Art Spolight: Elizabeth Catlett,

“First an Outcast,

Then an Inspiration”

4Jun2011  

Courtesy of Reginald and Aliya Browne

“Stargazer” (2007) by Elizabeth Catlett.

By CELIA McGEE

Published: April 21, 2011

While we are featuring the works of young, up-and-coming artists, this is an opportunity to get to know one of Americas most noted artist. Ms Catlett is the premier artist of our time and the exhibition which seeks to display works of new artists that are inspired by her is a fresh and exciting idea. Talking with her a bit last year in regards to the authenticity of a 1939 lithograph she did, Ms Catlett commented on how she was looking forward to this show while chastising those people forging her artwork George Bayard of Bayard Art Consulting said.

By CELIA McGEE

IN the fall of 1932, fresh out of high school, Elizabeth Catlett showed up at the School of Fine and Applied Arts of the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, having been awarded a prestigious full scholarship there. But she was turned away when it was discovered that she was “colored,” and she returned home to Washington to attend Howard University.

Elizabeth Catlett

Seventy-six years later, the institution that had rejected her, now Carnegie Mellon University, awarded her an honorary doctorate in recognition of a lifetime’s work as a sculptor and printmaker. By then, after decades of living and making art in Mexico, she had become a legendary figure to many in the art world, to the point where some were even surprised to learn she was still alive.

But not everyone, and certainly not the far younger, primarily African-American artists included along with her in the show “Stargazers: Elizabeth Catlett in Conversation With 21 Contemporary Artists,” on view now at the Bronx Museum of Art. “A lot of people like her are just kind of myths,” said Hank Willis Thomas, whose gold-chain and cubic zirconia nod to both the abolitionists of the 19th century and to rappers, “Ode to CMB: Am I Not a Man and a Brother,” is in the show and shares with much of Ms. Catlett’s work a concern with the history of slavery and “the black body as commodity,” he said. “A lot of her work,” he added, “especially from the ’60s and ’70s, could pass as art of today.”

Ms. Catlett, now 96, is known for her work’s deep engagement with social issues and the politics of gender, race and deprivation. She started down this road during the Depression, when she participated in the Federal Art Project, and followed it consistently into the era of the activist Black Arts movement in the ’60s and beyond. Which is not to say she has focused on message at the expense of form: she prepared for her M.F.A. under Grant Wood at the University of Iowa (“he was so kind,” she recalled recently, and he always addressed her as “Miss Catlett”) and also studied in New York with the Modernist sculptor Ossip Zadkine and at the Art Students League, developing her own brand of figurative modernism in bronze, stone, wood, drawings and prints.

Though that style has often been compared to Henry Moore’s, her work has always been grounded in her perspective as a black woman and artist, ruminating on communal struggle, pride, resistance, resilience and history, particularly through her depictions of the female form.

The curator of the Bronx Museum show, Isolde Brielmaier, has juxtaposed 31 of Ms. Cattlet’s works with pieces by 21 other artists — less to point out her direct influences on them, Ms. Brielmaier said, than to explore resonances between the older artist and the younger ones. The idea, she added, was to make the show about “what all the artists are thinking, and to look at the past and the future.”

Ms. Catlett herself, who is back in New York this week for a panel discussion about “Stargazers” at the museum on Friday, demurs about her influence on later generations. (She is, however, clear about the most important advice she can offer an artist, she said during her previous visit to the city, in the fall: “Never turn down a show, no matter where it is.”) She has lived much of her life, after all, on the margins of an art history she and other artists of color were not invited to help write for a very long time.

In 1947, while on a fellowship in Mexico, she married the artist Francisco Mora, whom she had met through the Taller de Gráfica Popular printmaking collective. Their left-wing political associations did not endear her to the State Department, which declared her an undesirable alien when she took Mexican citizenship in 1962. This, on top of Ms. Cattlet’s race, contributed to her relative obscurity in the mainstream American art world.

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The photographer Carrie Mae Weems, a generation older than most of the other artists in “Stargazers,” recalled encountering Ms. Catlett “through reading on my own,” in the late 1960s. “She wasn’t taught to me in class, as most black artists were not taught to me in class, and most women artists.”

The show gets its title from Ms. Catlett’s black-marble “Stargazer” (2007), a reclining female figure that manages to feel just as powerfully assertive as her standing red-cedar sculpture “Homage to My Young Black Sisters” of 1968, with its black-power salute. The reversal of the traditional passivity of the odalisque figure, said the Moroccan-born artist Lalla Essaydi, who upends the convention in her own work, “is definitely something I quote.” And Ms. Catlett’s more militantly upright sculptures seem to reappear in Sanford Biggers’ monumental woodcut “Afro Pick” (2005), and in Roberto Visani’s recycling of guns and other weapons into works that are street-wise, loaded with history and totemic.

In keeping with Ms. Brielmaier’s aim for the show, the impact is not always a matter of visible influence. Mickalene Thomas, for example, said her intricately bedizened paintings and pattern-happy photographs do not draw on Ms. Catlett’s work in any obvious way, but that “she’s been very inspirational.”

“I like how her draftsmanship and sculpting have informed the political impact of images she created,” Ms. Thomas said, allowing work created with a specific ideological bent to nevertheless “take the African American experience and make it universal.”

Another artist in the show, Xaviera Simmons, also talked about her intense admiration for Ms. Catlett’s formal skills, and for the fact that she is “still working in her 90s, and making art that’s so technically savvy and stunning.”

“That’s kind of diva,” Ms. Simmons said.

Ms. Simmons is friends with Ms. Catlett’s granddaughters (one of whom, Naima Mora, is known to students of another discipline as a winner on “America’s Next Top Model”). When Ms. Brielmaier decided to include her large-scale photograph “One Day and Back Then (Seated),” which shows Ms. Simmons sitting in the type of rattan chair made famous by Huey P. Newton and wearing little more than black paint and an Afro wig, “I was a little afraid of offending my best friends’ grandmother,” she said. But then again, she thought, Ms. Catlett “has her nudes” — and ultimately, “we all work in the same tradition.”

Maya Angelou

The Art of Fiction No. 119 (Fall 1990)

Interviewed by George Plimpton

 

This interview was conducted on the stage of the YMHA on Manhattan’s upper East Side. A large audience, predominantly women, was on hand, filling indeed every seat, with standees in the back . . . a testament to Maya Angelou’s drawingpower. Close to the stage was a small contingent of black women dressed in the white robes of the Black Muslim order. Her presence dominated the proceedings. Many of her remarks drew fervid applause, especially those which reflected her views on racial problems, the need to persevere, and “courage.” She is an extraordinary performer and has a powerful stage presence. Many of the answers seemed as much directed to the audience as to the interviewer so that when Maya Angelou concluded the evening by reading aloud from her work—again to a rapt audience—it seemed a logical extension of a planned entertainment.

 

INTERVIEWER

You once told me that you write lying on a made-up bed with a bottle of sherry, a dictionary, Roget’s Thesaurus, yellow pads, an ashtray, and a Bible. What’s the function of the Bible?

MAYA ANGELOU

The language of all the interpretations, the translations, of the Judaic Bible and the Christian Bible, is musical, just wonderful. I read the Bible to myself; I’ll take any translation, any edition, and read it aloud, just to hear the language, hear the rhythm, and remind myself how beautiful English is. Though I do manage to mumble around in about seven or eight languages, English remains the most beautiful of languages. It will do anything.

INTERVIEWER

Do you read it to get inspired to pick up your own pen?

ANGELOU

For melody. For content also. I’m working at trying to be a Christian and that’s serious business. It’s like trying to be a good Jew, a good Muslim, a good Buddhist, a good Shintoist, a good Zoroastrian, a good friend, a good lover, a good mother, a good buddy—it’s serious business. It’s not something where you think, Oh, I’ve got it done. I did it all day, hotdiggety. The truth is, all day long you try to do it, try to be it, and then in the evening if you’re honest and have a little courage you look at yourself and say, Hmm. I only blew it eighty-six times. Not bad. I’m trying to be a Christian and the Bible helps me to remind myself what I’m about.

INTERVIEWER

Do you transfer that melody to your own prose? Do you think your prose has that particular ring that one associates with the King James version?

ANGELOU

I want to hear how English sounds; how Edna St. Vincent Millay heard English. I want to hear it, so I read it aloud. It is not so that I can then imitate it. It is to remind me what a glorious language it is. Then, I try to be particular and even original. It’s a little like reading Gerard Manley Hopkins or Paul Laurence Dunbar or James Weldon Johnson.

INTERVIEWER

And is the bottle of sherry for the end of the day or to fuel the imagination?

ANGELOU

I might have it at six-fifteen a.m. just as soon as I get in, but usually it’s about eleven o’clock when I’ll have a glass of sherry.

INTERVIEWER

When you are refreshed by the Bible and the sherry, how do you start a day’s work?

ANGELOU

I have kept a hotel room in every town I’ve ever lived in. I rent a hotel room for a few months, leave my home at six, and try to be at work by six-thirty. To write, I lie across the bed, so that this elbow is absolutely encrusted at the end, just so rough with callouses. I never allow the hotel people to change the bed, because I never sleep there. I stay until twelve-thirty or one-thirty in the afternoon, and then I go home and try to breathe; I look at the work around five; I have an orderly dinner—proper, quiet, lovely dinner; and then I go back to work the next morning. Sometimes in hotels I’ll go into the room and there’ll be a note on the floor which says, Dear Miss Angelou, let us change the sheets. We think they are moldy. But I only allow them to come in and empty wastebaskets. I insist that all things are taken off the walls. I don’t want anything in there. I go into the room and I feel as if all my beliefs are suspended. Nothing holds me to anything. No milkmaids, no flowers, nothing. I just want to feel and then when I start to work I’ll remember. I’ll read something, maybe the Psalms, maybe, again, something from Mr. Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson. And I’ll remember how beautiful, how pliable the language is, how it will lend itself. If you pull it, it says, OK.” I remember that and I start to write. Nathaniel Hawthorne says, “Easy reading is damn hard writing.” I try to pull the language in to such a sharpness that it jumps off the page. It must look easy, but it takes me forever to get it to look so easy. Of course, there are those critics—New York critics as a rule—who say, Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer. Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language. On an evening like this, looking out at the auditorium, if I had to write this evening from my point of view, I’d see the rust-red used worn velvet seats and the lightness where people’s backs have rubbed against the back of the seat so that it’s a light orange, then the beautiful colors of the people’s faces, the white, pink-white, beige-white, light beige and brown and tan—I would have to look at all that, at all those faces and the way they sit on top of their necks. When I would end up writing after four hours or five hours in my room, it might sound like, It was a rat that sat on a mat. That’s that. Not a cat. But I would continue to play with it and pull at it and say, I love you. Come to me. I love you. It might take me two or three weeks just to describe what I’m seeing now.

INTERVIEWER

How do you know when it’s what you want?

ANGELOU

I know when it’s the best I can do. It may not be the best there is. Another writer may do it much better. But I know when it’s the best I can do. I know that one of the great arts that the writer develops is the art of saying, “No. No, I’m finished. Bye.” And leaving it alone. I will not write it into the ground. I will not write the life out of it. I won’t do that. 

INTERVIEWER

How much revising is involved?

ANGELOU

I write in the morning and then go home about midday and take a shower, because writing, as you know, is very hard work, so you have to do a double ablution. Then I go out and shop—I’m a serious cook—and pretend to be normal. I play sane—Good morning! Fine, thank you. And you? And I go home. I prepare dinner for myself and if I have houseguests, I do the candles and the pretty music and all that. Then after all the dishes are moved away I read what I wrote that morning. And more often than not if I’ve done nine pages I may be able to save two and a half or three. That’s the cruelest time you know, to really admit that it doesn’t work. And to blue pencil it. When I finish maybe fifty pages and read them—fifty acceptable pages—it’s not too bad. I’ve had the same editor since 1967. Many times he has said to me over the years or asked me, Why would you use a semicolon instead of a colon? And many times over the years I have said to him things like: I will never speak to you again. Forever. Goodbye. That is it. Thank you very much. And I leave. Then I read the piece and I think of his suggestions. I send him a telegram that says, OK, so you’re right. So what? Don’t ever mention this to me again. If you do, I will never speak to you again. About two years ago I was visiting him and his wife in the Hamptons. I was at the end of a dining room table with a sit-down dinner of about fourteen people. Way at the end I said to someone, I sent him telegrams over the years. From the other end of the table he said, And I’ve kept every one! Brute! But the editing, one’s own editing, before the editor sees it, is the most important.

INTERVIEWER

The five autobiographical books follow each other in chronological order. When you started writing I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings did you know that you would move on from that? It almost works line by line into the second volume.

ANGELOU

I know, but I didn’t really mean to. I thought I was going to write Caged Bird and that would be it and I would go back to playwriting and writing scripts for television. Autobiography is awfully seductive; it’s wonderful. Once I got into it I realized I was following a tradition established by Frederick Douglass—the slave narrative—speaking in the first-person singular talking about the first-person plural, always saying I meaning we. And what a responsibility! Trying to work with that form, the autobiographical mode, to change it, to make it bigger, richer, finer, and more inclusive in the twentieth century has been a great challenge for me. I’ve written five now and I really hope—the works are required reading in many universities and colleges in the United States—that people read my work. The greatest compliment I receive is when people walk up to me on the street or in airports and say, Miss Angelou, I wrote your books last year and I really—I mean I read . . . That is it—that the person has come into the books so seriously, so completely, that he or she, black or white, male or female, feels, That’s my story. I told it. I’m making it up on the spot. That’s the great compliment. I didn’t expect, originally, that I was going to continue with the form. I thought I was going to write a little book and it would be fine and I would go on back to poetry, write a little music.

INTERVIEWER

What about the genesis of the first book? Who were the people who helped you shape those sentences that leap off the page?

ANGELOU

Oh well, they started years and years before I ever wrote, when I was very young. I loved the black American minister. I loved the melody of the voice and the imagery, so rich and almost impossible. The minister in my church in Arkansas, when I was very young, would use phrases such as “God stepped out, the sun over his right shoulder, the moon nestling in the palm of his hand.” I mean, I just loved it, and I loved the black poets, and I loved Shakespeare, and Edgar Allan Poe, and I liked Matthew Arnold a lot—still do. Being mute for a number of years, I read and memorized, and all those people have had tremendous influence . . . in the first book and even in the most recent book.

INTERVIEWER

Mute?

ANGELOU

I was raped when I was very young. I told my brother the name of the person who had done it. Within a few days the man was killed. In my child’s mind—seven and a half years old—I thought my voice had killed him. So I stopped talking for five years. Of course I’ve written about this in Caged Bird. 

INTERVIEWER

When did you decide you were going to be a writer? Was there a moment when you suddenly said, This is what I wish to do for the rest of my life?

ANGELOU

Well, I had written a television series for PBS, and I was going out to California. I thought I was a poet and playwright. That was what I was going to do the rest of my life. Or become famous as a real estate broker. This sounds like name-dropping, and it really is, but James Baldwin took me over to dinner with Jules and Judy Feiffer one evening. All three of them are great talkers. They went on with their stories and I had to fight for the right to play it good. I had to insert myself to tell some stories too. Well, the next day Judy Feiffer called Bob Loomis, an editor at Random House, and suggested that if he could get me to write an autobiography, he’d have something. So he phoned me and I said, No, under no circumstances; I certainly will not do such a thing. So I went out to California to produce this series on African and black American culture. Loomis called me out there about three times. Each time I said no. Then he talked to James Baldwin. Jimmy gave him a ploy which always works with me—though I’m not proud to say that. The next time he called, he said, Well, Miss Angelou. I won’t bother you again. It’s just as well that you don’t attempt to write this book, because to write autobiography as literature is almost impossible. I said, What are you talking about? I’ll do it. I’m not proud about this button that can be pushed and I will immediately jump.

INTERVIEWER

Do you select a dominant theme for each book?

ANGELOU

I try to remember times in my life, incidents in which there was the dominating theme of cruelty, or kindness, or generosity, or envy, or happiness, glee . . . perhaps four incidents in the period I’m going to write about. Then I select the one that lends itself best to my device and that I can write as drama without falling into melodrama.

INTERVIEWER

Did you write for a particular audience?

ANGELOU

I thought early on if I could write a book for black girls it would be good because there were so few books for a black girl to read that said this is how it is to grow up. Then, I thought, I’d better, you know, enlarge that group, the market group that I’m trying to reach. I decided to write for black boys and then white girls and then white boys.

But what I try to keep in mind mostly is my craft. That’s what I really try for; I try to allow myself to be impelled by my art—if that doesn’t sound too pompous and weird—accept the impulse and then try my best to have a command of the craft. If I’m feeling depressed and losing my control then I think about the reader. But that is very rare—to think about the reader when the work is going on.

INTERVIEWER

So you don’t keep a particular reader in mind when you sit down in that hotel room and begin to compose or write. It’s yourself. 

ANGELOU

It’s myself . . . and my reader. I would be a liar, a hypocrite, or a fool—and I’m not any of those—to say that I don’t write for the reader. I do. But for the reader who hears, who really will work at it, going behind what I seem to say. So I write for myself and that reader who will pay the dues. There’s a phrase in West Africa, in Ghana; it’s called “deep talk.” For instance, there’s a saying: “The trouble for the thief is not how to steal the chief’s bugle but where to blow it.” Now, on the face of it, one understands that. But when you really think about it, it takes you deeper. In West Africa they call that “deep talk.” I’d like to think I write “deep talk.” When you read me, you should be able to say, Gosh, that’s pretty. That’s lovely. That’s nice. Maybe there’s something else? Better read it again. Years ago I read a man named Machado de Assis who wrote a book called Dom Casmurro. Machado de Assis is a South American writer—black father, Portuguese mother—writing in 1865, say. I thought the book was very nice. Then I went back and read the book and said, Hmm. I didn’t realize all that was in that book. Then I read it again, and again, and I came to the conclusion that what Machado de Assis had done for me was almost a trick: he had beckoned me onto the beach to watch a sunset. And I had watched the sunset with pleasure. When I turned around to come back in I found that the tide had come in over my head. That’s when I decided to write. I would write so that the reader says, That’s so nice. Oh boy, that’s pretty. Let me read that again. I think that’s why Caged Bird is in its twenty-first printing in hardcover and its twenty-ninth in paper. All my books are still in print, in hardback as well as paper, because people go back and say, Let me read that. Did she really say that? 

INTERVIEWER

The books are episodic, aren’t they? Almost as if you had put together a string of short stories. I wondered if as an autobiographer you ever fiddled with the truth to make the story better.

ANGELOU

Well, sometimes. I love the phrase “fiddle with.” It’s so English. Sometimes I make a character from a composite of three or four people, because the essence in any one person is not sufficiently strong to be written about. Essentially though, the work is true though sometimes I fiddle with the facts. Many of the people I’ve written about are alive today and I have them to face. I wrote about an ex-husband—he’s an African—in The Heart of a Woman. Before I did, I called him in Dar-es-Salaam and said, I’m going to write about some of our years together. He said, Now before you ask, I want you to know that I shall sign my release, because I know you will not lie. However, I am sure I shall argue with you about your interpretation of the truth. 

INTERVIEWER

Did he enjoy his portrait finally or did you argue about it? 

ANGELOU

Well, he didn’t argue, but I was kind too.

INTERVIEWER

I would guess this would make it very easy for you to move from autobiography into novel, where you can do anything you want with your characters.

ANGELOU

Yes, but for me, fiction is not the sweetest form. I really am trying to do something with autobiography now. It has caught me. I’m using the first-person singular and trying to make that the first-person plural, so that anybody can read the work and say, Hmm, that’s the truth, yes, uh-huh, and live in the work. It’s a large, ambitious dream. But I love the form.

INTERVIEWER

Aren’t the extraordinary events of your life very hard for the rest of us to identify with? 

ANGELOU

Oh my God, I’ve lived a very simple life! You can say, Oh yes, at thirteen this happened to me and at fourteen . . . But those are facts. But the facts can obscure the truth, what it really felt like. Every human being has paid the earth to grow up. Most people don’t grow up. It’s too damn difficult. What happens is most people get older. That’s the truth of it. They honor their credit cards, they find parking spaces, they marry, they have the nerve to have children, but they don’t grow up. Not really. They get older. But to grow up costs the earth, the earth. It means you take responsibility for the time you take up, for the space you occupy. It’s serious business. And you find out what it costs us to love and to lose, to dare and to fail. And maybe even more, to succeed. What it costs, in truth. Not superficial costs—anybody can have that—I mean in truth. That’s what I write. What it really is like. I’m just telling a very simple story. 

INTERVIEWER

Aren’t you tempted to lie? Novelists lie, don’t they? 

ANGELOU

I don’t know about lying for novelists. I look at some of the great novelists, and I think the reason they are great is that they’re telling the truth. The fact is they’re using made-up names, made-up people, made-up places, and made-up times, but they’re telling the truth about the human being—what we are capable of, what makes us lose, laugh, weep, fall down, and gnash our teeth and wring our hands and kill each other and love each other.

INTERVIEWER

James Baldwin, along with a lot of writers in this series, said that “when you’re writing you’re trying to find out something you didn’t know.” When you write do you search for something that you didn’t know about yourself or about us? 

ANGELOU

Yes. When I’m writing, I am trying to find out who I am, who we are, what we’re capable of, how we feel, how we lose and stand up, and go on from darkness into darkness. I’m trying for that. But I’m also trying for the language. I’m trying to see how it can really sound. I really love language. I love it for what it does for us, how it allows us to explain the pain and the glory, the nuances and the delicacies of our existence. And then it allows us to laugh, allows us to show wit. Real wit is shown in language. We need language.

INTERVIEWER

Baldwin also said that his family urged him not to become a writer. His father felt that there was a white monopoly in publishing. Did you ever have any of those feelings—that you were going up against something that was really immensely difficult for a black writer? 

ANGELOU

Yes, but I didn’t find it so just in writing. I’ve found it so in all the things I’ve attempted. In the shape of American society, the white male is on top, then the white female, and then the black male, and at the bottom is the black woman. So that’s been always so. That is nothing new. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t shock me, shake me up . . .

INTERVIEWER

I can understand that in various social stratifications, but why in art? 

ANGELOU

Well, unfortunately, racism is pervasive. It doesn’t stop at the university gate, or at the ballet stage. I knew great black dancers, male and female, who were told early on that they were not shaped, physically, for ballet. Today, we see very few black ballet dancers. Unfortunately, in the theater and in film, racism and sexism stand at the door. I’m the first black female director in Hollywood; in order to direct, I went to Sweden and took a course in cinematography so I would understand what the camera would do. Though I had written a screenplay, and even composed the score, I wasn’t allowed to direct it. They brought in a young Swedish director who hadn’t even shaken a black person’s hand before. The film was Georgia, Georgia with Diana Sands. People either loathed it or complimented me. Both were wrong, because it was not what I wanted, not what I would have done if I had been allowed to direct it. So I thought, Well, what I guess I’d better do is be ten times as prepared. That is not new. I wish it was. In every case I know I have to be ten times more prepared than my white counterpart. 

INTERVIEWER

Even as a writer where . . .

ANGELOU

Absolutely.

INTERVIEWER

Yet a manuscript is what arrives at the editor’s desk, not a person, not a body.

ANGELOU

Yes. I must have such control of my tools, of words, that I can make this sentence leap off the page. I have to have my writing so polished that it doesn’t look polished at all. I want a reader, especially an editor, to be a half-hour into my book before he realizes it’s reading he’s doing.

INTERVIEWER

But isn’t that the goal of every person who sits down at a typewriter? 

ANGELOU

Absolutely. Yes. It’s possible to be overly sensitive, to carry a bit of paranoia along with you. But I don’t think that’s a bad thing. It keeps you sharp, keeps you on your toes.

INTERVIEWER

Is there a thread one can see through the five autobiographies? It seems to me that one prevailing theme is the love of your child.

ANGELOU

Yes, well, that’s true. I think that that’s a particular. I suppose, if I’m lucky, the particular is seen in the general. There is, I hope, a thesis in my work: we may encounter many defeats, but we must not be defeated. That sounds goody-two-shoes, I know, but I believe that a diamond is the result of extreme pressure and time. Less time is crystal. Less than that is coal. Less than that is fossilized leaves. Less than that it’s just plain dirt. In all my work, in the movies I write, the lyrics, the poetry, the prose, the essays, I am saying that we may encounter many defeats—maybe it’s imperative that we encounter the defeats—but we are much stronger than we appear to be and maybe much better than we allow ourselves to be. Human beings are more alike than unalike. There’s no real mystique. Every human being, every Jew, Christian, backslider, Muslim, Shintoist, Zen Buddhist, atheist, agnostic, every human being wants a nice place to live, a good place for the children to go to school, healthy children, somebody to love, the courage, the unmitigated gall to accept love in return, someplace to party on Saturday or Sunday night, and someplace to perpetuate that God. There’s no mystique. None. And if I’m right in my work, that’s what my work says.

INTERVIEWER

Have you been back to Stamps, Arkansas?

ANGELOU

About 1970, Bill Moyers, Willie Morris, and I were at some affair. Judith Moyers as well—I think she was the instigator. We may have had two or three scotches, or seven or eight. Willie Morris was then with Harper’s magazine. The suggestion came up: Why don’t we all go back South? Willie Morris was from Yazoo, Mississippi. Bill Moyers is from Marshall, Texas, which is just a hop, skip, and a jump—about as far as you can throw a chitterling—from Stamps, my hometown. Sometime in the middle of the night there was this idea: Why don’t Bill Moyers and Maya Angelou go to Yazoo, Mississippi to visit Willie Morris? Then why don’t Willie Morris and Maya Angelou go to Marshall, Texas, to visit Bill Moyers? I said, Great. I was agreeing with both. Then they said Willie Morris and Bill Moyers would go to Stamps, Arkansas to visit Maya Angelou, and I said, No way, José. I’m not going back to that little town with two white men! I will not do it! Well, after a while Bill Moyers called me—he was doing a series on “creativity”—and he said, Maya, come on, let’s go to Stamps. I said, No way. He continued, I want to talk about creativity. I said, You know, I don’t want to know where it resides. I really don’t, and I still don’t. One of the problems in the West is that people are too busy putting things under microscopes and so forth. Creativity is greater than the sum of its parts. All I want to know is that creativity is there. I want to know that I can put my hand behind my back like Tom Thumb and pull out a plum. Anyway, Moyers went on and on and so did Judith and before I knew it, I found myself in Stamps, Arkansas. Stamps, Arkansas! With Bill Moyers, in front of my grandmother’s door. My God! We drove out of town—me with Bill and Judith. Back of us was the crew, a New York crew, you know, very “Right, dig where I’m comin’ from, like, get it on,” and so forth. We got about three miles outside of Stamps and I said, Stop the car. Let the car behind us pull up. Get those people in with you and I’ll take their car. I suddenly was taken back to being twelve years old in a Southern, tiny town where my grandmother told me, Sistah, never be on a country road with any white boys. I was two hundred years older than black pepper, but I said, Stop the car. I did. I got out of the car. And I knew these guys—certainly Bill. Bill Moyers is a friend and brother-friend to me; we care for each other. But dragons, fears, the grotesques of childhood always must be confronted at childhood’s door. Any other place is esoteric and has nothing to do with the great fear that is laid upon one as a child. So anyway, we did Bill Moyers’s show. And it seems to be a very popular program, and it’s the first of the “creativity” programs . . .

INTERVIEWER

Did going back assuage those childhood fears?

ANGELOU

They are there like griffins hanging off the sides of old and tired European buildings.

INTERVIEWER

It hadn’t changed?

ANGELOU

No, worse if anything.

INTERVIEWER

But it was forty years before you went back to the South, to North Carolina. Was that because of a fear of finding griffins everywhere, Stamps being a typical community of the South? 

ANGELOU

Well, I’ve never felt the need to prove anything to an audience. I’m always concerned about who I am to me first—to myself and God. I really am. I didn’t go south because I didn’t want to pull up whatever clout I had, because that’s boring, that’s not real, not true; that doesn’t tell me anything. If I had known I was afraid, I would have gone earlier. I just thought I’d find the South really unpleasant. I have moved south now. I live there. 

INTERVIEWER

Perhaps writing the autobiographies, finding out about yourself, would have made it much easier to go back. 

ANGELOU

I know many think that writing sort of “clears the air.” It doesn’t do that at all. If you are going to write autobiography, don’t expect that it will clear anything up. It makes it more clear to you, but it doesn’t alleviate anything. You simply know it better, you have names for people.

INTERVIEWER

There’s a part in Caged Bird where you and your brother want to do a scene from The Merchant of Venice, and you don’t dare do it because your grandmother would find out that Shakespeare was not only deceased but white.

ANGELOU

I don’t think she’d have minded if she’d known he was deceased. I tried to pacify her—my mother knew Shakespeare but my grandmother was raising us. When I told her I wanted to recite—it was actually Portia’s speech—Mama said to me, Now, sistah, what are you goin’ to render? The phrase was so fetching. The phrase was “Now, little mistress Marguerite will render her rendition.” Mama said, Now, sistah, what are you goin’ to render? I said, Mama, I’m going to render a piece written by William Shakespeare. My grandmother asked me, Now, sistah, who is this very William Shakespeare? I had to tell her that he was white, it was going to come out. Somebody would let it out. So I told Mama, Mama, he’s white but he’s dead. Then I said, He’s been dead for centuries, thinking she’d forgive him because of this little idiosyncrasy. She said, No Ma’am, little mistress you will not. No Ma’am, little mistress you will not. So I rendered James Weldon Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes. 

INTERVIEWER

Were books allowed in the house?

ANGELOU

None of those books were in the house; they were in the school. I’d bring them home from school, and my brother gave me Edgar Allan Poe because he knew I loved him. I loved him so much I called him EAP. But as I said, I had a problem when I was young: from the time I was seven and a half to the time I was twelve and a half I was a mute. I could speak but I didn’t speak for five years and I was what was called a “volunteer mute.” But I read and I memorized just masses—I don’t know if one is born with photographic memory but I think you can develop it. I just have that.

INTERVIEWER

What is the significance of the title All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes?

ANGELOU

I never agreed, even as a young person, with the Thomas Wolfe title You Can’t Go Home Again. Instinctively I didn’t. But the truth is, you can never leave home. You take it with you; it’s under your fingernails; it’s in the hair follicles; it’s in the way you smile; it’s in the ride of your hips, in the passage of your breasts; it’s all there, no matter where you go. You can take on the affectations and the postures of other places and even learn to speak their ways. But the truth is, home is between your teeth. Everybody’s always looking for it: Jews go to Israel; black Americans and Africans in the Diaspora go to Africa; Europeans, Anglo-Saxons go to England and Ireland; people of Germanic background go to Germany. It’s a very queer quest. We can kid ourselves; we can tell ourselves, Oh yes, honey, I live in Tel Aviv, actually . . . The truth is a stubborn fact. So this book is about trying to go home. 

INTERVIEWER

If you had to endow a writer with the most necessary pieces of equipment, other than, of course, yellow legal pads, what would these be? 

ANGELOU

Ears. Ears. To hear the language. But there’s no one piece of equipment that is most necessary. Courage, first.

INTERVIEWER

Did you ever feel that you could not get your work published? Would you have continued to write if Random House had returned your manuscript?

ANGELOU

I didn’t think it was going to be very easy, but I knew I was going to do something. The real reason black people exist at all today is because there’s a resistance to a larger society that says you can’t do it—you can’t survive. And if you survive, you certainly can’t thrive. And if you thrive, you can’t thrive with any passion or compassion or humor or style. There’s a saying, a song that says, “Don’t you let nobody turn you ’round, turn you ’round. Don’t you let nobody turn you ‘round.” Well, I’ve always believed that. So knowing that, knowing that nobody could turn me ’round, if I didn’t publish, well, I would design this theater we’re sitting in. Yes. Why not? Some human being did it. I agree with Terence. Terence said homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto. I am a human being. Nothing human can be alien to me. When you look up Terence in the encyclopedia, you see beside his name, in italics, sold to a Roman senator, freed by that Senator. He became the most popular playwright in Rome. Six of his plays and that statement have come down to us from 154 b.c. This man, not born white, not born free, without any chance of ever receiving citizenship, said, I am a human being. Nothing human can be alien to me. Well, I believe that. I ingested that, internalized that at about thirteen or twelve. I believed if I set my mind to it, maybe I wouldn’t be published but I would write a great piece of music or do something about becoming a real friend. Yes, I would do something wonderful. It might be with my next-door neighbor, my gentleman friend, with my lover, but it would be wonderful as far as I could do it. So I never have been very concerned about the world telling me how successful I am. I don’t need that.

INTERVIEWER

You mentioned courage . . . 

ANGELOU

. . .the most important of all the virtues. Without that virtue you can’t practice any other virtue with consistency.

INTERVIEWER

What do you think of white writers who have written of the black experience—Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury or William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner?

ANGELOU

Well, sometimes I am disappointed—more often than not. That’s unfair, because I’m not suggesting the writer is lying about what he or she sees. It’s my disappointment, really, in that he or she doesn’t see more deeply, more carefully. I enjoy seeing Peter O’Toole or Michael Caine enact the role of an upper-class person in England. There the working class has had to study the upper-class, has been obliged to do so, to lift themselves out of their positions. Well, black Americans have had to study white Americans. For centuries under slavery, the smile or the grimace on a white man’s face or the flow of a hand on a white woman could inform a black person that you’re about to be sold or flogged. So we have studied the white American, where the white American has not been obliged to study us. So often it is as if the writer is looking through a glass darkly. And I’m always a little—not a little—saddened by that poor vision. 

INTERVIEWER

And you can pick it up in an instant if you . . .

ANGELOU

Yes, yes. There are some who delight and inform. It’s so much better, you see, for me, when a writer like Edna St. Vincent Millay speaks so deeply about her concern for herself and does not offer us any altruisms. Then when I look through her eyes at how she sees a black or an Asian my heart is lightened. But many of the other writers disappoint me.

INTERVIEWER

What is the best part of writing for you?

ANGELOU

Well, I could say the end. But when the language lends itself to me, when it comes and submits, when it surrenders and says, I am yours, darling—that’s the best part.

INTERVIEWER

You don’t skip around when you write?

ANGELOU

No, I may skip around in revision, just to see what connections I can find.

INTERVIEWER

Is most of the effort made in putting the words down onto the paper or is it in revision?

ANGELOU

Some work flows and, you know, you can catch three days. It’s like . . .I think the word in sailing is scudding—you know, three days of just scudding. Other days it’s just awful—plodding and backing up, trying to take out all the ands, ifs, tos, fors, buts, wherefores, therefores, howevers; you know, all those.

INTERVIEWER

And then, finally, you write “The End” and there it is; you have a little bit of sherry. 

ANGELOU

A lot of sherry then.

 

__________________________

• 
• • Gary Younge
  • The Guardian, Saturday 14 November 2009
  • Article history

Maya Angelou: 'I plan to keep working as long as I can.' Photograph: Chris Buck

During a trip to Senegal, Maya Angelou called Samia, a friend she had made in Paris several years before, and was invited over for dinner. Passing a room where people apparently clung to the wall to avoid standing on the rug, Angelou became incensed. "I had known a woman in Egypt who would not allow her servants to walk on her rugs, saying that only she, her family and friends were going to wear out her expensive carpets. Samia plummeted in my estimation."

Keen to challenge her host's hauteur, she walked back and forth across the carpet. "The guests who were bunched up on the sidelines smiled at me weakly." Soon afterwards, servants came, rolled up the rug, took it away and brought in a fresh one. Samia then came in and announced that they would be serving one of Senegal's most popular dishes in honour of Angelou: "Yassah, for our sister from America… Shall we sit?" And as the guests went to the floor where glasses, plates, cutlery and napkins were laid out on the carpet, Angelou realised the full extent of her faux pas and was "on fire with shame".

"Clever and so proper Maya Angelou, I had walked up and down over the tablecloth… In an unfamiliar culture, it is wise to offer no innovations, no suggestions, or lessons. The epitome of sophistication is utter simplicity." Such is an example of the 28 short epistles that compriseLetter To My Daughter, Angelou's latest book.

Elsewhere, she is beaten up by a lover, shaved by her mother before giving birth, nixes an offer to televise one of her stories because a producer is sniffy, and drinks coffee with cockroaches in it rather than insult her hosts, vomiting when she is out of sight.

Most end with the kind of wisdom that, depending on your taste, qualifies as either homespun or hokey. "I am never proud to participate in violence, yet I know that each of us must care enough for ourselves that we can be ready and able to come to our own defence when and wherever needed." Or, "All great artists draw from the same resource: the human heart, which tells us that we are all more alike than we are unalike."

At moments in the book she sounds like an elderly relative, distraught at the wayward manners of the young. In one, she delivers a broadside against vulgarity. "I'm always disappointed when people don't live up to their potential," she says to me. "I know that a number of people look down on themselves and consequently on everybody who looks like them." She suggests that this mindset is at the root of black kids thinking that to do well at school is to "act white". "But that, too, can change," argues Angelou, as she shifts into full-on aspirational gear. "I like the idea that people can have a dress-up night. I like the idea that people might have a tuxedo or a cocktail dress. It means 'I have a place to go.' It means, 'I can be better than this. I can speak more intelligently than this. I can cook more deliciously.' "

She breaks into a recitation of one of James Weldon Johnson's poems.

"The glory of the day was in her face, The beauty of the night was in her eyes. And over all her loveliness, the grace Of Morning blushing in the early skies."

"That's beautiful. He's not just saying, 'I want your body'… That's tacky." She laughs.

At other times she sounds like the kind of elderly relative who has outlived the need for social convention. Arguing for honesty at every level of human contact, she writes: "When people ask, 'How are you?' have the nerve sometimes to answer truthfully. You must know, however, that people will start avoiding you…" Sure enough, halfway through the interview she tells me I'm fat and suggests I pay more attention to the size of my portions. "You are going to have to lose that weight. You're too young and too handsome. Don't do it to yourself."

Given the exhaustive autobiographical work for which she is known, it is stunning to think that she has much more to share. She has written six memoirs, starting with her birth in St Louis, Missouri and ending with the assassination of Martin Luther King, whom she knew, which inspired her to write her first autobiographical work – I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings.

What prompted her to write this book? "I had no daughters," she says. "I had a son who was the best thing that ever happened to me in my life. But in reality I have lots of daughters. Black ones, white ones, Asian ones and Jewish ones and the Spanish-speaking ones… Sometimes I'll get a thousand pieces of mail a week from young women who think I'm wise. So they use me as a mother and I think of them as my daughters. So I thought it was time to say, 'Listen, kids, I have been here and done this. I got into this scrape and got out of it. I paid for it. I want you to know that if you take this road in the dark, to the left there's a big hole and if you're not careful you'll step in it and break your foot.' "

Most people would struggle to get one book out of their first 40 years. But then Angelou is not most people. She fell in plenty of holes, but somehow managed to come out skipping with her bones intact. To know her life story is to simultaneously wonder what on earth you have been doing with your own life and feel glad that you didn't have to go through half the things she has. Before she hit 40 she had been a professional dancer, prostitute, madam, lecturer, activist, singer and editor. She had lived in Ghana and Egypt, toured Europe with a dance troupe and settled in pretty much every region of the United States. She was raped as a child and did not speak for five years after the man who raped her was kicked to death – she believed that by saying who had done it, her voice itself had killed him. As a teenager her first sexual encounter – embarked upon because she was bored and insecure – produced a son, Guy. For the last 41 years she has hardly been idle. There have been several volumes of poetry, one of which – Just Give Me A Cool Drink Of Water 'Fore I Diiie – was nominated for a Pulitzer. She played Kunta Kinte's grandmother in Roots and wrote a screenplay, Georgia, Georgia, which was the first original script by a black woman to be produced. She recited her poem, On The Pulse Of The Morning, at Bill Clinton's inauguration and was one of the few women allowed to the podium to address Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March. She married at least three times.

For the last couple of decades she has merged her various talents into a kind of performance art – issuing a message of personal and social uplift by blending poetry, song and conversation.

She is like the Desiderata in human form – issuing a litany of imperatives and exhortations to be fabulous, conscious, passionate and compassionate. A professional hopemonger, her poems have titles such as Phenomenal Woman, Still I Rise and Weekend Glory. In the introduction to her latest book, she commands: "Try to be a rainbow in someone's cloud. Do not complain… Never whine… Be certain that you do not die without having done something wonderful for humanity."

I have met Angelou before, in 2002 in Los Angeles where she was performing. It was a great day. We had lunch and drank whiskey in her chauffeur-driven limo on the way to Pasadena where she was performing. En route I told her stories I hoped would make her laugh and she sang poetry. On the way back we drank more whiskey and she teased me about the pretentious hotel I was staying in.

Much about her remains the same. Her southern formality – addressing everybody by their surname and insisting on being addressed herself as Dr Angelou – remains, along with her cinnamon skin and an Olympian smile. She is still curious and extremely courteous. After asking after my family, she proceeds to ask the photographer's assistants their names and home towns, only to question them about the lineage of both and then offer a short history lesson. One of the assistant's names is Esner.

"That's German, isn't it?" she asks.

"I have no idea," he says.

"Yes, it was originally Eisner and they changed it."

And then there is the slow manner in which she speaks, not with a drawl, but deliberation. Rather than fly, she still prefers to ride on a tour bus. Back then she was renting Prince's bus while waiting for the one she designed to be decked out in kente cloth. Now she has another bus, which she also designed, covered in a different African print, in which she is planning to take the 42-hour drive from New York to San Francisco a few days after our interview.

When we first met she was in the process of buying property in Harlem. Now she is in it – a lordly brownstone, custom-built, complete with a lift, in the bosom of the area that produced so many of the poets she is keen on reciting. On the first floor the walls are decked with paintings, including several jazz trumpeters and a watercolour of Rosa Parks sitting at the front of the bus, alongside a Faith Ringgold work entitled Maya's Quilt Of Life and several African wall hangings.

But the biggest difference between then and now is her health. Seven years ago, when the subject of her age came up, she joked that her breasts were in a race to see which would touch her waist first and started singing the final verse of her poem On Aging:

"I'm the same person I was back then

A little less hair, a little less chin,

A lot less lungs and much less wind.

But ain't I lucky I can still breathe in."

I had observed: "She may pause to catch her breath mid-sentence. And her 6ft frame may move hesitantly and with a stoop. But beyond the inconveniences of time and gravity, she is in fine form."

Seven years on she is frail. Well enough to make it down the stairs on her own, but sufficiently delicate that she would measure each step as she measures her words – with care and caution. Then she needed only a cane and the occasional offer of an arm; today she uses a walker. At one point she gets frustrated when she tries to dial a number and her fingers refuse to comply. A plastic tube attached to her nose plies her with oxygen to help with her chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. One of her lungs has collapsed. "I smoked for 40 years, so I'm paying those dues," she says. Of the tube she says, "I sleep with it. I teach without it. I wouldn't go all day without it." And then she smiles. "But I'm fine as wine in the summertime."

Last month the TMZ website, which broke the news of Michael Jackson's passing, claimed she had been hospitalised in Los Angeles. By the time the blogosphere got hold of it there were rumours that she had died. The "news" reached CNN before one of Angelou's team pointed out that she was actually in St Louis, alive and well.

Angelou heard of her own death in the early hours of the morning and, not surprisingly, found the whole episode very upsetting: "My little grandson, the younger of the two, telephoned, and weeping, [said] 'I want to talk to my Grandma! Grandma! Grandma!' I said, 'I'm fine, honey,' " she later said.

"I have family in Europe and in Africa, and they have phoned me in tears, trying to find [out] am I all right, am I alive," Angelou told a local St Louis TV station. "I have family here, a family of friends here, all over the country, who called me, responding to an erroneous account that I was sick and maybe even dying in Los Angeles. I was anxious to come [back] to St Louis, but I wasn't dying even to come to St Louis," Angelou joked.

Nonetheless I suggest to her that there are moments in Letter To My Daughter that read like an extended farewell. In the space of the 500-word introduction, she mentions death twice and states near the beginning: "My life has been long, and believing that life loves the liver of it, I have dared to try many things, sometimes trembling, but daring still."

Angelou shrugs at the suggestion.

"Well I'm dealing with my 81-itis," she says, mildly whipping her oxygen cord for effect. "And I expect that next year it will be 82-itis. I don't have as far to go as I had to come. But I'm not making any arrangements and I plan to keep working as long as I can."

She is writing another cookbook, Great Food All Day Long, and when that is done she says she wants to write a letter to her sons.

I wonder what she will tell her sons about the presidential election of 2008. The year America elected a black man to be president and Angelou – who worked with both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King – backed his opponent, Hillary Clinton, in the Democratic primaries. Given her support for Clarence Thomas for the Supreme Court and her excitement at the appointment of Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell to the Bush Administration, her support for Obama would have been consistent with a desire to see black faces in the highest places that is not obviously fettered by ideology. But Angelou, who was raised for much of her childhood in Stamps, Arkansas, had known Hillary for several decades and had liked what she had seen.

"My connection was with Hillary Clinton," she says. "I had watched her when she was the first lady of Arkansas. I thought this white girl would come to Arkansas and play croquet on the lawn and throw tea parties. And she was just the opposite. She worked on public health and education… even prisons. When her husband ran for the presidency and she said she was not going to bake cookies, I thought, 'I'm going to watch her for a while.'

"I told her then: 'If you ever run for anything, I've got your back. I'd never heard of Senator Obama. So when she said she was running for president I said, 'I've got your back.' "

When it became clear that Hillary could not win, some Democratic party grandees asked her to try to persuade Hillary to step down. "I told them, 'I'm backing her. I'll step down when she steps down.' When she stepped down, I went over to President Obama."

She concedes that she never thought America would put a black man in the White House in her lifetime. "In 100 years' time or maybe 50," she says. "But not now, no. I did not believe it could happen now."

With hindsight, how does she think it came about? "The terrorist action of 9/11 gave birth to President Obama's entry to the White House," she suggests. "Not directly but indirectly." She launches into a lyrical riff on Obama's campaign slogan, "Yes we can" which explains that that feeling of boundless possibility encompasses the best and worst of what the country has to offer.

"Yes I can. I can do whatever I want to do. I can do both the best and worst I can imagine. I can own human beings. I can have slaves. Yes I can. I can be the best human being ever. I can defeat slavery and segregation. Yes I can. I can be so cruel I can tax people out of their homes. Yes I can. I can have the greatest charities in the world. Yes I can."

The Bush Administration instilled, incited and then exploited fear, she says, which ran counter to the American spirit. "What happened was the leaders began to offer and introduce fear to the people. Fear?" she says, as though it were an aberration to America's national mood. "Braggadocio, yes. Boldness, yes. But get tin foil and scotch tape for your windows? It's ridiculous. It began to weaken the resolve that is American. So when someone said we are better than that, people breathed more freely. They wanted to say, Let America be America Again," she says, citing Langston Hughes's poem.

And what does she think now she has seen Obama in action? "Well, he's stepped into a hornets' nest," she says, referring to the mess Bush has bequeathed. "People want to know how he is doing during his first 100 days, but that's not realistic. We'll have to wait maybe two years."

Somehow, notwithstanding her support for Hillary, I had expected her to be more excited. But then I realise Obama is literally old enough to be her grandson and that she is not easily fazed. When I ask what she does to relax, it sounds as though she mostly naps, only to wake and receive awards. The night before our interview, she was being honoured with a $500-a-head fundraiser for the Maya Angelou Centre for Health Equityat Saks Fifth Avenue. The evening after, Black Entertainment Television was giving her the Healing The Race award. Two days later, she was honoured at Glamour magazine's 2009 women of the year, alongside Michelle Obama, Rihanna, Serena Williams and others. I joke that it was considerate of those who dispense awards to give her one day off. A smile stretches clean across her face.

"Well, it's Sunday," she says. "And I have to go to church." •

Elmer 'Geronimo' Pratt,

a former Black Panther leader,

dies in Tanzania

June 2, 2011 |  7:36 pm

 

 

Elmer G. "Geronimo" Pratt, a former Los Angeles Black Panther Party leader who spent 27 years in prison for a murder he says he did not commit and whose case became a symbol of racial injustice during the turbulent 1960s, has died. He was 63.
 
Pratt died at his home in a small village in Tanzania, where he had been living with his wife and child, according to Stuart Hanlon, a San Francisco attorney who helped overturn Pratt's murder conviction.  Hanlon said he was informed of the death by Pratt's sister.

Pratt's case became a cause celebre for elected officials, Amnesty International, clergy and celebrities who believed he was framed by the government because he was African American and a member of the Black Panthers.

"Geronimo was a powerful leader," Hanlon told The Times. "For that reason he was targeted."

Pratt was convicted in 1972 and sentenced to life in prison for the 1968 fatal shooting of Caroline Olsen and the serious wounding of her husband, Kenneth, in a robbery that netted $18. The case was overturned in 1997 by an Orange County Superior Court judge who ruled that prosecutors at Pratt's murder trial had concealed evidence that could have led to his acquittal.

Pratt maintained that the FBI knew he was innocent because the agency had him under surveillance in Oakland when the murder was committed in Santa Monica.

— Robert J. Lopez

Twitter: @LAJourno

Photo: Geronimo Pratt, left, with defense attorney Johnny L. Cochran Jr. in Los Angeles in 1998. Credit: Nick Ut / Associated Press

__________________________

Geronimo ji-Jaga Dies at 63

New Zealand music meets

Ghanaian culture

with Wanlov the Kubolor

Making Tracks, the New Zealand TV series  takes NZ music around the world in order to have it blended with the music and cultures of other countries, touched down in Ghana late last year, and while it isn't - and doesn't claim to be - an in-depth look at urban culture in Ghana, it's certainly worth viewing if you're feeling guilty for not knowing anything about Ghana. 

The most interesting thing to come out of the visit, though, was Wanlov's adaptation of the gospel-soul song Bathe in the River by Hollie Smith & Don McGlashan to lament the problem of river pollution in Ghana (lyrics at the bottom of this piece). Apropriately, Wanlov's interpretation is called For The River.

It's a problem with many culprits, some of whom truly have no idea they're contributing to the problem.

The image directly above and the one that follows are part of a series by Andrew McConnell about Accra's Agbogbloshie Dump. This is where a significant percentage of the old computers from Europe and the States end up.

Andrew writes:

Of the 20 to 50 million tons of electronics discarded each year 70% will end up in poor nations, and in the EU alone 6.6 million tons of e-waste are unaccounted for every year...Increasingly this e-waste is finding it's way to West Africa and countries like Ghana, Nigeria and Ivory Coast. Traders bypass international laws by labelling the equipment as second-hand goods or charity donations, but, in reality as much as 80% of the computers sent to Ghana are broken or obsolete.

Some of the toxic metals - lead, beryllium, cadmium and mercury - end up in the bloodstream of the people who work the dump, some seeps into the ground, some into the river.

Other culprits include farmers (bad farming practices), the fishing industry (fishing with chemicals), and regular folk (inappropriate disposal of domestic waste), but the worst culprits are industrial companies (who direct their waste liquids directly into nearby streams and rivers) and mining companies.

Research commissioned last year in Ghana by the human rights and mining advocacy NGO Wacam revealed that 250 rivers in mining communities around Obuasi and Tarkwa had been polluted by cyanide and heavy metals.  

And while all this has been going on what have the public officials whose job is to ensure the environment isn't befouled - and if it is to bring the culprits to book - been doing?

Besides bringing some attention to the problem, Wanlov's video is also a timely prelude to the Environmental Film Festival of Accra, running from the 7th to 19th of June. If you're in Ghana during this period be sure to check their programme coz you're bound to see something that'll inspire you to take action.

Wanlov the Kubolor's European tour to promote his any-day-now new album Brown Card kicks off on the 3rd of June (Listen to the first single, African Gypsy, feat. Keziah Jones). Check his Facebook page for all gig dates and locations so you don't miss he when he hits your city.

Video directed by Dean Cornish

LYRICS
i wan go boff
for the river
i wan hold ma head up
for the river
but e no dey anymore
coz da river
e full of borla
e turn to gutta (rap verse)
i dey kai da way den we dey swim
4 da rivers plus wanna friends
afta den we dey fetch water
take go cook
den we dey chop better
but somtin happen
plastic come
rivers turn into drastic dump
sewage n electronic waste
sweet river
kai
toxic taste (breakdown)
river pra
emu aye fii
river odo
ewo muji
river volta
emeh podi
river densu
very nasty (bridge)
ooh wanna rivers
i dey wonder how we go survive (ch)

WHISPERING PRAIRIE PRESS
• 2011 POETRY, FLASH FICTION, AND ESSAY WRITING AWARDS •

POSTMARK DEADLINE | June 30, 2011

Polish your favorite poems, short fiction, and essays for the Whispering Prairie Press 2011 Poetry, Flash Fiction, and Essay Writing Awards!

PRIZES IN EACH CATEGORY |
1st place $100, 2nd place $50, 3rd place $25, plus one honorable mention for every 10 entries.

ELIGIBILITY |
Open to all writers age 18 and up, except members of the Board of Directors of Whispering Prairie Press and the editorial board of Kansas City Voices. All work must be the author's original work.

POETRY |
Any style, any subject. Limit: 36 lines

FLASH FICTION |
A complete fictional short story with a beginning, middle and end. 1,000 words or less

NON-FICTION PERSONAL ESSAY |
1,000 words or less

SUBMISSIONS |

• All entries must be unpublished at the time of submission. • No limit on number of entries. • Submit hard copy with no name on manuscript. • Put word count for fiction or line count for poetry in the top right corner. Include a cover sheet with name, address, e-mail, telephone number with area code, category, and title of entry. • If author is a full-time college student, add the name of the school • Prose must be double-spaced in 12-point Times New Roman or Courier. Poetry may be single spaced. • Enclose SASE for next year's guidelines. Entries not returned.

ENTRY FEE |

• $5 for each entry or 3 entries for $10. (nonrefundable) • Full-time college students: 2 entries for $5. May mix categories.

ADDRESS |
Whispering Prairie Press Writing Awards
2128 E. 144th St.
Olathe, KS 66062-2355

POSTMARK DEADLINE |
June 30, 2011

RESULTS |
Winners will be announced by August 1, 2011, and winners' names posted at www.kansascityvoices.com. Judges' decisions are final.

Whispering Prairie Press publishes Kansas City Voices magazine, now in its 9th year.

(Gargoyles of Notre Dame by Blake Krasner)

Halloween Short Story Contest Guidelines

Sponsored by Water Forest Press Books, Skyline Publications &

 Night Wind Publishing

 

Start date: Now

End Date: August 15, 2011

Entry Fee: $10.00 per story.  Please read all guidelines before you

Pay at the bottom of this page.

Genre: Mainstream Horror – Thriller – Occult – Supernatural – Psychological Thriller – Paranormal – Fantasy - Monsters

Place of Publication: http://www.nightwindpublishing.com

 

Original, unpublished short stories, any length.

 

One story will be selected by three editors as the winner of our Halloween Short Story Contest.

Prize: Publication of winner's own short story collection, published by Water Forest Press and Night Wind Publishing. Winner will receive 10 books (perfect bound soft cover up to 200 pages and cover art) including ISBN and LOC numbers, a professional book release and review, listing and promotion online Water Forest Press, Night Wind Publishing and Skyline Publications websites.

Optional: If you would like your entry to be published online, we'd be happy to do so on

 Night Wind Publishing website where it will be archived for everyone to enjoy.

Otherwise, we'll simply hold it until judging.

There is also the possibility of future publication in an encore edition of

SpinningS. . . intense tales of life anthology

Submit as many stories as you would like but each story must be accompanied by a $10.00 entry fee payable on Paypal or by check.  Paypal charge will be listed as:

Skyline Short Story Contest 2011

 After you've made your payment, Submit your Story to: nightwindstorycontest@gmail.com" style=""> nightwindstorycontest@gmail.com

For check payment instructions or general information, email nightwindstorycontest@gmail.com"> nightwindstorycontest@gmail.com

Thank you and good luck !!!

The 2012 Adventure Writers' Competition $1,000 grand prize: The Grandmaster Award Unpublished writers in the adventure genre can vie to be the next Clive Cussler by submitting their original fiction manuscripts for a chance at the $1000 grand prize The Grandmaster Award

Announcement:
We are pleased to announce the 2012 Adventure Writer’s Competition. This will be the third competition since the announcement of the format at the 2007 Clive Cussler Collector’s Society Convention in Charleston, South Carolina. Since that event, two winners have been crowned: the 2008 winner was Jeff Edwards for his manuscript The Seventh Angel, and the 2010 winner was Ian Kharitonov for his manuscript The Russian Renaissance. A bonus feature to the 2012 Competition is the addition of a Facebook page where news of the current competition, insight to authors and prior competitions, and questions can be addressed for a broader audience. Kerry Frey, our Director of the Adventure Writer’s Competition, will administer the site.

Good luck to all participants – and in the words of the Grandmaster himself Clive Cussler – Here’s to Adventure!

Competition Rules:
Manuscripts will be accepted beginning October 1, 2011. The competition deadline is January 1, 2012 with a maximum of 25 entries/manuscripts. The competition will be closed with the receipt of the 25th manuscript.

Eligibility:

(a) Participants must be 18 years of age by October 1, 2011.

(b) The Adventure Writers' Competition is open only to unpublished writers.*

An “unpublished writer" is defined as: an author whose fictional work has not appeared in book, magazine, or periodical format via a Fortune 500 recognized publishing firm. Self-published/Vanity Press authors are eligible as long as their work has not appeared in any of the formats listed above.

(c) Clive Cussler Collectors Society' Officers, Panel Judges, and their families/relatives are not eligible for the contest.

 

Rules & Submittal Requirements:

(a) Full-length submittals must be original and cannot include characters from another authors' work - i.e. fan-fiction is not allowed.

(b) The length of the manuscript shall not exceed 130K words or less than 50K words.

(c) Format: 12 pt.- Times New Roman font, paginated and double-spaced with one-inch margins, and numbered pages.

(d) Writers may only submit one manuscript.

(e) Submitted manuscripts must be of the action-adventure genre. The story must have action and conflict, and the reader must identify with the character(s) in order to draw them into the plot. Fantasy and Science Fiction entries will not be accepted.

(f) The deadline of the competition is January 1, 2012.

(g) Attendance to the Clive Cussler Collector's Society Convention is not required to claim the Grand Prize.

(h) A minimum of 10 entries/manuscripts will need to be submitted by the deadline for this competition to take place, with a maximum of 25 entries/manuscripts.

 

Judging:

The first 25 submitted manuscripts (which meet the requirements of the competition) will be judged by a select panel composed of recognized authors and members from the Clive Cussler Collectors Society. The manuscripts’ opening chapters will also be posted on the competition’s Facebook page for fans to vote for their favorite Top 5. Voters will do this by hitting the “like button”. The panel members input will be weighted heavier than the votes from the Facebook site. From a compellation of these votes, the 25 will be down-selected to the top three finalists.

Competitors' Rights:

(a) By submitting a manuscript to the competition, the author (i) certifies their eligibility per the contest eligibility rules, (ii) grants the Society the right to publish excerpts on the web site, Facebook page, and in conference material, (iii) grants the Society the right to forward the winning manuscript to participating Literary agents for consideration, (iv) represents or warrants their work to be original and to have not used licensed material owned by someone else - thus being libelous, or infringing or violating the rights of any third parties, (v) and agrees to not submit their work to any other publisher, competition or self-publish until notified of their elimination from the contest.

(b) By entering this competition, the author (i) acknowledges the competition will be conducted in good-faith by members of the Clive Cussler Collectors Society acting as judges and overseers of the process, and (ii) agrees to not hold the Society responsible for violating copyright infringements both during and beyond the competition.

 

The Prize:

(a) The Clive Cussler Award winner will receive a $1000 cash prize and additional amenities to be named at a later date.

(b) The winner will be announced at the 2012 Clive Cussler Collector's Society Convention. The location and date of the event will be announced at a later time.

(c) Dirk Cussler will select the winner from the top finalists.

How to Enter:

Information on the contest can be found on the Adventure Writer’s Competition Facebook page or solicited through Kerry Frey - c/o the Clive Cussler Collectors Society.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Un-Victim

Amitava Kumar interviews Arundhati Roy February 2011

In the wake of sedition threats by the Indian government, Arundhati Roy describes the stupidest question she gets asked, the cuss-word that made her respect the power of language, and the limits of preaching nonviolence.

We
Have to be
Very
Careful
These Days
Because...

That is what I read on the little green, blue, and yellow stickers on the front door of Arundhati Roy’s home in south Delhi. Earlier in the evening I had received a message from Roy asking me to text her before my arrival so that she’d know that the person at her door wasn’t from Times Now. Times Now is a TV channel in India that Roy memorably described, for non-Indian readers, as “Fox News on acid.” The channel’s rabidly right-wing anchor routinely calls Roy “provocative” and “anti-national.” Last year, when a mob vandalized the house in which Roy was then living, the media vans, including one from Times Now, were parked outside long before the attack began. No one had informed the police. To be fair, Times Now wasn’t the only channel whose OB Van was parked in front of Roy’s house. But that too is a part of the larger point Roy has been making. Media outlets are not only complicit with the state, they are also indistinguishable from each other. The main anchor of a TV channel writes a column for a newspaper, the news editor has a talk show, etc. Roy told me that the monopoly of the media is like watching “an endless cocktail party where people are carrying their drinks from one room to the next.”

In most other homes in rich localities of Delhi those stickers on the door could be taken as apology for the heavy locks. But in Roy’s case the words assume another meaning. They mock the ways in which people rationalize their passivity and silence. You can shut your eyes, complacently turn your back on injustice, acquiesce in a crime simply by saying, “We have to be very careful these days…”

In November 2010, following a public speech she had made on the freedom struggle in Kashmir, a case of sedition was threatened against Roy. Several prominent members of the educated middle class in India spoke up on Roy’s behalf but a sizable section of this liberal set made it clear that their support of Roy was a support for the right to free speech, not for her views. What is it about Roy that so irks the Indian middle-class and elite? Is it the fact that she has no truck with the sober, scholarly, Brahmanical discourse of the respectable middle-of-the-road protectors of the status-quo? Her critics, among whom are some of my friends, are also serious people. But their objections appear hollow to me because they have never courted unpopularity. They air their opinions in op-eds, dine at the corporate table, are fêted on national TV, and collect followers on Twitter. They don’t have to face court orders. Naturally, I wanted to ask Roy whether she feels estranged from the people around her. She does, but also not. Her point is, which people? A bit melodramatically, I asked, “Are you lonely?” Roy’s wonderfully self-confident response: “If I were lonely, I’d be doing something else. But I’m not. I deploy my writing from the heart of the crowd.”

When I sat down for dinner with her I noticed the pile of papers on the far end of the wooden table. These were legal charges filed against Roy because of her statements against Indian state atrocities. Roy said to me, “These are our paper napkins these days.” What toll had these trials taken on her writing? Was her activism a source of a new political imagining or was her political experience one of loneliness and exile in her own land? What would be the shape of any new fiction she would write? These and other questions were on my mind when I began an exchange with Roy by email and then met with her twice at her home in Delhi in mid-January.

—Amitava Kumar for Guernica

Guernica: Before we begin, can you give me an example of a stupid question you are asked at interviews?

Arundhati Roy: It is difficult to answer extremely stupid questions. Very, very, difficult. Stupidity defeats you in some way. Especially when time is at a premium. And sometimes these questions are themselves mischievous.

My father turned out to be an absolutely charming, unemployed, broke, irreverent alcoholic.

Guernica: Give me an example.

Arundhati Roy: “The Maoists are blowing up schools and killing children. Do you approve? Is it right to kill children?” Where do you start?

Guernica: Yes.

Arundhati Roy: There was a Hardtalk once, I believe, between some BBC guy obviously, and a Palestinian activist. He was asking questions like this—“Do you believe in killing children?”—and any question he asked, the Palestinian just said, “Ariel Sharon is a war criminal.” Once, I was on The Charlie Rose Show. Well, I was invited to be on The Charlie Rose Show. He said, “Tell me, Arundhati Roy, do you believe that India should have nuclear weapons?” So I said, “I don’t think India should have nuclear weapons. I don’t think Israel should have nuclear weapons. I don’t think the United States should have nuclear weapons.” “No, I asked you do you believe that India should have nuclear weapons.” I answered exactly the same thing. About four times… They never aired it!

Guernica: How old were you when you first became aware of the power of words?

Arundhati Roy: Pretty old I think. Maybe two. I heard about it from my disappeared father whom I met for the first time when I was about twenty-four or twenty-five years old. He turned out to be an absolutely charming, unemployed, broke, irreverent alcoholic. (After being unnerved initially, I grew very fond of him and gave thanks that he wasn’t some senior bureaucrat or golf-playing CEO.) Anyway, the first thing he asked me was, “Do you still use bad language?” I had no idea what he meant, given that the last time he saw me I was about two years old. Then he told me that on the tea estates in Assam where he worked, one day he accidentally burned me with his cigarette and that I glared at him and said “chootiya” (cunt, or imbecile)—language I’d obviously picked up in the tea-pickers’ labor quarters where I must have been shunted off to while my parents fought. My first piece of writing was when I was five… I still have those notebooks. Miss Mitten, a terrifying Australian missionary, was my teacher. She would tell me on a daily basis that she could see Satan in my eyes. In my two-sentence essay (which made it into The God of Small Things) I said, “I hate Miss Mitten, whenever I see her I see rags. I think her knickers are torn.” She’s dead now, God rest her soul. I don’t know whether these stories I’m telling you are about becoming aware of the power of words, or about developing an affection for words… the awareness of a child’s pleasure which extended beyond food and drink.

What’s interesting is trying to walk the path between honing language to make it as private as possible, then looking around, seeing what’s happening to millions, and deploying that private language to speak from the heart of a crowd.

Guernica: How has that early view changed or become refined in specific ways in the years since?

Arundhati Roy: I’m not sure that what I had then was a “view” about language—I’m not sure that I have one even now. As I said, it was just the beginnings of the recognition of pleasure. To be able to express yourself, to be able to close the gap—inasmuch as it is possible—between thought and expression is just such a relief. It’s like having the ability to draw or paint what you see, the way you see it. Behind the speed and confidence of a beautiful line in a line drawing there’s years of—usually—discipline, obsession, practice that builds on a foundation of natural talent or inclination of course. It’s like sport. A sentence can be like that. Language is like that. It takes a while to become yours, to listen to you, to obey you, and for you to obey it. I have a clear memory of language swimming towards me. Of my willing it out of the water. Of it being blurred, inaccessible, inchoate… and then of it emerging. Sharply outlined, custom-made.

Guernica: As far as writing is concerned, do you have models, especially those that have remained so for a long time?

Arundhati Roy: Do I have models? Maybe I wouldn’t use that word because it sounds like there are people who I admire so much that I would like to become them, or to be like them… I don’t feel that about anybody. But if you mean are there writers I love and admire—yes of course there are. So many. But that would be a whole new interview wouldn’t it? Apart from Shakespeare, James Joyce, and Nabokov, Neruda, Eduardo Galeano, John Berger, right now I’m becoming fascinated by Urdu poets who I am ashamed to say I know so little about… But I’m learning. I’m reading Hafiz. There are so many wonderful writers, my ancestors that have lived in the world. I cannot begin to list them. However, it isn’t only writers who inspire my idea of storytelling. Look at the Kathakali dancer, the ease with which he can shift gears within a story—from humor to epiphany, from bestiality to tenderness, from the epic to the intimate—that ability, that range, is what I really admire. To me it’s that ease—it’s a kind of athleticism—like watching a beautiful, easy runner—a cheetah on the move—that is proof of the fitness of the storyteller.

Guernica: American readers got their introduction to you when, a bit before The God of Small Things was published, an excerpt appeared in the New Yorker issue on India. There was a photograph there of you with other Indian writers, including Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth, Vikram Chandra, Anita Desai, Kiran Desai, and a few others. In the time since then, your trajectory as a writer has defined very sharply your difference from everyone in that group. Did you even ever want to belong in it?

Arundhati Roy: I chuckle when I remember that day. I think everybody was being a bit spiky with everybody else. There were muted arguments, sulks, and mutterings. There was brittle politeness. Everybody was a little uncomfortable, wondering what exactly it was that we had in common, what qualified us to be herded into the same photograph? And yet it was for The New Yorker, and who didn’t want to be in The New Yorker? It was the fiftieth anniversary of India’s Independence and this particular issue was meant to be about the renaissance of Indian-English writing. But when we went for lunch afterward the bus that had been booked to take us was almost empty—it turned out that there weren’t many of us, after all. And who were we anyway? Indian writers? But the great majority of the people in our own country neither knew nor cared very much about who we were or what we wrote. Anyway, I don’t think anybody in that photograph felt they really belonged in the same “group” as the next person. Isn’t that what writers are? Great individualists? I don’t lose sleep about my differences or similarities with other writers. For me, what’s more interesting is trying to walk the path between the act of honing language to make it as private and as individual as possible, and then looking around, seeing what’s happening to millions of people and deploying that private language to speak from the heart of a crowd. Holding those two very contradictory things down is a fascinating enterprise. I am a part of a great deal of frenetic political activity here. I’ve spent the last six months traveling across the country, speaking at huge meetings in smaller towns—Ranchi, Jullundur, Bhubaneshwar, Jaipur, Srinagar—at public meetings with massive audiences, three and four thousand people—students, farmers, laborers, activists. I speak mostly in Hindi, which isn’t my language (even that has to be translated depending on where the meeting is being held). Though I write in English, my writing is immediately translated into Hindi, Telugu, Kannada, Tamil, Bengali, Malayalam, Odia. I don’t think I’m considered an “Indo-Anglian” writer any more. I seem to be drifting away from the English speaking world at high speed. My English must be changing. The way I think about language certainly is.

Guernica: We are going to entertain the fantasy that you have the time to read and write these days. What have you been reading this past year, for instance?

Arundhati Roy: I have for some reason been reading about Russia, post-revolution Russia. A stunning collection of short stories by Varlam Shalamov called Kolyma Tales. The Trial of Trotsky in Mexico. Emma Goldman’s autobiography, Living My Life. Journey Into the Whirlwind by Eugenia Ginzburg… troubling stuff. The Chinese writer Yu Hua…

Finding out about things, figuring out the real story—what you call research—is part of life for some of us. Mostly just to get over the indignity of living in a pool of propaganda, of being lied to all the time.

Guernica: And writing? You have been effective, at crucial moments, as a writer-activist who introduces a strong opinion or protest when faced with an urgent issue. Often, these pieces, which are pretty lengthy, must require a lot of research—so much information sometimes sneaked into a stunning one-liner! How do you go about doing your research?

Arundhati Roy: Each of these pieces I have written over the last ten years are pieces I never wanted to write. And each time I wrote one, I thought it would be my last… Each time I write something I promise myself I’ll never do it again, because the fallout goes on for months; it takes so much of my time. Sometimes, increasingly, like of late, it turns dangerous. I actually don’t do research to write the pieces. My research isn’t project-driven. It’s the other way around—I write because the things I come to learn of from the reading and traveling I do and the stories I hear make me furious. I find out more, I cross-check, I read up, and by then I’m so shocked that I have to write. The essays I wrote on the December 13 Parliament attack are a good example—of course I had been following the case closely. I was on the Committee for the Free and Fair trial for S.A.R Geelani. Eventually he was acquitted and Mohammed Afzal was sentenced to death. I went off to Goa one monsoon, by myself with all the court papers for company. For no reason other than curiosity. I sat alone in a restaurant day after day, the only person there, while it poured and poured. I could hardly believe what I was reading. The Supreme Court judgment that said that though it didn’t have proof that Afzal was a member of a terrorist group, and the evidence against him was only circumstantial, it was sentencing him to death to “satisfy the collective conscience of society.” Just like that—in black and white. Even still, I didn’t write anything. I had promised myself “no more essays.”

But a few months later the date for the hanging was fixed. The newspapers were full of glee, talking about where the rope would come from, who the hangman would be. I knew the whole thing was a farce. I realized that if I said nothing and they went ahead and hanged him, I’d never forgive myself. So I wrote, “And his life should become extinct.” I was one of a handful of people who protested. Afzal’s still alive. It may not be because of us, it may be because his clemency petition is still pending, but I think between us we cracked the hideous consensus that had built up in the country around that case. Now at least in some quarters there is a healthy suspicion about unsubstantiated allegations in newspapers whenever they pick up people—mostly Muslims, of course—and call them “terrorists.” We can take a bit of credit for that. Now of course with the sensational confession of Swami Aseemanand in which he says the RSS [Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh] was behind the bomb blasts in Ajmer Sharif and Malegaon, and was responsible for the bombing of the Samjhauta Express—the idea of radical Hindutva groups being involved in false-flag attacks—is common knowledge.

To answer your question, I don’t really do research in order to write. Finding out about things, figuring out the real story—what you call research—is part of life now for some of us. Mostly just to get over the indignity of living in a pool of propaganda, of being lied to all the time, if nothing else.

The Indian elite has seceded into outer space. It seems to have lost the ability to understand those who have been left behind on earth.

Guernica: What would it mean for you to write fiction now?

Arundhati Roy:  It would mean finding time, carving out a little solitude, getting off the tiger. I hope it will be possible. The God of Small Things was published only a few months before the nuclear tests which ushered in a new, very frightening, and overt language of virulent nationalism. In response I wrote “The End of Imagination” which set me on a political journey which I never expected to embark on. All these years later, after writing about big dams, privatization, the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, the Parliament attack, the occupation of Kashmir, the Maoists, and the corporatization of everything—writing which involved facing down an incredibly hostile, abusive, and dangerous middle class—the Radia tapes exposé has come like an MRI confirming a diagnosis some of us made years ago. Now it’s street talk, so I feel it’s alright for me to do something else now. It happens all the time. You say something and it sounds extreme and outrageous, and a few years down the line it’s pretty much accepted as the norm. I feel we are headed for very bad times. This is going to become a more violent place, this country. But now that it’s upon us, as a writer I’ll have to find a way to live, to witness, to communicate what’s going on. The Indian elite has seceded into outer space. It seems to have lost the ability to understand those who have been left behind on earth.

Guernica: Yes, but what do you have to do to write new fiction?

Arundhati Roy: I don’t know. I’ll have to find a language to tell the story I want to tell. By language I don’t mean English, Hindi, Urdu, Malayalam, of course. I mean something else. A way of binding together worlds that have been ripped apart. Let’s see.

Guernica: Your novel was a huge best-seller, of course. But your nonfiction books have been very popular too. In places like New York, whenever you have spoken there is always a huge turnout of adoring fans. Your books sell well here but what I’ve been amazed by is how some of your pieces, including the one published in the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, become a sensation on the Internet. Could you comment on this phenomenon. Also, is it true that the New York Times refused to publish that piece?

Arundhati Roy: As far as I know the New York Times has a policy of not publishing anything that has appeared elsewhere. And I rarely write commissioned pieces. But of course “The Algebra of Infinite Justice,” the essay I wrote after 9/11, was not published in any mainstream U.S. publication—it was unthinkable at the time. But that essay was published all over the world; in the U.S. some small radio stations read it out, all of it. And yes, it flew on the net. There’s so much to say about the internet… Wikileaks, the Facebook revolution in places like Kashmir which has completely subverted the Indian media’s propaganda of noise as well as strategic silence. The Twitter uprising in Iran. I expect the internet to become a site of conflict very soon, with attempts being made by governments and big business to own and control it, to price it out of the reach of the poor… I don’t see those attempts being successful though. India’s newest and biggest war, Operation Green Hunt, is being waged against tribal people, many of whom have never seen a bus or a train, leave alone a computer. But even there, mobile phones and YouTube are playing a part.

Guernica: Talking of the New York Times, I read your recent report from Kashmir, just after you were threatened with arrest on the slightly archaic-sounding charge of sedition.

Arundhati Roy: Yes, there was that. But I think it has blown over. It would have been a bad thing for me. But I think, on balance, it would have been worse for them. It’s ludicrous because I was only saying what millions of Kashmiris have been saying for years. Interestingly, the whole thing about charging me for sedition was not started by the Government, but by a few right-wing crazies and a few irresponsible media channels like Times Now which is a bit like Fox News on acid. Even when the Mumbai attacks happened, if you remember it was the media that began baying for war with Pakistan. This cocktail of religious fundamentalism and a crazed, irresponsible, unaccountable media is becoming a very serious problem, in India as well as Pakistan. I don’t know what the solution is. Certainly not censorship…

Guernica: Can you give a sense of what is a regular day for you, or perhaps how irregular and different one day may be from another?

Arundhati Roy: My days and nights. Actually I don’t have a regular day (or night!). It has been so for years, and has nothing to do with the sedition tamasha [spectacle]. I’m not sure how I feel about this—but that’s how it is. I move around a lot. I don’t always sleep in the same place. I live a very unsettled but not un-calm life. But sometimes I feel as though I lack a skin—something that separates me from the world I live in. That absence of skin is dangerous. It invites trouble into every part of your life. It makes what is public private and what is private public. It can sometimes become very traumatic, not just for me but for those who are close to me.

Guernica: Your stance on Kashmir and also on the struggles of the tribals has drawn the ire of the Indian middle class. Who belongs to that class and what do you think gets their goat?

Arundhati Roy: The middle class goat is very sensitive about itself and very callous about other peoples’ goats.

Guernica: Your critics say that you often see the world only in black and white.

Arundhati Roy: The thing is you have to understand, Amitava, that the people who say such things are a certain section of society who think they are the universe. It is the jitterbugging elite which considers itself the whole country. Just go outside and nobody will say that to you. Go to Orissa, go to the people who are under attack, and nobody will think that there is anything remotely controversial about what I write. You know, I keep saying this, the most successful secession movement in India is the secession of the middle and upper classes to outer space. They have their own universe, their own andolan, their own Jessica Lal, their own media, their own controversies, and they’re disconnected from everything else. For them, what I write comes like an outrage. Ki yaar yeh kyaa bol rahi hai? [What the hell is she saying?] They don’t realize that they are the ones who have painted themselves into a corner.

It would be immoral of me to preach violence unless I’m prepared to pick up arms myself. It is equally immoral for me to preach nonviolence when I’m not bearing the brunt of the attack.

Guernica: You have written that “people believe that faced with extermination they have the right to fight back. By any means necessary.” The knee-jerk response to this has been: Look, she’s preaching violence.

Arundhati Roy: My question is, if you are an Adivasi living in a village in a dense forest in Chhattisgarh, and that village is surrounded by eight hundred Central Reserve Police Force who have started to burn down the houses and rape the women, what are people supposed to do? Are they supposed to go on a hunger strike? They can’t. They are already hungry, they are already starving. Are they supposed to boycott goods? They can’t because they don’t have the money to buy goods. And if they go on a fast or a dharna, who is looking, who is watching? So, my position is just that it would be immoral of me to preach violence to anybody unless I’m prepared to pick up arms myself. But I think it is equally immoral for me to preach nonviolence when I’m not bearing the brunt of the attack.

Guernica: According to Macaulay, the rationale for the introduction of English in India, as we all know, was to produce a body of clerks. We have departed from that purpose, of course, but still, in our use of the language we remain remarkably conservative. I wonder sometimes whether your style itself, exuberant and excessive, isn’t for these readers a transgression.

Arundhati Roy: I wouldn’t say that it’s all Macaulay’s fault. There is something clerky and calculating about our privileged classes. They see themselves as the State or as advisors to the State, rarely as subjects. If you read columnists and editorials, most have a very clerky, “apply-through-proper-channels” approach. As though they are a shadow cabinet. Even when they are critical of the State they are what a friend once described as “reckless at slow speed.”  So I don’t think my transgressions as far as they are concerned has only to do with my style. It’s about everything—style, substance, politics, speed. I think it worries them that I’m not a victim and that I don’t pretend to be one. They love victims and victimology. My writing is not a plea for aid or for compassion towards the poor. We’re not asking for more NGOs or charities or foundations in which the rich can massage their egos and salve their consciences with their surplus money. The critique is structural.

Guernica: Your polemical essays often draw criticism also for their length. (We are frankly envious of the space that the print media in India is able to grant you.) You have written “We need context. Always.” Is the length at which you aspire to write and explain things a result of your search for context?

Arundhati Roy: I don’t aspire to write at any particular length. What I write could be looked at as a very long essay or a very short book. Most of the time, what I write has everything to do with timing. It’s not just what I say, but when I say it. I usually write when I know the climate is turning ugly, when no one is in a mood to listen to this version of things. I know it’s going to enrage people and yet, I know that nothing is more important at that moment than to put your foot in the door.

Guernica: But even as we raise the issue of criticism, it is also important to say that some of these critics who accuse you of hyperbole and other sins are hardly our moral exemplars. I’m thinking of someone like Vir Sanghvi. His editorial about your Kashmir speech was dismissive and filled with high contempt. We’ve discovered from the recent release of the Radia tapes that people like Sanghvi were not impartial journalists: they were errand boys for corporate politicians.

Arundhati Roy: We didn’t need the Radia tapes to discover that. And I wouldn’t waste my energy railing against those who criticize or dismiss me. It’s part of their brief. I don’t expect them to stand up and applaud.

Guernica: Having read all your published writing over the past twelve years or more, I wonder: Is there anything you have written in the past that you don’t agree with anymore, that you think you were wrong about, or perhaps something about which you have dramatically changed your mind?

Arundhati Roy: You know, ironically, I wouldn’t be unhappy to be wrong about the things I’ve said. Imagine if I suddenly realized that big dams were wonderful. I could celebrate the hundreds of dams that are being planned in the Himalayas. I could celebrate the Indo-U.S. nuclear deal. But there are things about which my views have changed—because the times have changed. Most of this has to do with strategies of resistance. The Indian State has become hard and unforgiving. What it once did in places like Kashmir, Manipur, and Nagaland, it does in mainland India. So some of the strategies we inherited from the freedom movement are a bit obsolete now.

Guernica: You have pointed out that the logic of the global war on terror is the same as the logic of terrorism, making victims of civilians. Are there specific works, particularly of fiction, that have arrived close to explaining the post 9/11 world we are living in?

Arundhati Roy: Actually I haven’t really kept up with the world of fiction, sad to say. I don’t even know who won the Booker Prize from one year to the next. But when you read Neruda’s “Standard Oil Co.” you really have to believe that while things change they remain the same.

Guernica: Your old friend Baby Bush is gone. But has Obama been any better? While we are worried about the TSA at airports, in less fortunate places U.S. drone attacks are killing more civilians than militants. Shouldn’t we be raising our voices against the role played by the U.S. terrorist-industrial complex instead of backing, as you suggest, the Iraqi resistance movement?

Arundhati Roy: I hope I didn’t say we should back the Iraqi resistance movement. I’m not sure what backing a resistance movement means—saying nice things about it? I think I meant that we should become the resistance. If people outside Iraq had actually done more than just weekend demonstrations, then the pressure on the U.S. government could have been huge. Without that, the Iraqis were left on their own in a war zone in which every kind of peaceful dissent was snuffed out. Only the monstrous could survive. And then the world was called upon to condemn them. Even here in India, there are these somewhat artificial debates about  “violent” and “non-violent” resistance—basically a critique of the Maoists’ armed struggle in the mineral-rich forests of Central India. The fact is that if everybody leaves adivasis to fight their own battles against displacement and destitution, it’s impossible to expect them to be Gandhian. However, it is open to people outside the forest, well-off and middle-class people who the media pays mind to, to become a part of the resistance. If they stood up, then perhaps those in the forest would not need to resort to arms. If they won’t stand up, then there’s not much point in their preaching morality to the victims of the war. About Bush and Obama: frankly, I’m tired of debating U.S. politics. There are new kings on the block now.

 

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