Conscious Choice: Hope Springs Eternal for This Dissident Writer

August 2003 | Choice Books

Hope Springs Eternal for This Dissident Writer

by Mark Harris

War Talk, by Arundhati Roy (South End Press, 2003) 140 pages.

"Another world is not only possible, she’s on her way. Maybe many of us won’t be here to greet her, but on a quiet day, if I listen very carefully, I can hear her breathing." — Arundhati Roy

The novelist Arundhati Roy suggests that the infamous deck of playing cards displaying those wanted Iraqi high officials be expanded to include the American and British politicians who once gave money, arms, and political backing to Saddam Hussein’s regime. But her remark, which she made last May before a C-Span audience and 3,000 people at the Riverside Church in New York City, was more than a polemical jab. In 1988, the Iraqi dictator razed hundreds of Kurdish villages and used chemical weapons to kill thousands. That same year the Reagan administration delivered to this exterminator of people and villages $500 million in agricultural subsidies. A year later, the subsidy was doubled, plus the administration threw in high-quality germ seed, the kind used in the production of anthrax. Hussein also got helicopters and other dual-use materials needed to manufacture chemical and biological weapons.

Was all this Republican largesse tacit recognition of the momentarily enhanced "stability" Washington perceived in the region — the Kurdish "problem" (as it were) no longer being quite so acute? Was it a year-end bonus thrown in for the good job done in Hussein’s pointless, draining war against Iran, a war that cost a million lives but earned the Iraqi dictator high marks from Donald Rumsfeld-type mind-sets that then and now distinguish the leadership of this country?

Arundhati Roy, the author of the highly acclaimed novel, The God of Small Things, is inclined to ask such questions. In Power Politics, The Cost of Living, and now her latest book, War Talk, Roy shows why in recent years she has earned a reputation as a powerful essayist and a graceful, dissident writer whose roving target is always this world’s disgrace of justice and the abuse of power.

In her C-Span talk — presented in the same church where in 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. once delivered his famous speech publicly opposing the Vietnam War — Roy castigated the empty, imperial version of "democracy." A democracy now celebrated by those who believe in the apparent superiority of American culture, who seem to equate the sustainability of Our Way of Life with armored personnel carriers and cast plastic bonded explosives.

Is it possible to react with anything but incredulity and outrage at the post-war debate over Iraq’s missing in action weapons of mass destruction? I might otherwise feel bemusement at the nonsense of politics, but it’s hard to be bemused when behind these policy debates are flowing rivers of blood.

In the build-up to the war, the human bullhorns of cable TV and Talk Radio screamed something close to treason if you even suggested that just maybe the motives for the war were questionable. Iraq, the country of Weapons of Mass Destruction, was an imminent threat to our shores, proclaimed our President with his now trademark grim authority. Iraq held Tons of Chemical and Biological Weapons, an arsenal that at any given moment was only 45 minutes away from being unleashed on a frightened world.

We may have got that part wrong, we now hear. Big deal, at least we got rid of a rotten dictator, so the pro-war lobby declares with a shrug. It’s the arrogance and short-sightedness of Power at work, when even in the end, the reasons for our actions just don’t matter. I don’t mean to sound rude, but the Nazis used to think like this.

Yes, Hussein is gone, but the conditions that create dictators like him remain firmly in place. In India, as Roy describes in War Talk, Muslims die by thousands in pogroms that go unnoticed by the Fox News-types who are otherwise hysterical for "freedom." Yet what Fox tags the "The New Iraq" remains a remarkably familiar landscape, in its penchant for leaders who tool around in Mercedes with bullet-proof windows and armed escorts. Meanwhile, terrorism remains a world threat, and the new millennium markets a brand of corporate globalization that is looking increasingly like old, unvarnished, 19th century imperialism.

That’s why I recommend reading Roy. Not just because she deconstructs the lies, but because she gives voice to deeper, more life-affirming notes in the human experience. Roy is a voice of cool, grounded reason; the sheer force of her eloquence raises her words and her heart above the white noise of our culture’s present dispiritedness.

Whether she’s writing of twins Estha and Rahel and the tragic, corrupt setting of their lives in The God of Small Things, or mocking "Prince of Darkness" Donald Rumsfeld for the implicit cultural imperialism that he used to downplay the ransacking of Iraq’s museums after the fall of Hussein, Roy remains a courageous, trenchant student of Power. Yes, it’s a sad, sordid story she often describes, stories of global power and its abuses, of the plight of this world’s many otherwise unheard, subjugated voices. But she tells it with an artist’s touch and a rebel’s fire, graced always with a sense of history that is indistinguishable from hope.

Books by Arundhati Roy

War Talk (South End Press, 2003) 140 pages.

Power Politics (South End Press, 2001) 182 pages.

The Cost of Living (Random House, 1999), 176 pages.

The God of Small Things (Random House, 1997), 321 pages.

Mark Harris is a Chicago-based writer. Visit his Web site, A Writer’s Voice.

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