Arundhati Roy and Viet Thanh Nguyen | 5-3-2018 | LIVE from the NYPL

[Music] thank you I feel I must clarify this hooker that won the book what happened was that at the time when I was writing about the big dams being built on the Narmada River and I criticized a Supreme Court judgement so I was hauled up for contempt of criminal contempt of court I was facing a jail sentence and the judges kept throwing this essay that I'd written called the greater common good from one lordship to the next and they they would refer to me as that woman so which is when I started calling myself the hooker that won the Booker and eventually they suggested that I must apologize or go to jail and when I refused to apologize they said but she's not behaving like a reasonable man that was a reasonable man is a legal concept so that was the sort of genesis of this so I'm going to treat you badly and read a part which is towards the end of the book and the reason for this is that I've actually done quite a lot of readings and now I want to read different parts you know so this is I mean you saw the film this part is set in Kashmir and it's called the chapter is called the untimely death of Miss juban the first ever since she was old enough to insist she had insisted on being called Miss GB it was the only name she would answer to everyone had to call her that her parents her grandparents the neighbors too she was a precocious devotee of the Miss fetish that gripped the Kashmir Valley in the early years of the insurrection all of a sudden fashionable young ladies especially in the towns insisted on being addressed as Miss miss momen miss Ghazala miss Farhana it was only one of the many fetishes of the times in those blood-dimmed years for reasons nobody fully understood people became what can only be described as fetish prone other than the miss fetish there was a nose fetish a PT instructor fetish and a rollerskating fetish so in addition to check posts bunkers weapons grenades landmines casapierce concertina wire soldiers insurgents counter insurgents spies special operatives double agents triple agents and suitcases of cash from the agencies on both sides of the border the valley was also awash with nurses PT instructors and roller skaters and of course mrs. among them miss Rubin who didn't live long enough to become a nurse nor even a roller skater in the Missouri Shore da the Marta's graveyard where she was first buried the cast-iron signboard that arched over the main gate said in two languages we gave our two days for your tomorrow it's corroded now the green paint faded the delicate calligraphy flecked with pinholes of light still there it is after all those years silhouetted like a swatch of stiff lace against the sapphire sky and the snowy Sawtooth Mountains there still is miss Rubin and her mother were buried along with 15 others taking the toll of their Massacre to 17 at the time of their funeral the Missouri Shore was still fairly new but was already getting crowded however the intezaar meeow committee the organizing committee had its ear to the ground from the very beginning of the insurrection and had a realistic idea of things to come it planned the layout of the graves carefully making ordered efficient use of the available space everyone understood how important it was to bury martyrs bodies in collective burial grounds and not leave them scattered in their thousands like bird feed up in the mountains or in the forests around the army camps and torture centers that had mushroomed across the valley when the fighting began and the occupation tightened its grip for ordinary people the consolidation of their dead became in itself an act of defiance martyrdom stole into the Kashmir Valley from across the line of control through moonlit mountain passes manned by soldiers night after night it walked on narrow stony paths wrapped like thread around blue cliffs of ice across vast glaciers and high meadows of waist-deep snow it trudged past young boys shot down in snowdrifts their bodies arranged in eerie frozen tableaus under the pitiless dais at the pale moon in the cold night sky and stars that hung so low you felt you could almost touch them when it arrived in the valley it stayed close to the ground and spread through the walnut Grove's the saffron fields the apple almond and cherry orchards like a creeping mist it whispered words of war into the ears of doctors and engineers students and laborers tailors and carpenters Weaver's and farmers Shepherds cooks and bards they listened carefully and then put down their books and implements their needles the chisels their staffs their plows their cleavers and their spangled clown costumes they still the looms on which they had woven the most beautiful carpets and the finest softest shawls the world had ever seen and ran gnarled wandering fingers over the smooth barrels of Kalashnikovs that the strangers who visited them allowed them to touch they followed the new pied piper's up into the high meadows and alpine glades where training camps had been set up only after they had been given guns of their own after they had curled their fingers around the trigger and felt it give ever so slightly after they had weighed the odds and decided it was a viable option only then did they allow the rage and shame of the subjugation they had endured for decades for centuries to cause through their bodies and turn the blood in their veins into smoke the mist swirled on on an indiscriminate recruitment drive it whispered into the ears of black marketeers bigots thugs and confidence tricksters they too listened intensely before they reconfigured their plans they ran sly fingers over the cold metal bumps on their quota of grenades that was being distributed so generously like parcels of choice mutton at Eid they grafted the language of God and freedom Allah and Azadi onto their murders and new scams they made off with money property and women of course women women of course in this way the insurrection began death was everywhere death was everything career desire dream poetry love youth itself dying became just another way of living graveyards sprang up in parks and meadows by streams and rivers in fields and forest glades tombstones grew out of the ground like young children's teeth every village every locality had its own graveyard the ones that didn't grew anxious about being seen as collaborators in remote border areas near the line of control the speed and regularity with which the bodies turned up and the condition some of them were in wasn't easy to cope with some were delivered in sacks some in small polythene bags just pieces of flesh some hair and teeth notes pinned to them by the quartermaster's of death said one kilo 2.7 kilos 500 grams tourists flew in journalists flew out honeymooners flew out soldiers flew in women flocked around police stations and army camps holding up a forest of thumbed dog yard passport size size photographs grown soft with tears please sir have you seen my boy anywhere have you seen my husband has my brother by any chance passed through your hands and the sirs swelled their chests and bristled their moustaches and played with their medals and narrowed their eyes to assess them to see which one's despair would be worth converting into corrosive hope I'll see what I can do and what that hope would be worth to whom a fee a feast a a truck full of walnuts prisons filled up jobs evaporated guides touts pony owners and their ponies bell boys waiters receptionists toboggan pullers trinket sellers florists and the boatman on the lake Group Ora and hungrier only for the gravediggers there was no rest it was just work work work with no extra pay for overtime or night shifts in the masala Shahadah mr. bean and her mother were buried next to each other on his wife's tombstone Musa yes we wrote rfas we 12 September 1968 to 22nd December 1995 wife of Musa yes we and below that wha-ha-ha karate hechizo pool he pulled jihad a belly now dust blows on autumns breeze where once for flowers only flowers next to it on mr. Bean's tombstone it said Miss jib in 2nd January 1992 to 22nd December 1995 beloved daughter of Arafah and Musa yes we and then right at the bottom in very small letters Musa asked the tombstone engraver to inscribe what many would consider an inappropriate epitaph for Amata he positioned it in a place where he knew that in winter it would be more or less hidden under the snow and during the rest of the earth tall grass and wild narcissists would obscure it more or less and this is what he wrote luck Dalila one yet month nakhon belay us now our tsukune junghwa's months rose on it's what mr. bean would say to him at night as she lay next to him on the carpet resting her back on a frayed velvet bolster washed donned and washed again wearing her own Ferren washed donned and washed again as tiny as a tea cozy for Rosie blue with salmon pink Paisley's embroidered along the neck and sleeves and mimicking precisely her father's lying down posture her left leg bent her right ankle on her left knee a very small fist in his very big one ACK Dalila one tell me a story and then she would begin the story herself shouting it out into the somber curfew tonight her raucous delight dancing out of the windows and rousing the neighborhood tell me a story there wasn't a witch and she didn't live in the jungle tell me a story and can we cut the crap about the witch and the jungle can you tell me a real story coal soldiers from a warm climate patrolling the icy highway that circle their neighborhood cocked their ears and uncocked the safety caches of their guns who's there what's that sound stop or we'll shoot they came from far away and did not know the words in Kashmir leave or stop or shoot or who they had guns so they didn't need to the youngest of them s murugesan's barely adult had never been so cold had never seen snow and was still enchanted by the shapes his breath made has it condensed in the frozen air look he said on his first night patrol two fingers to his lips pulling on an imaginary cigarette exhaling a plume of blue smoke free cigarette the white smile in his dark face floated through the night and then faded deflated by the bored disdain of his mates go ahead Rajnikant they said to him Rajnikant is a tamil film star smoke the whole pack cigarettes don't taste so good once they've blown your head off they they did get to him eventually the armored Jeep he was riding in was blown up on the highway just outside Guevara he and two soldiers bled to death by the side of the road his body was delivered in a coffin to his family in his village intangible district Tamilnadu along with the DVD of the documentary film saga of untold valor directed by a major Raju and produced by the Ministry of Defense s murugesan's wasn't in the film but his family thought he was because they never saw it they didn't have a DVD player in his village the 1-yard who were not untouchable would not allow the body of s Morrison who was to be carried past their houses to the cremation ground so the funeral procession took a circuitous route that circled the village to the separate Untouchables cremation ground right next to the village dump to commemorate as murugesan's valor the army contributed towards building a cement statue of savoy s muruga seen in his soldiers uniform with the rifle on his shoulder at the entrance to the village every now and then his young widow would point it out to their baby who was six months old when her father died Appa she'd say waving at the statue and the baby would smile mimicking precisely her mother's wave a fold of baby fat spilling over her baby wrist like a bracelet Appa Appa Appa Appa she'd say smiling not everyone in the village was happy with the idea of having an untouchable man's statue put up at the entrance particularly not an untouchable who carried a weapon they felt her to give out the wrong message gives people ideas so three weeks after the statue went up the rifle on its shoulder went missing Savoy s murugesan's family tried to file a complaint but the police refused to register a case saying that the dry 'full must have fallen off or simply disintegrated due to the use of substandard cement a fairly common malpractice and that nobody could be blamed a month later the statues hands were cut off once again the police refused to register a case although this time they sniggered knowingly and did not even bother to offer a reason two weeks after the amputation of its hands the statue of Savoy s merle gayson was beheaded there were a few days of tension people from nearby villages who belonged to the same caste as s murugesan's organized a protest they began a real a hunger strike at the base of the statue a local court said it would constitute a magisterial committee to look into the matter in the meanwhile it ordered a status quo the hunger strike was discontinued the Magisterial committee was never constituted in some countries some soldiers that died twice the headless statue remained at the entrance of the village they with no longer bore any likeness to the man it was supposed to commemorate it turned out to be a more truthful emblem of the times than it would otherwise have been s Morgan's baby continued to wave at him abba-abba-abba thank you [Applause] well it is a thrill and an honor to be here on stage with you I'm one of your eight million fans book sales figure that I saw for the god of small things and I've been following you since that book came out for the last 20 years and I I'm also a fiction writer but also know that I need to write this down in the next book jacket yeah but you know I do fiction in nonfiction so the you know I'm fascinated by your movement back and forth between fiction and nonfiction and I also hope that I could become a writer who engages in politics as much as you do and I knew I know I told you offstage that we're going to start with that but I didn't know you're gonna read this passage you actually wanna start with up the passage and some of the things that were raised and in the film that you showed and in that passage that you that you read was so beautiful but also obviously so sad at the same time there's a lot of death happening there is the Indian occupation of Kashmir there's a Kashmiri revolution against that there is as Buddha gation we're a case then the untouchable soldier whose fate then becomes symbolic of so many of the different things that are happening to the people of India and Kashmir of different kinds of backgrounds and I'm I'm just wondering I'm recalling a quote from The New Yorker review of the Ministry of utmost happiness where the reviewer said it compares you to Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie and says that you all use magical realism in order to depict the horror but not make it so tedious do you agree with that no I I just can't understand why people think I do magic realism you know I I just don't know where it comes from I ask someone once and they said you know you have a person Will's a guesthouse in a graveyard I said you want to see photographs you know like I mean people live in graveyards in in India graveyards are obviously now ghettos only Muslims buried their dead and Christians but Hindus don't and so graveyards and now you know the Hinderer the Hindu right ridicules them contests why should they be given the space they should be forced to cremate the dead and and I spend a lot of time actually in graveyards where people live in fact the the cover of the book is a picture of a graves of an unknown person in in the dargah of Nizamuddin Auliya and for years and years there have been two women who sleep on either side of this this grave you know so I don't know perhaps perhaps the realism that we experience is magical for people who don't experience it but you know to turn that into a genre of literature is to deny our reality in some ways you know I think Garcia Marquez said something of the same sort wait this is the only mode that we can use to depict what's actually happening here and you know the fact that you were focusing on graveyards in this in this passage reminds me of something else that you said where you were talking about how part of the novel is about graveyards that have paradises in them because the guest house that's built in this particular graveyard is called the paradise guest house and some paradises have graveyards in the in Canary Valley is one of these paradises and that summarizes whether expressed is one way in which I think your novel is weaving back and forth between the site these extremes of the paradise in the graveyard your your calling as a novelist is to draw our attention to these graveyards to all of the horrible I think the other thing is that perhaps perhaps they're too you know there's a there's a difference in in perception of in the West people think of graveyards as as the place where the dead are interred whereas in the in the graveyard in Delhi where unzoom one of the main characters you know begins to enclose the graves of her relatives and then turns it into the journal guest house Jonathan will do means paradise and then in Kashmir where which is often referred to as John not as paradise because it's so beautiful it's a holiday resort and as I read it's it's being covered by graveyards but they're to the dead in fact Musa one of the characters writes this letter to his daughter saying in Kashmir actually the dead are alive and the living are only dead people pretending you know so this there's a constant sense in which the graveyard is not necessarily a place for the dead and the borders between the living and the dead are pretty porous in this book you know they just move around like guests at a party in different rooms they come and go there's a kind of communion that goes on between humans and animals between the dead and the living and and so on so and and a place that is so you know in a way your book it's it's it's about the horror of war and the aftermath of war and the horror in this book is that is supposed to be peace you know it's supposed to be democracy it's supposed to be the way everything is all right and all this is covered over you know so there is a sense in which people even just the physical space there is so it's you know everything is contested so so you know there are places where there are people running tea shops in graveyards clean the graves of the coffee you know whatever so it's it's every every space and every person is so layered you know one of the things that you said at the end of the film clip is from the novel about becoming everything and there is a way obviously in the novel in which you are trying to connect all these different aspects of life in India and the politics in India but not just humans but not just people of different castes and backgrounds or different political beliefs but also humans and the dead humans and animals humans and the environment all of that and I think it's it's it's part of what makes the Ministry of utmost happiness really a really powerful novel because there's this huge ambition in there to connect all these different things and many writers don't want to do that yeah well I actually don't think I think you have to make the effort that people make is to not connect them you know the truth is that you don't have to connect them they are connected you know and I think increasingly the way people are trained whether it's academics or journalists to to kind of mark off their fields of expertise and then act as if that is something that found students on its own whereas it's not you know whether it's cast whether it's gender whether it's these are not subjects you know this is in the air this is what we breathe night and day and it's extraordinary to me that many intellectuals academics writers have managed to for example just act as though caste doesn't exist in India whereas it's the motor that runs society you know but being able to silo put these things into silos and then you know end our chairs and have special you know sections about this and that it's it's a form of depoliticization which is which is dishonest really I hold an endowed chair but anyway but I'm just saying you know to to separate these things and to sort of NGO headings or funding you know ways in which things are funded and therefore you just stop you know like if you specialize in environment then you're not supposed to know anything about caste or whatever it is whereas novels the power of novels is that they do connect I totally agree I think everything is connected right and I and I think I I think it is partly a willful act for people not to see that but it's also what dominant society dominant ideology encourages whether it's in India or in the United States where I think many people don't want to see the connections between many different kinds of problems and I identified with you as a writer because you are someone who has said that not seeing is not an option for you I'm curious as to when that realization happened was a gradual or was there a sudden moment where you felt that you did see these connections that other people weren't seeing well in my case you know the thing is that i-i-i have a very peculiar background for an indian it's India is a society which from the outside or from the hippie side everybody looks at as this anarchic Bollywood the yoga Gandhi vegetarian whatever but in truth obviously it's a very very policed society it's a society that lives in the fine grid of caste and ethnicity and religion and all that and I come like most of the people in this book I die I don't fit into that grid because my mother married outside the community then got divorced and not from a big city you know so so we grew up my brother and I in this little village in which the god of small things except where where it was made clear to me especially to me as a girl that you know no one was going to marry me I didn't belong they're not asking me whether I wanted to marry them which I didn't but in separate so so I grew up sort of on the edge watching all this you know and and trying to understand it I think at a time when when I was very very young you know so they were watching my mother for example who who's like someone who escaped from the sets of a Fellini film but you know at that time she was she was very very very harsh to me and my brother but because there was so much harshness directed at her for the choices she had made and so as a very young person you were struggling to understand things in adult waste and and of course you misunderstand things too but so so this this began for me very very early I think there was a moment where you're also talking about when after you had graduated from college I think and then you had gone off to to go up with a boyfriend at the time and and you or maybe even before this you were poor basically as a poor student and then poor postgraduate life that you really felt identification with people who were living in poverty and that this has been something that you have never left behind never never forgotten well I I was 16 when I sort of stopped going home you know and I used to work and I put myself through architecture school and then by the time I finished by the time I'm 50 I knew that I wasn't going to be a architect you know building houses for rich people or whatever so I became very interested in City Planning and I'd want at some point I I just gave up all of that and I used to earn a living selling cake on the beach then I got fed up of that came back and I lived yes in even while I was in college in in in a sort of squat which was within the walls of an old monument and to be you know in a city like Delhi when you're 17 18 on your own and you you see how the most vulnerable survived and that becomes your basic premise of trying to understand anything you know I I used to live in in the dargah of close to the dargah of Nizamuddin Auliya which is very low tomorrow one of the characters lived lives and every morning used to have tea with all the beggars and derelicts and we stole gossip you know about things I used to cycle to work and every day they would be like also you survived today because the traffic was so bad and I I think it you know when you when you one of the greatest crises in India today is the fact that people don't know how to talk to each other and I'm not talking about language I'm saying that when you see you know the World Economic Forum the prime minister or the rich businessman you look at them and you know they don't even know how to go to a village they don't know how to enter a house they the language doesn't exist anymore - for the powerful to speak to the vulnerable you know when you listen to judges in court you know that they don't understand how if you go to a village like in the forests of Central India and you steal all the chicken and you shoot holes in in the vessels it sounds like a joke in New York right but there it means you can just die of thirst because you can't go for miles and collect water and bring it back you don't have shops to buy another vessel you don't have you know but in in the Supreme Court listening to the case of the mining companies versus these people that's a joke because they have forgotten what vulnerability means so this capacity for empathy for great empathy for a wide range of people and wide range of characters certainly marks your work whether it's fiction or nonfiction but something else that you brought up in what you just said was your willingness to actually go out and talk to people I'm speaking of someone who hates talking to people you know I like sitting in a room writing and but you are someone who actually besides doing that also likes to go out and engage with people and it seems like you know one kind of a writer is the writer who writes alone and other kind of writer is a writer who worked right since ala Dara T and I think that word has come up often in the interviews I've read of your work that you see yourself as being not just an isolated voice but as someone whose fiction and nonfiction is not supposed to represent other people not supposed to be the voice for the voiceless for example but is working in concert with these social and political movements and all of that I don't know if there's a question here I just want to point it out that we're doing that well you know it's it's actually I'm I'm I'm actually sometimes I keep telling people I'm most social crippled you know like I can be here and talk to people but like I've signed it very hard to go and have dinner with seven people or something you know that way but more than talk to people you know I think what I like to do is to listen to people because people forget how to listen you know and and and there's something there's something very beautiful about just listening you know so it's not that I mean the Ministry of utmost happiness is not a book that's written in solidarity with anybody or any movement or anything like that but it is to me the fundamental desire of all right to understand the terrain in which they write you know so I need to I need to know it intimately and for that I need to listen you know which is not so so when I'm in Delhi for example people nobody invites me for anything because they know I won't go you know like no marriage no dinner no there's no that no but these journeys into the forest you know the journey for example spending weeks with the Maoist like the footage that you saw of those women comrades if the camera had panned a little more I was there with them and sometimes you you you you you come across the most unexpected things there was a moment when all of us went to the river to bathe you know so there were these armed guerillas there was me there were women farmers all you know bathing in the same room and you think what a moment that is you know or late at night you know when everyone's asleep one of the comrades is busy on his solar-powered computer so I asked him what are you doing so he said I'm writing a clarification then he laughed and he said you know we could publish like several volumes of clarifications so I said what is the funniest clarification you've ever had to make so he said in Hindi he said by Homme neige Geico Hattori's and aymara which means no brother we did not hammer the cows to death one of the one of the election promises by the man who was standing for Chief Minister was that if he won the elections he would give every indigenous person's family a cow so when he won the elections he was distributing this age of cows right so there were these cow contractors who were taking these old cows will bloody die on the way and things and then they decided the best way to get out of this tedious thing was to just say the Maoist kill them these guys are like from the forest thing no no we didn't kill them so the thing is you you know how do you how do you understand the bizarreness of this this place that I live in all these languages all this you know it's only it's only true you know delightful listening so so when when when when people talk about free speech some of us often say free speech and fearless listening delightful listening you delightfully listen to a whole panoply of characters in your book now that panoply of characters includes not just the revolutionaries and the freedom fighters and the downtrodden and so on but also people were not so necessarily nice people like Garson Hobart and made your emmerich Singh I don't want to tell the audience a little bit about these characters but is it delightful to listen to to people like that because I assume you have to all the time oh it's fascinating you know I mean Garson Hobart is a character he's called Garson Hobart because he plays that in in Norman is that you a college play that they're doing which never gets performed the actual name is beep lobe Das Gupta and he's a he's very much part of the nerubian sort of upper caste secular fallen now Indian state you know and he's a brilliant guy you know so for me writing Garson Hobart was was like coming close to schizophrenia because he's the enemy that you don't want to have you know he's he's a brilliant guy there's no question already not easy meat you know and and so it was a game in a way you know he's funny he's self-deprecating and he has that the expansive ability to wait that the state always has you know to allow people to to let off steam and and it's wonderful the way he he'll tell us about about how Kashmir is managed for example that he says you know we deliberately took the decision that every time someone is killed when these hundreds of thousands of people come out let them come out pull the army back let them let off steam and then they'll all go home you know and the the other thing he talks about is how when the insurrection began and it didn't have any leadership how do you how do you know who to watch you fund newspapers against yourself and then the voices will emerge then the resistance will have a face then you know who to get you know so he's a he's pretty brilliant guy you know and I'm reaching I'm reaching to I'm reaching is a captain a major in the Indian Army who then eventually has to flee and guess where he comes to the United States but he he's he's also a creation of the system you know he's not just a crazed killer he's someone who's given the latitude to do that work right anyplace you know and then they're fed up of him they farm him off you know I mean you've talked about how in order to write your characters you have to love all of your characters which would include these two men who are scary each have their own different ways major Emmerich Singh because he tortures and kills a lot of people and Garson Hobart because he seems to represent the security apparatus the guy who's not going to get his hands dirty but he's observing everything from afar as you're saying was it hard to love these these characters love is a complicated thing right I mean you when when I say love them it doesn't mean love them like you know a lover but love them because you lavish attention as a writer on them and that is the form of love or right to give the character you know so yes it was very important for me and I and I I mean it would be silly right if we just loved the lovely ones what would that mean well I wrote an essay for the New York Times a few months ago where I said I have to find empathy even for Donald Trump that was very hard for me to do still remains hard for me to do but maybe it would be too boring to have him in a novel right you can't beat the reality show that is the presidency but the these two characters this one I keep talking about them because I think they are very interesting you know they they they meet conclusion today could I read a little paragraph of Garson Hobart so that you you know who he is sure I can find it quickly oh yeah so this is this is Garson Hobart he's the only Titor who's in the first person he insisted on being in the first person his serenity over me as a citizen so he's talking about he's talking about the time and he was a student you know in 1984 and he says for a few days after the assassination of mrs. Gandhi mobs led by her supporters and acolytes killed thousands of six in Delhi homes shops taxi stands with Sikh drivers whole localities where Sikhs lived were burned to the ground plumes of black smoke climbed into the sky from fires all over the city from my window seat in a bus on a bright beautiful day I saw a mob lynch an old Sikh gentleman they pulled off his turban tore out his beard and necklace him South Africa style with a burning tire while people around stood baying their encouragement I hurried home and waited for the shock of what I had witnessed to hit me oddly it never did the only shock I felt was shocked at my own equanimity I was disgusted by the stupidity the futility of it all but somehow I was not shocked it could be that my familiarity with the gory history of the city I had grown up in had something to do with it It was as though the operation whose presence we in India are all constantly and acutely aware of had suddenly surfaced snarling from the deep and had behaved exactly as we expected it to once its appetite was sated it sank back into its subterranean lair and normality closed over it maddened killers retracted their fangs and returned to their daily chores normality in our part of the world is a bit like a boiled egg it's humdrum surface conceals at its heart a yoke of egregious violence it is a constant anxiety about that violence our memory of its past Labor's and our dread of its future manifestations that lays down the rules for how a people as complex and as diverse as we are continue to coexist continue to live together tolerate each other and from time to time murder one another as long as the center holds as long as the yolk doesn't run we'll be fine in moments of crisis it helps to take the long view so this is even before he's become a bureaucrat you know so part of the plot of the novel is that Garson Hobart Tilo and Musa who becomes one of the Kashmir freedom fighters all went to college together and there's a moment towards the conclusion of the novel where Musa and Garson Hobart actually meet decades after their college years and you know obviously they're now on opposing sides of this political divide and Musa makes a prediction he says what what India is doing to Kashmir is going to lead to the self-destruction of India and this thought stays with Garson Hobart act you know and I'm wondering is is Musa deluded is is is that actually what you think will happen the internal contradictions of India will lead to its own destruction well you know I mean in some way it's already happening because India is a country which from the day it became independent from British rule August 1947 there has not been a single day when the Indian Army has not been deployed within its own borders against quote-unquote its own people you know whether it's I Sam Nagaland Mizoram or Kashmir Punjab Gujarat Hyderabad it's constantly at war and again I mean if you look at who those people are it's always indigenous people Christians Muslims Sikhs the lids you know so there's this very militarized upper caste state at war but now what Musa is talking about is the fact that there are two there are two conflicts this book has in in it contains in it one is the conflict in Kashmir and the other is the conflict in central India which you saw the the battle against these big mining companies the forests are full of paramilitary and what has happened is very interesting that in Kashmir which is on the border the army for now close to 30 years is gradually becoming an administrative force like the police you know corrupt bloated and in bastard the police are becoming like the army you know gunships helicopters grenades you know bombing burning villages all that so gradually every institution is becoming completely corroded completely communal eyes and this is what Musa is talking about you know the fact that I mean for the first time in the history of India for judges of the Supreme Court came out and did a press conference saying that democracy is just last the the four people that you saw being flogged in the film they were flogged two two years ago it led to a huge amount of unrest and the people who flogged them have recently been released and they flogged them again they fought the same man again same manner one of the men committed suicide because he was so humiliated in the auditory the killers who were convicted and sentenced to death for the mass murder of Muslims in Gujarat are all being released now in time for the next elections so you see history books are being rewritten everything is you know slowly imploding in ways which which come from being able to absorb this kind of violence while continuing to maintain the hypocrisy of democracy you know I mean there are other places where there's more violence but they don't pretend you know I couldn't help when I was reading the Ministry of utmost happiness and you know reading the part about the self-destruction and I'm hearing you talk right now thinking could describe the United States in some ways in terms of the erosions of democracy for example and the incapacity of the majority to see some of the things that this country is doing both internally within its own borders and externally which is even more invisible to so many people in this country so going back at that idea seeing and not seeing there's a lot of willful not seeing in this country as well I mean I don't spend much time here but I can see some parallels you know but at the same time I'd be wary of I'd be wary of making direct comparisons you know because in a way what is happening in India right now is something that was set into motion at the turn of the 18th and 19th century you know sorry the 19th and 20th century and now from the 1920s there's been this organization called the RSS to which Modi belongs it's an organization inspired by Mussolini and Hitler openly Modi and many of his ministers belong it is the most powerful organization in India today it has hundreds of thousands of volunteers it is not the political party that makes decisions it is this organization and it has sort of compromised all these big institutions of democracy you know so this what I see here is is is elite institutions unable to deal with lunatic in the White House like it don't have the protocols so you know to to take him out out of that place you know but but all these elite institutions are angry with him whereas in India the elite institutions are with this program at the moment you know so it's you're seeing a situation where a hundred and fifty million Muslims are being ghettoized the economic base has been eroded you're seeing a very militaristic police society you know you have laws like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act or the unlawful activities Prevention Act where now there are thousands of people in jail you know I've never been so anxious about what's going on there you know now we have elections coming up in the year and you can see that the government is trying to polarize trying to create a situation where I mean none of us really know how to respond because whatever you do it depends the polarization whatever you say it deepens the polar if a man has been hacked to death and that video has been put up on YouTube people are collecting money for the defense legal defense of the murderer the little girl who was raped in Jammu she was raped she's held in a temple she was bludgeoned to death but it wasn't just these five men who did it there are thousands of people including women who are marching in support of that you know so that is the the thing that one can't wrap one's head around now you know the rod that is setting in where three people - God men and then the rapist of this little girl you had to have locked down in states because people are going to protest because the men who are convicted of rape are being supported by by by their followers you know how do you think about that you've been confronting these political issues in India since at least 1998 when the end of imagination came out and you were dealing with India's nuclear ization it's been 20 years where you've been actively political as a writer as an intellectual as an activist and I'm just wondering if it's exhausting because I think about something that Pankaj Mishra wrote in The Guardian you know he was saying well people in the West audiences in the West expect writers from these so-called third world countries or don't even call that but non-western countries to be political you know we look at other countries and we see these terrible things happening and and the West expects writers be political but Mishra points out I think he's right that in places like the United States and England writers have the luxury of not being political that's a whole separate issue but do you feel that this this is something that that you have to confront do this this demand to be explicitly political and is it exhausting it's not exhausting it's it's it's exhilarating you know it's important to be in the world and it's not as if I do it as a duty you know and when I want to withdraw I do as I did when I was writing in the last few years when I was writing this you know it's it's not all all about current affairs you know it's about deepening your understanding and so to me it would be exhausting to keep quiet and to you know sit it will be exhausting and it would be terribly boring you know I was just speaking to some young students who asked me how do you deal with the you know the trolling in the hatred which many of us have to deal with I said you know imagine if they liked me like horrible with that so you got to be up for it I'm up for it you know it's not it's not we're not trying to be cute here you know so it's a it's it's exhilarating because when you you know for instance when I write the political essays they are immediately translated into so many Indian languages I remember when I wrote walking with the comrades I finished copy editing it at midnight in the office of Outlook and I came to speak in San Francisco and while I was speaking people had already made it into a book and were distributing it at the back saying with permission of the author I was like really but it's a it's it's it's like it's it's it belongs to everybody you know so people asked me how do you get feedback for your work I said I just stand at the traffic lights you know it's so it's a it's it's it's it's it's the way it should be like an awesome and people and it's like a direct shot into the veins you know there's no arbitral arbiters in the middle you're not sitting around waiting for good reviews or awards or whatever it is you know those are some I mean those don't matter that much so I think someone called you a writer activist in one of your interviews I don't know what it was but you said no you objected this term writer activist because it seems to apply imply that a writer should not be an activist and you're identifying yourself as one of these I said that I just wondered where this word activist came from like who started it you know because there was a time when writers that's what writers did they they engaged with society they argued they thought they were political and this word activist is a slightly strange word don't you think I mean I I said it's like calling me a sofa bed why why does it it suggests that writers should be in some nursery you know playing with this stuff toys while the real world goes to work you know so you think that there was a time in the past when writers on the average were more engaged than they are now whether it's India or I wonder what it is about you know but yeah sure I mean maybe it's maybe at the time when our concerns were whether or not we would be beheaded we were more serious than when the concerns are whether or not we'll be on the bestseller list or you live between literary festivals and bestseller lists or something like that you know where the market has begun to play a part in you know even in genres of writing like you're quickly wanting to say what is this book about can you tell me in three sentences you know which shelf should I put it in and so on so I had this very funny experience at a Book Fair in India where the algebra of infinite justice was in the math section to Empire was in the Travel section listening to grasshoppers in the entomology section god of small things was in religious section you know maybe on that note if you wanted to question can't beat that answer one of the questions I think Paul has a few but don't answer me because the questions come from there sorry if you ask me I answer you okay all right well the first question for you yet really okay how do you engage people to tell you their stories and the context is my parents are also Vietnamese refugees but I don't know this story well specifically in the Vietnamese context all you really have to do is listen because Vietnamese people can't shut up at least that's my experience growing up the problem is of course that they are not necessarily telling you the stories or the answers that you want to hear or they're not responding to the questions you want to ask because they're not listening back so I'm sorry I have problems with Vietnamese people you know I know them very well but seriously I mean the idea of listening is absolutely crucial to to being a writer whether it happens to be you listening to someone next to you on the airplane you know you you can a real exposure to human nature the realization that most people want to talk but they don't want to ask questions and listen and likewise in the context of growing up in an immigrant or refugee environment I think it is very difficult because it often is the case that your parents don't want to tell you what you want to what you want to learn specifically but you listen long enough and you'll hear something and sometimes you hear something in the absence of them saying something I mean this silence is as crucial as what they're talking about and so being able to understand where that silence is coming from is important too I remember when I was 11 years old my mother told me you know Paul we have two ears and one mouth I think probably because I wasn't listening I think this question is for both of you can you share a hopeful story I could just stop there that's a pretty good question could you share can you share a hopeful story of successful activism against great odds adversary for this time of challenge and polarization I can can you I hope so no I mean for example once again the the people that you saw in the footage you know the the militants they are I mean there's a guerrilla army in that forest 40% of them are women armed guerillas and they are fighting the takeover of their lands by huge mining companies now they've actually pushed them back they may not I don't know how long that will be but you you do you are seeing right now the poorest people in the world stopping the richest corporations in their tracks you know and people in India who are fond of sitting in the televisions in their television studios and talking about Gandhi and talking about non-violence they you know call these people terrorists often and and once I was speaking to a roomful of guardians and I said look some of them have been dressed as Gandhi so imagine I said see if you're living in a village for days walk a deep forest village for days walk from the main road and a thousand paramilitary come and burn the village and rape the women what form of non-violence are you prescribing here you know like should they go on a hunger strike they're already starving what should they boycott them nothing to buy or own to boycott you know and non-violence is fine political theater but you must have an audience they don't have an audience they don't have a superstar they so so it is a tactic you know so to me there is a widespread resistance to all forms of dispossession going on in India right now some of it is militant some of it is not but all of it is tactical and it really matters and it does sometimes succeed or slow things down I'll take a slightly different tack you know talk about in the American context and talk about how you know I think for many of us who are people of color or who are immigrants or refugees we feel that this is a real moment of crisis because there's rising xenophobia and anti-refugee and anti-immigrant feeling in this country and it is bad but this is not new because it's a cyclical it's only been in the last 50 or 60 years where this country has actually been open to a more equitable Immigration and Refugee policy and have welcomed people from from different kinds of countries here outside of outside of Europe and so I look back upon history and think we actually have made a difference I mean the various kinds of social and political movements that have come before have actually shifted the landscape so for example when I was at high school I went to a primarily white high school the handful of us who were of Asian descent and we knew we were different and every day for lunch we gather in a corner of the campus and we call ourselves the Asian invasion you know by the time I finished college I was part of the asian-american movement and that that that idea of just this one particular movement goes back to this notion that that Asians in this country have been attacked have been discriminated against I've been subjected all kinds of violence all kinds of exclusion since the night the middle of the 19th century and yet out of that they were able to build a variety of social and political movements that coalesced so that now you know we have something called Asian Americans which is progress in a lot of ways so that's the hopeful story but with every progress also changes and and setbacks so now you know in the 1960s becoming an Asian American was about being anti racist anti-war anti imperialist but solidarities with decolonization movements and other peoples of color in this country and now that may be still be true for some but a lot of asian-americans are against affirmative action and they're against further immigration and they're against refugees so the political shifts have opened up other kinds of political battles that we still need to fight and that's that's that's kind of disappointing but it's also an outcome of the positive results of the struggles have been happening for the past century and a half - that we're now free to be jerks [Laughter] well I I have a question here which is the shortest question ever asked it's it's just one word Trump question well I was speaking at the Brooklyn Public Library yesterday and somebody asked me this question in a longer format but what I said was that you know one of the dangers that we do face today is for us to get so anxious about Trump and so anxious about Modi that we forget that they emerged through a sewage system and we got to look at the we have to we have to understand that you know to over personalized things also doesn't get us anywhere you know he he uses up so much oxygen so much oxygen you know and so I don't know maybe there should be a committee of doctors or something's put in charge of the common tree and then everyone else can do you know I mean imagine imagine just losing sight of a system that created him you know he's like III think he's like come out of the toxic effluent of a system you know which neglected whole populations and then he emerges as their savior Modi on the other hand is the system you know so they are not the same in any way but still I would not I mean to me as I said the RSS is the system there you know they can replace Modi with someone it's any minute but so I would say we should we should we should allocate us a little space for Trump but we shouldn't spend all our energy talking about him all the time well I would say you know besides Trump question mark the other part of the question should be Obama question mark because I think a lot of for example it's how about writers a lot of writers have become radicalized in the age of Trump they're shocked shocked that we could have a country that could produce Trump and they should be shocked but they weren't shocked that we had a country that could produce Obama list yeah and so for me when we talk about the system it's important to understand that that Trump is is not a surprise I mean he's an outcome of that America is designed to produce America has been Trump since the founding of this country and it goes it goes in cycles you know and so we are completely a country that can elect President Obama in one cycle and President Trump in another cycle these are both facets of the American contradiction that are born out of genocide and slavery and and the desire to forget those kinds of things which leads us to lionize President Obama but there are both facets of a system that you know our part of American imperialism our part of an American military-industrial complex that you know Indian Army deploys within its own borders the US Army and Air Force the military deploys on eight hundred plus bases around the world we're much more dangerous than India and Modi I think but focusing on Trump does allow us to forget that by blaming him when actually it's like you're saying the system and simply electing a Democratic president in the next cycle which I hope we do if you just look at how many I mean Vietnam Korea all of that even just now post 9/11 how many countries have been destroyed and what is this myth about radical Islam you know I mean Syria is not radical Islam Libya's not a radical Islam Iraq was not radical Islam the radical Islam is is the best friend and radical Islam is the enemy that they would like to have but actually what is being destroyed is something else I really I'm going to put you a tiny bit on the spot you were aware that that Viet is a writer and I was thinking that you might ask him a question about his work well I I would like to tell well if it's a question or if you'd like to speak about it but I was I thought that your book was fabulous and I I was just so happy the part where you write about well the hamlet which is Apocalypse Now but I think you know when you say when you say he who has the means of production owns the means of representation and that has been so important in constructing a completely false narrative of the history we're talking about so I what if you want to talk about that a little more well that was a very important passage in the book for me and my publicist of the audience you make sure you wrote down that she said my novel is fabulous okay just there all these witnesses okay but that line is very important because I think that one of the problems of being a writer in this country is that it's easy to lower yourself into believing that your representation is gonna make a difference and it can you know your novel or your film can make a difference and all that kind of stuff but unless you actually own the means of production the difference that you make is only gonna go so far right so for those of us who imagine ourselves as political writers or committed writers and I fantasize about myself in that way I always have to sort of think about that other dimension that in order for a true transformation to take place we have to have we have to own the means of production as well there's not going to be true justice in representation until there's true justice in production and that's where revolutions actually take place and so in the novel I just wanted to deal with that in just one industry which is the Hollywood industry and of course what I'm talking about in the late 1970s is still with us today in the contemporary moment every just if we're talking about Hollywood that here we see basically the the they won the war they want the war it's it's the it's it's the US doesn't need an official Ministry of propaganda it's got Hollywood yeah that's advancing this kind of American ideology we don't need Hollywood producers forced to make propaganda they just already agree with the same ideology that is inhabits the Pentagon and that's what I wanted to eliminate but what I I must tell you is that in India you know and especially in Kerala which was of course the first ever communist government in the world it played it had such a huge part in our imagination on the other side you know so I remember the first debate that I ever did when I must have been nine or something and it was all about the running dogs of imperialism you know Vietnam the the chant in the 1960s was amarga to Markham Gummy's Village amarga my village or Village amarga to Marga the now Vietnam you know so there's a lot of the I mean I grew up with the other side of the propaganda if you like but it was it was I was enraged by a epic Apocalypse Now you know and and I remember you probably remember the beginning of the god of small things is about you know a little country for the east with rivers rice fields and communists was being bombed enough to cover it with six inches of steel sigh I did grow up with this idea that I was a you know to it was but but but I I mean whatever you know they have their means of production but your book is very very important well III think about how in ministry of utmost happiness I think that you're talking about the Kashmir revolution but you're also sort of foreshadowing some of the possible outcomes of that that you know there there there is this this way in which all revolutions and it's you know inspire you know I'm inspired people all over the world and the Vietnamese Vietnamese Revolution inspire people all over the world and but one of the great sadnesses of that is is the outcome of that revolution wasn't so great yeah you know I mean for the imagination of the global dot the Vietnam Vietnam is frozen as this moment of revolutionary inspiration in the actual Vietnam the country is far from revolutionary today you know it's a hotbed of global capitalism in which the Communist Party is basically a capitalist party and so I think there is some some some morning in the ministry but most happiness about that because you talk about how the the freedom fighters the line is ever hardening and ever shifting further and further left and there's no more room for compromise and I can sort of see and then he says you know first victory and then inhalation of ourselves because we will destroy ourselves in the fight even if we win you will destroy yourself and we will destroy ourselves and yet it's so important to believe that revolution is possible you know and and one of the saddest things in India now is just that the idea of all over the world I mean the idea of justice that huge and beautiful idea of justice has shrunk to a discourse on human rights which is not the same thing the the shriveling of language itself is a horror no couple more questions before before you we end with Aaron that a reading a passage and closing what influence has salman rushdie had on your work well Salman Rushdie is a person who I mean I do think that he's you know there are books he's written which have been greatly influential not necessarily to me but he's a fine writer you know but but for me language for example when one of the things I'll be doing when I when I go back from here is next month disabled lecture on literary translation in which language you know historically people have made fun of Indian speaking English forgetting how ridiculous they might sound if they try to speak Hindi or Telugu or anything you know and so for me language I have a slightly different approach to to the beauty of people who try and express themselves in other languages they stretch and bend the language and the grace of their mistakes expands language and makes it beautiful you know so for me the Ministry of our post happiness is is a book imagined in several languages even if it's written in English so but I but I do think that rusty I I really admire his ambitions his literary ambitions you know I love to more questions describe your utopian society it begins in a graveyard with the guest house well in some ways in if you look at the if you look at the people who live in the Janet Guest House in the graveyard you look at who lives there who dies there and who's buried there it is a revolution and a utopia you know in a very small delicate and unground way you know utopias are easy to imagine and hard to achieve they're not meant to be achieved but even the aspiration to get there basically I mean have a little five-year-old son and I you know we teach him and all the other parents teach their kids sharing an empathy or hope they're teaching their kids sharing an empathy maybe not all of them are succeeding but but sharing an empathy these are very these are things that are easy to say and you know you enforce it upon children but extremely difficult to enforce in a society or to encourage in a society where you know we we are not inclined to share and to empathize very often if we can somehow make that happen both of the level of emotions but economics as well that's no edges closer to utopia maybe so in closing in terms of questions before you read this question which is really for both of you once again and comes back to the question of listening but in a different way I'm truly passionately interested myself in the in the question of listening being often on the stage I think one of the most important things is actually to listen which is so much harder than talking you wouldn't know it from this moment when I'm talking to you but here it goes you have made the basis of your art the practice of listening do you ever feel unheard yourself every time I go home to see my parents well I think I think on a on a serious level you know one of the big problems that that is going to that has begun to face us but it's going to become more serious than me know is the way today real news and fake news are like to fizzy drinks available across the counter and you can buy whichever one you want you know so everybody can can make you into whatever they want they can put words in your mouth they can you know so whether it's being unheard or whether it's being you know deliberately deliberately misinterpreted or just outright Lee invented you know these are things that are going to be pretty terrifying where for example the let's look at let's look at the rape of the eight-year-old girl that happened a month ago there within a few months there is going to be a debate about whether it happened at all it was just propaganda did the Gujarat massacre actually happen oh it's just lies you know there's so so the the danger is even worse than being unheard you know and I think we don't really know in any way how to deal with what is coming in terms of technology you know before we hear Arundhati Roy read could we both think yet and Aaron that I ruined that hey this is your moment so this is going to be a very very short reading just to give you a slightly more you know the book is not just only politics so this is a chapter called the tenant the spotted owl it on the streetlight ducked and bobbed with the delicacy and immaculate manners of a Japanese businessman he had an unobstructed view through the window of the small bear room and the odd bear woman on the bed she had an unobstructed view of him to some nights she bobbed back and said Moshi Moshi which was all the Japanese she knew even indoors the walls radiated a bullying unyielding heat thus low ceiling fan stilled the scorched air layering it with fine syndra dust the room showed signs of celebration the balloons tied to the window grill bumped into each other this ultra ly softened and shriveled by the heat in the center on a low painted stool was a cake with bright strawberry icing sugar flowers a candle with a child wick a matchbox and a few used matchsticks on the cake it said happy birthday mr. bean the cake had been cut a small piece eaten the icing had melted and dribbled onto the silver foil covered cardboard cake base and so making off with crumbs larger than themselves black ants pink crumbs the baby whose birthday and baptism ceremonies had been simultaneously celebrated and successfully concluded was fast asleep her kidnapper who went by the name of s Tillett mo was awake and conscious treating she could hear her hair growing it sounded like something crumbling a burnt thing crumbling cold toast Mott's crisped on a lightbulb she remembered reading somewhere that even after people died the hair and nails kept growing like Starlight traveling through the universe long after the stars themselves had died like cities fizzy effervescent simulating the illusion of life while the planet they had plundered died around them she thought of the city at night of cities at night discarded constellations of old stars fallen from the sky rearranged on earth in patterns and pathways and towers invaded by weevils that have learned to walk upright a Weedle philosopher with a grave manner and a sharp mustache was teaching a class reading aloud from a book admiring young weevils strained to catch each word that spilled from his wise we will lips Nietzsche believed that if pity were to become the core of ethics misery would become contagious and Happiness an object of suspicion the youngsters scratched away on their little notepads Supan Hauer on the other hand believed that pity is an ought to be the supreme we will virtue belong before them Socrates asked the key question why should we be moral he had lost a leg in weevil world war for this professor and carried a cane his remaining five legs were in excellent condition a Bosch airbrush graffiti sprayed on the back wall of his classroom said evil we will always make the cut other creatures crowded into the already crowded classroom an alligator with a human skin purse a grasshopper with good intentions a fish on a fast a fox with a flag a maggot with a manifesto a neocon newt an icon iguana a communist cow and owl with an alternative a lizard on TV hello and welcome you're watching lizard news at nine there's been a blizzard on Lizard Island the baby was the beginning of something this much the kidnapper knew her bones had whispered this to her that night the sad night the concern night the night the aforementioned night the night hereinafter referred to as the night when she made her move on the pavement and her bones were nothing if not reliable informants the baby was mr. bean returned returned that is not to her mr. bean the first was never hers but to the world mr. bean ii when she was grown to be a lady with settle accounts and square the books mr. bean would turn the tide there was hope yet for the evil weevil world [Music] thank you [Applause] [Music] [Music]

Channel: The New York Public Library

Views: 4,528

Keywords: Arundhati Roy, Viet Thanh Nguyen, LIVE from the NYPL, New York Public Library, The Sympathizer, The Ministry of Upmost Happiness

Id: jc6a1owQEYA

Length: 94min 27sec (5667 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 09 2018