Indian novelist, essayist, and activist
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В онези ранни смътни години, за които едва си спомняха, когато животът беше пълен с множество начала, но липсваха краища, когато всичко им се струваше завинаги, Еста и Рахел заедно се възприемаха като мен, а поотделно, насаме, като Ние или Нас. Сякаш бяха някаква странна порода сиамски близнаци, разделени физически, но с обща самоличност.
Сега, след толкова години, Рахел още пази спомена как една нощ се бе събудила от собствения си смях, породен от някакъв смешен сън на Еста.
Помни и други неща, които не би трябвало да помни.
In those early amorphous years when memory had only just begun, when life was full of Beginnings and no Ends, and Everything was Forever, Esthappen and Rahel thought of themselves together as Me, and separately, individually, as We or Us. As though they were a rare breed of Siamese twins, physically separate, but with joint identities.
Baby Kochamma had installed a dish antenna on the roof of the Ayemenem house. She presided over the world in her drawing room on satellite TV. The impossible excitement that this engendered in Baby Kochamma wasn’t hard to understand. It wasn’t something that happened gradually. It happened overnight. Blondes, wars, famines, football, sex, music, coups d’etat — they all arrived on the same train. They unpacked together. They stayed at the same hotel. And in Ayemenem, where once the loudest sound had been a musical bus horn, now whole wars, famines, picturesque massacres and Bill Clinton could be summoned up like servants.
The U.S. empire rests on a grisly foundation: the massacre of millions of indigenous people, the stealing of their lands, and following this, the kidnapping and en- slavement of millions of black people from Africa to work that land. Thousands died on the seas while they were being shipped like caged cattle between continents. "Stolen from Africa, brought to America"-Bob Marley's "Buffalo Soldier" contains a whole universe of unspeakable sadness.
I saw a man on a bridge about to jump. I said, ‘Don’t do it!’ He said, ‘Nobody loves me.’ I said, ‘God loves you. Do you believe in God?’ He said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Are you a Muslim or a non-Muslim?’ He said, ‘A Muslim.’ I said, ‘Shia or Sunni?’ He said, ‘Sunni.’ I said, ‘Me too! Deobandi or Barelvi?’ He said, ‘Barelvi.’ I said, ‘Me too! Tanzeehi or Tafkeeri?’ He said, ‘Tanzeehi.’ I said, ‘Me too! Tanzeehi Azmati or Tanzeehi Farhati?’ He said, ‘Tanzeehi Farhati.’ I said, ‘Me too! Tanzeehi Farhati Jamia ul Uloom Ajmer, or Tanzeehi Farhati Jamia ul Noor Mewat?’ He said, ‘Tanzeehi Farhati Jamia ul Noor Mewat.’ I said, ‘Die, kafir!’ and I pushed him over.
Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe.
The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.
Remember this: We be many and they be few. They need us more than we need them.
Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.
Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. When independent-thinking people (and here I do not include the corporate media) begin to rally under flags, when writers, painters, musicians, film makers suspend their judgment and blindly yoke their art to the service of the “Nation,” it’s time for all of us to sit up and worry.
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it could be argued that it actually began thousands of years ago. Long before the Marxists came. Before the British took Malabar, before the Dutch Ascendency, before Vasco da Gama arrived, before the Zamorin’s conquest of Calicut. Before three purple-robed Syrian Bishops murdered by the Portuguese were found floating in the sea, with coiled sea serpents riding on their chests and oysters knotted in their tangled beards. It could be argued that it began long before Christianity arrived in a boat and seeped into Kerala like tea from a teabag. That it really began in the days when the Love Laws were made. The laws that lay down who should be loved, and how. And how much. HOWEVER, for practical purposes, in a hopelessly practical world . .
Women from Kerala work throughout India and the world earning money to send back home. And yet they'll pay a dowry to get married, and they'll have the most bizarrely subservient relationships with their husbands. I grew up in a little village in Kerala. It was a nightmare for me. All I wanted to do was to escape, to get out, to never have to marry somebody there. Of course, they were not dying to marry me [laughs]. I was the worst thing a girl could be: thin, black, and clever.