welcome to the world…
Well, in reading her recent lecture, The Graveyard Talks Back, I see now how my dark imagination connects to the darkness of reality. As you read Roy’s lecture, she will tell you of the underlying myth that supports the horror that is happening today in India—the caste system. I had visited India in 1985 and found the caste system to be alive and well, to my own detriment! The toilet next to our hotel room was appalling so I went to the store and bough some Dettol and rag and proceeded to clean it, We were bundled out of the hotel before I could say, “acha”!
I worked with her essay for two hours today. Roy speaks here as a writer and story-teller–a truth teller. I’ll whet your appetite with a couple of key quotes:
I mean fiction that attempts to recreate the universe of the familiar, but then makes visible what the Project of Unseeing seeks to conceal.
The Project of Unseeing is the fascist mode of re-writing history to favour the Powerful and to elide (a word she uses to maximum effect) any alternative history, such as the history of treatment towards the “Untouchables”.
She speaks powerfully about the art of writing as a way to combat the Project of Unseeing:
If I were to be incarcerated or driven underground, would it liberate my writing? Would what I write become simpler, more lyrical perhaps, and less negotiated? It’s possible. But right now, as we struggle to keep the windows open, I believe our liberation lies in the negotiation. Hope lies in texts that can accommodate and keep alive our intricacy, our complexity and our density against the onslaught of the terrifying, sweeping simplifications of fascism. As they barrel toward us, speeding down their straight, smooth highway, we greet them with our beehive, our maze. We keep our complicated world, with all its seams exposed, alive in our writing.
Here she defines writing as an art that privileges complexity over banal simplicities (such as “America First”) and then her definition becomes a true battle cry:
Because truly, the most palpable feeling in the air is the barbaric hatred the current regime and its supporters show toward a section of the population. Equally palpable now is the love that has risen to oppose this. You can see it in people’s eyes, hear it in protestors’ song and speech. It’s a battle of those who know how to think against those who know how to hate. A battle of lovers against haters. It’s an unequal battle, because the love is on the street and vulnerable. The hate is on the street, too, but it is armed to the teeth, and protected by all the machinery of the state.
I know this battle cry. I was conscripted in the 90’s with dreams like this one:
I reach into a fireplace and shake a skeleton to release a young boy in its grip. A challenge to Death to release the boy, based on what? A love for Life. As Thanatos creeps more into our lives what do we do? Give up? We are so hooked on cheating, or worse, killing Death, but to challenge Death to release the living being? This is my first intimation of the Eros/Thanatos drama.
Confronting hatred and death! There is a strong connection between the two. They both speak to separation! Roy’s clarion call to arms tells us to come down to earth, out of our ideals or illusions about life, down to the street level where the action is. In effect she is asking us to sustain love in the streets, where hatred rules. What kind of cultural practice do we need to enable this posture? It has something to do with not being so afraid of our vulnerability–in fact that may be our best weapon!
The last two lines of this long lecture are the most evocative and mysterious, the work of a master writer to awaken the imagination:
The destruction—it has begun.
And, yes, if in a dream you’ve eaten fish, it means you’ve eaten fish.
What do you make of this? Both statements are dream-like. I say, the destruction has begun—the destruction of the psyche! And, in counterpoint, writers must privilege the psyche/imagination like never before. So, that, if in a dream you’ve eaten fish, then it means you’ve eaten fish! In other words the dream is its own meaning. We don’t have to scrabble about looking for meaning external to the dream. It simply needs to be said and responded to in some real way.
Roy’s writing is real enough to effect real responses from the Powerful:
Due to an ongoing dispute between the Trinity College Board of Trustees and the University of Cambridge’s University and College Union, and in defense of a request by the Union, this lecture was not delivered in person.
