Arundhati Roy speaks to zMag

Arundhati Roy always has been to the ground. I guess she is one honest woman we need. And what's more, she is leaning more left, than she was while winning the brits' award. I especially like her statement, given recently: "I wouldn't feel I was doing anything right if everyone stood up and applauded."Well, she speaks this time, on Superstars and Globalization, to zMag, and I am sure not everyone is going to applaud:

I don’t also want to go around being the Barbie doll of non-violent struggle. To confuse non-violence with passivity is one of the things that’s dangerous. And the fact is that neither am I a person who feels that I have the right, or I am in a place where I should be dictating to people how they should conduct their movements. Personally I’m not prepared to pick up arms now. But maybe I can afford not to, at whatever place I am in now. I think violence really marginalizes and brutalizes women. It depoliticizes things. It’s undemocratic in so many ways. But at the same time, when you look at the massive amount of violence that America is perpetrating in Iraq, I don’t know that I’m in a position to tell Iraqis that you must fight a pristine, feminist, democratic, secular, non-violent war. I can’t say. I just feel that that resistance in Iraq is our battle too and we have to support it. And we can’t be looking for pristine struggles in which to invest our purity.

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