Joseph-Roy-4/6

Arundnati Roy,when speaking about the unfavorable political climate in India, expressed hope for an anarchist spirit. The exchange is as follows:

Zinn: But I liked what you said about the...that in India there's a kind of inherent anarchism which will save India.

Roy: We hope. I think it's like... trying to corporatize India is like trying to put an iron grid on the ocean. I just think even though Fascists are not disciplined, they're...hopefully they'll mess it up.

Roy became aware of the need for political disturbances/awareness from a very young age. She comments that her mother(who married a man outside of tradition)  “ made the mistake of marrying him and then divorcing him and came back to the village. And so we grew up sort of outside the realm of all the protections that that society chose to offer its members. So from a very young age, one was aware of the fact that you were not going to be given those protections.”

If we look at the text, we can see a similar ostracization towards the character of Ammu. Roy writes, on page 256(of my version), that Ammu is “The Unmix-able Mix—the infinite tenderness of motherhood, the reckless rage of a suicide bomber.”

Ammu refuses prostitution, and is shamed by the patriarchal community. This is a label she cannot escape( i.e,  after Velutha’s arrest, Ammu is called a veshya by the police.) Ammu is seen as a wild card. She is not the traditional, doting mother or wife. She is someone who is attempting to transcend the ‘double colonization(introduced by Kirsten Holst Petersen and Anna Rutherford’ of colonalism and indigenous patriacharal structures. Roy writes of Ammu on page 44: “They senses somehow that she lived in the penumbral shadows between two worlds, just beyond the grasp of their power. That a woman that they had already damned, now had little left to lose, and could therefore be dangerous.”

Protections may have to be sacrificed, but it is ultimately worth it. At the heart of the matter, Roy is a sentimentalist in the age of irony. She is not a kind of sentimentalist that is content to learn coping mechanisms and accept things as they are. She is the other kind of sentimentalist: the kind that risks losing power in order to gain strength. The last statement in her interview is the perfect mix of sentiment and sober thought:

To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget.

 Beauty and truth are not all around us. They must be sought out, and chased down. If literature is to be the oppostite of a nuclear bomb(as Roy states), it must properly cultivate its explosive power.