An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire.

An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire

By Arundhati Roy (South End Press, 2004)

Arundhati Roy pulls no punches. She is not the sort to beat around the bush. Roy's aim, when she speaks to packed audiences or writes her incisive essays, is a straightforward one: to expose injustice, to explain why this or that indignity is being visited upon this or that community, and then to exhort us to mobilize, unite and fight back.

It's an approach that works.

In the seven short years since the publication of Roy's award-winning novel The God of Small Things, the Indian writer, essayist and activist has become a widely-admired left luminary, an unwavering, high-profile champion of the dispossessed and the marginalized.

Just how has Roy managed to attract this kind of respect and acclaim? An answer clearly emerges from the pages of her latest book, An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire. It's a collection of seven talks and essays delivered or published over a thirteen-month period, from March 2003 to April 2004. Roy's best weapons are her words, and to read her--and ideally hear her speak--is to understand the power and importance of words and ideas to the evolving global justice movement.

Many of the points elaborated in Roy's book--about the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the growing consolidation of media ownership, and the privatization of public resources worldwide--will be familiar to people on the left. But there's plenty of less-disseminated information and insight to chew on. For instance, at a time when many progressive thinkers stress transnational phenomena, Roy emphasizes the importance of nation-states: corporations, she notes, need and rely on repressive governments "to quell the mutinies in the servants' quarters." Indeed, creating a good investment climate is impossible without the intervention (or at least the threat of it) of the state.

While U.S.-based activists have mobilized around the draconian USA PATRIOT ACT, Roy points out that other countries have followed the U.S.'s legislative lead. Civil liberties in India, for example, are threatened daily by the Prevention of Terrorism Act, "a versatile, hold-all law" that's being used to terrorize Muslims and poor people, to detain local activists without trial, and to stifle dissent of all kinds. Last March, Roy took part in a people's tribunal on POTA; the testimony she heard about torture at police stations was chilling.

But Roy's intention is not simply to inveigh against the status quo. Her eye is always on the prize: How can those on the side of justice and equality actually win? What's the quickest, most efficient way to overthrow the structures and policies we've come to despise?

Roy is not interested in feel-good activism for its own sake. She's especially disturbed by what she calls "crisis production": the left strategy of cooking up crises that the mainstream media, with its "endless appetite for theater," will notice and report on. Instead, Roy urges progressives to get real--"aim at real targets, wage real battles, and inflict real damage." Since the goal is to disable Empire, the targets should be its working parts, and Roy relishes the idea of targeting its corporate parts, the businesses directly benefiting from the trampling of defenseless nations and peoples. Boycotting them and forcing them out of business, she asserts, would be an excellent start.

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Specific tactics aside, Arundhati Roy's overarching desire is to reclaim democracy from those who have made it "a hollow word, a pretty shell." How might that be accomplished? The only way, says Roy, "is to begin a process of constant questioning, permanent provocation, and continuous public conversation between citizens and the State." She has already done a great deal to move that process forward.

Reviewed by C.S. Soong

C.S. Soong hosts the public affairs show "Against the Grain" on KPFA (Pacifica) Radio in the San Francisco Bay Area (againstthegrain.org).