Arundhati Roy: Come September

Although it has been 11 years since this stunningly powerful speech happened, it continues to be deeply and tragically relevant today. Incredibly, I first heard this voice giving this speech on NPR over a decade ago. I was just left weeping at its end. It was so shocking to hear such truth-telling on the radio - other than on Democracy Now! Of course, that was the one and only time I heard this speech on NPR, and voices like Arundhati Roy's and Howard Zinn's have long since disappeared from National Public Radio. But it was just enough of a glimpse to compel me to find out who this amazing woman with the amazing voice was. Courage, curiosity, integrity, truth, authenticity, depth, and fierce caring and compassion are contagious. May we all find inspiration here. Peace ~ Molly

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Excerpted from Arundhati Roy's speech "Come September", 
presented September 18, 2002.

ARUNDHATI ROY - A writer's reflections on the U.S.-decreed 'War Against Terror', the conflict between power and powerlessness, and a better world on its way.

Quite often these days, I find myself being described as a "social activist." Those who agree with my views, call me "courageous." Those who don't, call me all kinds of rude names which I won't repeat. I am not a social activist, neither am I particularly courageous.... So please do not underestimate the trepidation with which I stand here to say what I must say.

Writers imagine that they cull stories from the world. I'm beginning to believe that vanity makes them think so. That it's actually the other way around.

Stories cull writers from the world. Stories reveal themselves to us. The public narrative, the private narrative - they colonise us. They commission us. They insist on being told. Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of storytelling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.

The theme of much of what I write, fiction as well as non-fiction, is the relationship between power and powerlessness and the endless, circular conflict they're engaged in. John Berger, that most wonderful writer, once wrote: Never again will a single story be told as though it's the only one. There can never be a single story. There are only ways of seeing. So, when I tell a story, I tell it not as an ideologue who wants to pit one absolutist ideology against another, but as a storyteller who wants to share her way of seeing. Though it might appear otherwise, my writing is not really about nations and histories, it's about power. About the paranoia and ruthlessness of power. About the physics of power. I believe that the accumulation of vast unfettered power by a state or a country, a corporation or an institution - or even an individual, a spouse, friend or sibling - regardless of ideology, results in excesses such as the ones I will recount here.

Living as I do, as millions of us do, in the shadow of the nuclear holocaust that the governments of India and Pakistan keep promising their brain-washed citizenry, and in the global neighbourhood of the War Against Terror (what President Bush rather biblically calls 'The Task That Never Ends'), I find myself thinking a great deal about the relationship between Citizens and the State.

In India, those of us who have expressed views on Nuclear Bombs, Big Dams, Corporate Globalisation and the rising threat of communal Hindu fascism - views that are at variance with the Indian Government's - are branded 'anti-national'. While this accusation does not fill me with indignation, it's not an accurate description of what I do or how I think. An 'anti-national' is a person who is against his/her own nation and, by inference, is pro some other one. But it isn't necessary to be 'anti-national' to be deeply suspicious of all nationalism, to be anti-nationalism. Nationalism of one kind or another was the cause of most of the genocide of the twentieth century. Flags are bits of coloured cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap peoples' minds and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. When independent, thinking people (and here I do not include the corporate media) begin to rally under flags, when writers, painters, musicians, film-makers suspend their judgment and blindly yoke their art to the service of the 'Nation', it's time for all of us to sit up and worry. In India we saw it happen soon after the Nuclear tests in 1998 and during the Kargil War against Pakistan in 1999. In the United States we saw it during the Gulf War and we see it now, during the 'War against Terror'. That blizzard of Made-in-China American flags.

Recently, those who have criticised the actions of the U.S. Government (myself included) have been called 'anti-American'. Anti-Americanism is in the process of being consecrated into an ideology.

The term 'anti-American' is usually used by the American establishment to discredit and, not falsely - but shall we say inaccurately - define its critics. Once someone is branded anti-American, the chances are that he or she will be judged before they're heard and the argument will be lost in the welter of bruised national pride.

What does the term 'anti-American' mean? Does it mean you're anti-jazz? Or that you're opposed to free speech? That you don't delight in Toni Morrison or John Updike? That you have a quarrel with giant Sequoias? Does it mean you don't admire the hundreds of thousands of American citizens who marched against nuclear weapons, or the thousands of war resisters who forced their government to withdraw from Vietnam? Does it mean that you hate all Americans?

This sly conflation of America's culture, music, literature, the breathtaking physical beauty of the land, the ordinary pleasures of ordinary people with criticism of the U.S. Government's foreign policy (about which, thanks to America's "free press," sadly most Americans know very little) is a deliberate and extremely effective strategy. It's like a retreating army taking cover in a heavily populated city, hoping that the prospect of hitting civilian targets will deter enemy fire.

There are many Americans who would be mortified to be associated with their government's policies. The most scholarly, scathing, incisive, hilarious critiques of the hypocrisy and the contradictions in U.S. Government policy come from American citizens. When the rest of the world wants to know what the U.S. Government is up to, we turn to Noam Chomsky, Edward Said, Howard Zinn, Ed Herman, Amy Goodman, Michael Albert, Chalmers Johnson, William Blum and Anthony Arnove to tell us what's really going on.

Similarly, in India, not hundreds, but millions of us would be ashamed and offended if we were in any way implicated with the present Indian Government's fascist policies, which, apart from the perpetration of state terrorism in the Valley of Kashmir (in the name of fighting terrorism), have also turned a blind eye to the recent state-supervised pogrom against Muslims in Gujarat. It would be absurd to think that those who criticise the Indian Government are 'anti-Indian' - although the Government itself never hesitates to take that line. It is dangerous to cede to the Indian Government or the American Government or anyone for that matter, the right to define what 'India' or 'America' are, or ought to be.

To call someone 'anti-American', indeed, to be anti-American, (or for that matter anti-Indian, or anti-Timbuktuan) is not just racist, it's a failure of the imagination. An inability to see the world in terms other than those that the establishment has set out for you: If you're not a Bushie you're a Taliban. If you don't love us, you hate us. If you're not Good you're Evil. If you're not with us, you're with the terrorists.

Please continue reading the transcript here:  http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/free/9-11/come_september.htm

For the full video, which includes introduction and discussion with Howard Zinn, please go here:  http://www.lannan.org/events/arundhati-roy-with-howard-zinn/