Finding Justice with Arundhati Roy

Over the last few years Arundhati Roy has become a powerful and important global citizen writing and speaking out against the excesses of corporate globalization, privatization of essential resources, and United States imperialism. Naomi Klein says "with her writing and her actions, Roy has placed herself in opposition to anyone who treats people as collateral damage – of a mega-dam, a terrorist attack, or a military invasion," and Roy has described herself as "a black woman from India speaking about America to an American audience."

Roy was catapulted to fame in 1997 when she won the Booker Prize for her first novel, "The God of Small Things." She is trained as an architect, worked as a production designer and has written the screenplays for two films. In 2002 she was convicted of contempt of court by the Supreme Court in New Delhi for accusing the court of attempting to silence protests against the Narmada Dam project, but received only a symbolic sentence of one day in prison.

Roy has also become known internationally for her literate and powerful political essays in books like "Power Politics," "War Talk," "The Checkbook and the Cruise Missile" (interviews with David Barsamian), and her latest, "An Ordinary Person's Guide to Empire."

Terrence McNally: You are now both a writer and an activist. How did your work and your role in the world evolve?

Arundhati Roy: I usually shy away from defining myself as one thing or another, because I always find that limiting, and it doesn't really matter. People look at it from the outside, and they see first I studied architecture and then I worked at cinema and then I wrote a novel and now I write political essays. It could seem as though I'm really doing very different things, but in fact, right from the time that I was studying architecture or even earlier, this political way of looking at the world began. These are just each a means of expressing that politics differently. The essence of what one is looking at is deeply political, but how one chooses to express that can change – if for no other reason than that one wants to keep experimenting and not bore oneself to death, you know.

I understand. When you found yourself writing essays and speaking in front of thousands and on the air, people asking you less about literature than about the world situation – how has that transition occurred and what does it say to you?

Actually, you know, I did write non-fictional essays before I wrote "The God Of Small Things." It's just that I wasn't that well-known a person. When people define me as a writer and an activist, I say that sounds like a "sofa-cum-bed" or something. In fact, isn't literature supposed to be placed at the heart of the world? What you do and what you look at and what you write about, whether it's personal or social or political, whether it's about an insane aunt or whether it's about the invasion of a country – I don't think you can avoid looking at it as a comment on society and on yourself... more on your self.

No writer can dodge the glare of literature. Most people see it as something I'm sacrificing in order to do something else, but I don't see it that way. I'm a pretty instinctive person and I know that when I'm ready to write another novel, I will write it. I'm not suffering through this process of writing non-fiction, even though the act of writing fiction is a more joyful act than these essays which address very searing situations. You do feel that they're wrenched out of you in some way, but at the same time they're both writing and I don't think I've ever not been a writer. That is my medium and that's what I do. I'm not endorsing any action or any kind of politics. I'm not a football star that's endorsing the fact that we shouldn't cut down the rainforest or something. I'm not external to myself in this. I'm doing what I do.