|
|
|
September 14, 2003
Review: The voice of our times
LEAFING through the pages of War Talk, Arundhati Roy’s latest collection of political essays, one is reminded of Baby Kochamma, the eighty-three-year-old grandaunt in The God of Small Things, the author’s first novel that won her, the Booker Prize in 1997. As Baby Kochamma sat all day in her Ayemenem house watching TV, her hair dyed jetblack, her lipstick mouth shifted slightly off her real mouth, wearing diamond earrings and gold bangles. “She was frightened by the BBC famines and television wars that she encountered, while she channel surfed... she viewed ethnic cleansing, famine and genocide as direct threats, to her furniture.”
It appears that the character and the author, share similar concerns. But there is a difference. The character keeps her concerns, locked behind doors and windows. The author-turned-activist, shares them with the world, urging it to ACT. Her timing says, the hour has come.
In War Talk, she recalls her childhood. “As a child growing up in the state of Kerala, in South India — where the first democratically elected communist government in the world, came to power in 1959, the year I was born — I worried terribly about, being a gook. Kerala was only a few thousand miles, west of Vietnam. We had jungles and rivers and rice-fields and communists, too. I kept imagining my mother, my brother and myself, being blown out of the bushes by a grenade, or mowed down like the gooks in the movies, by an American marine, with muscled arms and chewing gum and a loud background score. In my dreams, I was the burning girl in the famous photograph, taken on the road from Trang Bang.”
As one reads through the War Talk, one realizes that this fearful little girl from Kerala, has grown up and out of her childhood fears. She has turned into a daring young woman, who has taken it upon herself, to ‘upset the globalization applecart’.
An architect by training, an author by choice, she travels across the globe, urging its people to ‘confront the empire’. She identifies the empire with the American government (and definitely, not it’s people), it’s European satellites, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization and multinational corporations. To the list she adds, what she calls its dangerous byproducts — religious bigotry, cultural nationalism, fascism and terrorism, all marching arm in arm, with the project of corporate globalization.
Appreciating the physical beauty of the land, its culture, music and literature, the ordinary pleasures of ordinary people, she criticizes the US government’s foreign policy — ‘Since the second world war, the United States has been at war with one country or another, every year.’ From Cuba to Cambodia, her list goes on. She terms Palestine and Kashmir, ‘Imperial Britain’s festering, blood-drenched gifts to the modern world’.
She then goes on to explain, that wars are never fought for altruistic reasons. ‘The US government’s paranoid patrolling of the Middle East is because, it has two-thirds of the world’s oil reserves,’ she points out. She quotes from Thomas L. Friedman’s book The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization, “The hidden hand of the market will never work, without a hidden fist. McDonalds cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas”. She further elaborates, “For all the endless empty chatter about democracy, today the world is run, by three of the most secretive institutions in the world: the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, all three of which are in turn, dominated by the United States.”
Shedding light on the political changes around the world, she says, “Today corporate globalization needs an international confederation of loyal, corrupt, authoritarian governments in poorer countries, to push through unpopular reforms and quell the mutinies. It needs a press, that pretends to be free. It needs courts, that pretend to dispense justice.”
Referring to the war against terror, she laments, “Now under the spreading canopy of the war against terror, this process is being hustled along. The men in suits, are in an unseemly hurry. While bombs rain down on us and cruise missiles skid across the skies, while nuclear weapons are stockpiled to make the world a safer place, contracts are being signed, patents are being registered, oil pipelines are being laid, natural resources are being plundered, water is being privatized and democracies are being undermined.”
Of India, her home-country, she has this to say, “The two arms of the Indian government have evolved, the perfect pincer action. While one arm is busy selling India off in chunks, the other, to divert attention, is orchestrating a howling, baying chorus of Hindu nationalism and religious fascism. It is conducting nuclear tests, rewriting history books, burning churches and demolishing mosques... while Gujarat burns our prime minister is on MTV, promoting his new poems.” She calls India’s secularism, “Just an empty shell, about to implode”.
She talks of the Israeli state’s attitude towards the Palestinians, “When Israel attacks Palestine, it is American missiles that smash through Palestinian homes.” Quoting the words of Israeli Prime Minister, addressing Palestinians as ‘grass hoppers’ and ‘two-legged beasts’, she quips, “This is the language of heads of state, not the words of ordinary people.” Then there is Madeleine Albright with her famous quote, ‘We think, the price is worth it’, referring to half a million deaths among Iraqi children, as a result of the sanctions.
Having said it all, she goes on to pay tribute to an American citizen — Noam Chomsky (‘For Reasons of State’ and otherwise), whom she calls one of the greatest, most radical public thinkers, of our time. “When the sun sets on the American empire, as it will, as it must, Noam Chomsky’s work will survive. It will point a cool, incriminating finger at the merciless, Machiavellian empire as cruel, self-righteous and hypocritical as the ones, it has replaced.”
Her perception is sharp, her expression passionate. Having reached the last words of this highly insightful book, one is reminded of her declaration in one of her previous essays (‘The End of Imagination’), “If protesting against having a nuclear bomb implanted in my brain, is anti-Hindu and anti-national, then I secede. I hereby declare myself an independent, mobile republic. I am a citizen of the earth. I own no territory. I have no flag. I’m female, but have nothing against eunuchs. My policies are simple. I’m willing to sign any nuclear nonproliferation treaty or nuclear test ban treaty, that’s going. Immigrants are welcome. You can help me, design our flag.” One is sure that with War Talk across the racks, many more around the globe would gather, under the flag of Arundhati Roy, ‘The goddess of bigger things’.
War Talk
By Arundhati Roy
South End Press. Available at Liberty Books (Pvt) Ltd, 3 Rafiq Plaza, M.R. Kayani Road, Saddar, Karachi. Tel: 021-5683026.
Email: libooks@cyber.net.pk Website:
www.libertybooks.com
ISBN 0-89508-724-7
142pp. Rs830
|
|
|
|
