Arundhati Roy speaks to
zMag
31/08/04 09:14 Filed by Saswat Pattanayak in:
Reference
| Political
Arundhati Roy always has been to the ground. I guess
she is one honest woman we need. And what's more, she
is leaning more left, than she was while winning the
brits' award. I especially like her statement, given
recently: "I wouldn't feel I was doing anything right
if everyone stood up and applauded."
Well, she speaks this time, on
Superstars and
Globalization, to zMag, and I am sure not
everyone is going to applaud:
I don’t also want to go around being the Barbie
doll of non-violent struggle. To confuse
non-violence with passivity is one of the things
that’s dangerous. And the fact is that neither am I
a person who feels that I have the right, or I am
in a place where I should be dictating to people
how they should conduct their movements. Personally
I’m not prepared to pick up arms now. But maybe I
can afford not to, at whatever place I am in now. I
think violence really marginalizes and brutalizes
women. It depoliticizes things. It’s undemocratic
in so many ways. But at the same time, when you
look at the massive amount of violence that America
is perpetrating in Iraq, I don’t know that I’m in a
position to tell Iraqis that you must fight a
pristine, feminist, democratic, secular,
non-violent war. I can’t say. I just feel that that
resistance in Iraq is our battle too and we have to
support it. And we can’t be looking for pristine
struggles in which to invest our purity.
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Tags: Saswat, India, Feminism, Capitalism, Literature