#30: What She Said
Plus, "Mother Mary Comes To Me" by Arundhati Roy
This month, in lieu of the usual programming, I’m sharing an excerpt from a recent speech delivered by the extraordinary Arundhati Roy. Why? Because she says it better than I ever can (video, courtesy of The Wire, follows).
I have something to say because I’m my mother’s daughter, and because I need to straighten my shoulders and say this. It’s a little statement about the war that is about to consume the world. I know we’re here today to talk about “Mother Mary Comes To Me,” but how can we end the day without talking about those beautiful cities, Tehran, Isfahan, and Beirut, that are up in flames?
In keeping with my mother Mary’s spirit of candor and impoliteness, I would like to use this platform to say something about the unprovoked and illegal attack by the United States and Israel on Iran. It is, of course, a continuation of the U.S.-Israeli genocide in Gaza. It’s the same old genocideers using the same old playbook, murdering women and children, bombing hospitals, carpet-bombing cities, and then playing the victim.
But Iran is not Gaza. The theater of this new war could expand to consume the whole world. We’re on the brink of nuclear calamity and economic collapse. The same country that bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki could be readying itself to bomb one of the most ancient civilizations in the world. There will be other occasions to speak of this in detail. So here, let me simply say that I stand with Iran unequivocally.
Any regimes that need changing, including the U.S., Israel, and ours, need to be changed by the people, not by some bloated, lying, cheating, greedy, resource-grabbing, bomb-dropping imperial power and its allies who are trying to bully the whole world into submission. Iran is standing up to them, while India cowers.
I am ashamed of how gutless and how spineless our government has been. Long ago we were a poor country of very poor people, but we had pride. We had dignity. Today, we are a rich country with very poor, unemployed people who are fed on a diet of hatred, poison, and falsehoods instead of real food. We have lost pride, we have lost dignity, we have lost courage, except in our movies. What sort of people are we whose elected government cannot stand up and condemn the U.S. when it kidnaps and assassinates heads of state in other countries? Would we like that done to us?
For our Prime Minister to have traveled to Israel and embraced Benjamin Netanyahu just days before he attacked Iran? What does it mean? For our government to sign a groveling trade deal with the U.S. that literally sells our farmers and textile industry down the river only days before the U.S. Supreme Court declared Trump’s tariffs illegal? What does it mean? For us to now be given “permission” to buy oil from Russia? What does it mean? What else do we need permission for? To go to the bathroom? To take a day off work? To visit our mothers? Every day U.S. politicians, including Donald Trump, mock and demean us publicly, and our Prime Minister laughs his famous vacuous laugh and hugs on.
At the height of the genocide in Gaza, the government of India sent thousands of poor Indian workers to Israel to replace expelled Palestinian workers. Today, while Israelis take shelter in bunkers, it is being reported that those Indian workers are not allowed into those shelters. What the hell does this mean? Who has put us into this absolutely humiliating, shameless, disgusting place in the world?
Some of you will remember how we used to joke about that florid, overblown Chinese Communist term, “running dog of imperialism.” But right now, I’d say it describes us well, except, of course, in our twisted, toxic movies in which our celluloid heroes strut on, winning phantom war after war, dumb and over-muscled, fueling our insatiable bloodlust with their gratuitous violence and their shit for brains.
Book 30: “Mother Mary Comes To Me” by Arundhati Roy
Memoirs aren’t usually my thing. I say usually because there are many exceptions, foremost among them this new book by Arundhati Roy. I’ll be honest, I’m an Arundhati fangirl through and through; she is India’s conscience, her child and lover and increasingly, her mother. The one time I got to meet her in person I lost my capacity for speech and became a fuzzy babbling ball of smiles. But I have read her and re-read her over the years, her words do wonderful things to my brain, she lights up the world in glorious, funny, heartbreaking ways, and I agree with almost everything she says (the speech above included).
On to the book. “Mother Mary Comes To Me” is a phenomenal one. Though it has been marketed as a memoir, Roy herself claims that it should be treated as a novel. It is her truth, not the truth. A lot of media coverage I’ve seen focuses on the book’s treatment of Mary Roy’s problematic side—she was a deeply flawed mother—for me, though, that’s not nearly as interesting (or important) as Arundhati’s commitment to complexity. She undermines herself constantly and refuses to simplify things, and how!
As in here:
Mrs. Roy taught me how to think, then raged against my thoughts. She taught me to be free and raged against my freedom. She taught me to write and resented the author I became.
Or here:
I have thought of my own life as a footnote to the things that really matter. Never tragic, often hilarious. Or perhaps this is the lie I tell myself. Maybe I pitched my tent where the wind blows strongest hoping it would blow my heart clean out of my body.
Nothing is just one thing in Roy’s eyes. As in the book, so in the world. This is the kind of thinking that can put you to sleep and/or smash your head in. In the hands of a master like Roy, this unflinching depiction of reality becomes beautiful, impossibly so. Here is writing that can save the world.
Thank you for sharing this.