Culture Clash: The Limits of Imagination

Culture Clash:
The Limits of Imagination
By SALIL TRIPATHI

A young man in a London pub looked with contempt at the dozens of people, who stood shocked in front of a giant TV screen, watching the destruction of the World Trade Center. He kept repeating, to nobody in particular, that the chickens were coming home to roost. "I'm really, really upset," he said. "All this sympathy going to America. They don't deserve it. What's happened is because of their foreign policy. Where were these tears when millions were dying in the Third World?"

That young man is far from alone. On Internet lists, in letters columns and e***orial pages of some publications in Europe and Asia, such views are being expressed. The tactic is similar: Express outrage over the attack, sympathize with the victims -- and then blame the United States. On an Internet list ostensibly devoted to postcolonial literature, some people selectively lamented the deaths of janitors, day-wage workers and "people of color" who died on Sept 11. The others who died were apparently willing accomplices of imperialistic capitalism.

Now these disparate voices have received intellectual imprimatur from the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy, winner of the 1997 Booker Prize for her novel, "The God of Small Things." In a long essay published Sept. 29 in The Guardian of London, she challenges the notion that the world must sympathize with America's plight. Osama bin Laden and the Taliban are creatures of U.S. foreign policy, she says, and America's political, militaristic and economic triumphalism since the end of the Cold War are to blame for the Sept. 11 attacks.

Since writing the novel, Ms. Roy has focused her energies on setting the world right. She has written three long essays critical of India's policies of building large dams, making nuclear bombs and freeing its economy. She does not say anything new. Popular opposition movements on these three issues, for example, have long preceded Ms. Roy's intervention. What she adds are polemic and rhetoric, skillfully and effectively.

Many see Ms. Roy as the intellectual dissident, part of the tra***ion of writers who have taken up unpopular causes, seeking to be the conscience-keepers of their generation. Some, like Zhang Xianliang, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Nadine Gordimer, Vaclav Havel and Pramoedya Ananta Toer, succeed in arousing our revulsion, by painting a haunting landscape of the waste land they inhabit. Their imagination soars to capture the kind of truth that remains elusive to most reporters. But they are firmly committed to a moral truth.

The Sri Lankan writer Romesh Gunesekera once said that novelists have it easy: They can make things up; journalists are not allowed to. But what happens when novelists turn journalists? What happens when they use techniques accepted in fiction -- where emotion and leaps of logic are permitted precisely because they let our imagination soar -- and create a tract that masquerades as an essay?

Ms. Roy admits that she is writing "in absence of information," but asserts: "Writers (like myself) will invest the act with their own politics, with their own interpretations. This speculation, this analysis of the political climate in which the attacks took place, can only be a good thing." Perhaps. But some readers take her analysis as facts.

"Someone," Ms. Roy says, told her that if Osama bin Laden did not exist, America would have invented him. This is careless. She can say so herself, if she believes it, or she can attribute the remark. Who is this "someone"? Was it a veteran Middle East correspondent like Robert Fisk, or longtime critic of U.S. foreign policy Noam Chomsky, or a friend of hers in a New Delhi barsati? She makes other forceful assertions, imbuing in them the certainty of axioms.

Ms. Roy's celebrity and great felicity with the language make some assertions appear respectable. Consider this: "Box-cutters, penknives and cold anger are the weapons with which the wars of the new century will be waged. Anger is the lock pick. It slips through customs unnoticed. Doesn't show up in baggage checks." Powerful stuff, this. Now many of us are angry or sad while boarding a plane: over leaving a job, a town, a home, a lover, over having to wake up early, over a delayed flight, over not getting the desired seat, or not getting upgraded. But that anger isn't enough to decide to take over the plane and force it to crash into a well-populated building full of civilians.

I'm not being facetious; she picks one form of anger, over U.S. foreign policy, and attempts to rationalize it, by elevating it as distinct. Whose anger, indeed, is more valid? Ms. Roy claims that the message left behind on Sept. 11 was written not just by Mr. bin Laden, but also by the millions killed in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Central America and many other countries. Wait a minute: Vietnam? The country was ravaged, with many lives shattered. They had some reasons to hate America for generations. Yet, visiting Americans -- tourists, businessmen, diplomats, war veterans -- are routinely astonished by the generosity and hospitality they receive there. No Vietnamese hatched a plot targeting an office building at the start of a new day.

An eye for an eye leaves the world blind, Gandhi had said. All Ms. Roy can offer is an axiom: What supposedly goes around eventually comes around. This is why she remains an interpreter, not the moral force Mr. Zhang, Mr. Solzhenitsyn, Mr. Pramoedya, Ms. Gordimer or Mr. Havel before her became.

The end of the Cold War made many people upset because in their eyes, the wrong system -- the U.S. and liberal, capitalist democracy -- won. Ms. Roy complains: "It made the space for neocapitalism and corporate globalization, again dominated by America." She elaborates that "just like the multinationals," terrorism has no country. It is transnational, as global an enterprise as Coke or Pepsi, or Nike. After the first sign of trouble, terrorists can pull up stakes and move their factories in search of a better deal.

This is gratuitous. Nobody in the world is being forced at gunpoint to eat at McDonald's, drink Coke or Pepsi, or buy Gap clothes. People choose to do so. (In contrast, the people who boarded the planes on Sept. 11 did not choose to see the twin towers up close). She may not like it, but many people, not only Americans, happen to like the American way of life. Otherwise, why do people choose to wait in long queues for visas outside U.S. consulates?

You can do what you want, the American way of life promises. It is all right to pursue happiness. You can't get what you want, its detractors are saying, because there are costs associated with that happiness. That's a reasonable debate. But the detractors include those who are angry only because their settled way of life (which they consider tranquil, but is sometimes feudal and brutal) is threatened. Recognizing these subtleties would have made Ms. Roy's essay more balanced. But adding shades of gray would have made her essay less vivid; it would have clipped the wings of her imagination. Like her fiction, her essay is a triumph of imagination. Unlike her fiction, it fails to ennoble.