Writing and Reading as Activism

A pandemic solidarity check with Arundhati Roy

I’m still getting back to regular writing after a bout of Covid last month. Like thousands of people in the UK, I managed to avoid the coronavirus during two full years of lockdown, only to be struck down the week after restrictions were lifted in England in late February. I had a minor two-week illness followed by lingering fatigue; others have not been so lucky. Watching Londoners go about their daily lives, shoving onto tubes and buses, ambling into shops merrily unmasked, while the UK government acts as if the pandemic were over, cancelling the free testing and other measures that had helped to slow the spread of the virus, I suddenly find myself living in a scene from the movie Don’t Look Up.

Worse yet, I feel like a failed activist, part of a sick society that’s been given two years to build new networks of solidarity, care and alternatives to consumer capitalism and has chosen instead to stumble around in a state of mass denial, capitulating to a government murderously invested in getting the economy “back to normal” whatever the cost in health and lives.

In need of a solidarity check and some inspiring prose, I returned to a precious text by Arundhati Roy, originally published in the early weeks of the pandemic in April 2020. “The Pandemic is a Portal” is a terrifying and vivid description of the effects of the rapidly spreading Coronavirus and its impact on one the world’s largest countries, India, an account grounded in a longer history of colonialism, state violence, government corruption, global capitalism. It’s one of the finest examples of activist writing I’ve read in recent years.

I have often heard writers say that their writing is their activism. In my earliest newsletter posts I wrote about some classic forms of activist writing: placards, slogans and graffiti on street demonstrations, the manifesto. There are other kinds of text that aim to intervene directly in politics, like the political statement, which can be a denunciation or a set of demands, or both. Then there’s the letter that tries to change the course of history, like Ghandi’s letter to Hitler, written in July 1939.

But activist writing isn’t limited to these obvious forms. Writing as activism lies less in the topic or genre, or even the intention of the author, than in the relationship between the writing and the wider world. Activist writing is a movement between the word and the world, between writers and readers, between the realities, relationships and stories of the past and the present and the shaping of something new.

In an interview with Gary Young the year before the pandemic, Roy recounted that one of her motivations for writing both fiction and nonfiction was the need to document. “Whatever happens,” she says, “let’s leave the record of what was done to us, to our minds, to our imagination”. Roy’s novels and essays are filled with acts of witnessing: to political and religious violence, to poverty and dispossession, to the devastating impact of neoliberal economic policies on human communities and the environment. Following the fame that came with the publication of her first novel, The God of Small Things, in 1997, Roy used the financial independence afforded by the novel’s success to do different kinds of writing, to tell stories she felt needed to be told ––for example, of the displacement of communities in the Narmada valley for the building of a dam and popular struggle against it. As Roy tells Young:

“I did speak a lot and travel with the non-fiction, because it needs to be spoken about and it’s not just about me.” 

This short statement – “it’s not just about me” – is deceptively simple. Yet it explains so much about what for me makes Roy’s writing exemplary of activist writing. Roy locates herself in her work as a witness, as part of the world that she lives and writes in, entwined in something bigger than herself. “The Pandemic is a Portal” moves between the writer, the voices of those whose words she listens to and records, and the reader. Her writing takes the act of reading seriously. It assumes the reader to be a subject, an interlocutor. As another commentator on Roy’s work notes, “as a writer, she holds a mirror to the society she lives in… she goes a step further than just expressing her opinion — she urges readers to find a solution”.

One of the things that makes writing magical is that we never really know who the reader will be. In writing courses students are often presented with the maxim: “Know your audience.” But if we take that statement too literally we risk constructing a one-dimensional reader of the writer’s own imagination. Not knowing fully who will read our work helps to keep our writing open. Once we put our writing out into the world it moves in ways we can never fully predict. Writing is always a potential agent of change in the sense that we can’t know in advance who it will touch, and in what ways, how readers may take ideas or stories from the page and weave them into their own lives and actions. Writing does not have to be didactic or a direct call to action in order to lead to some kind of change. But is has to be more than a statement of opinion or fact. And it has to take the act of reading seriously, making the reader part of the process. It has to be writing that is not just about us as writers.

“The Pandemic is a Portal” is a condensed record of the tragic and the unexpected effects of the epidemic––“even while the virus proliferates, who could not be thrilled by the swell of birdsong in cities, peacocks dancing at traffic crossings and the silence in the skies? The number of cases worldwide this week crept over a million. More than 50,000 people have died already.” The piece also accomplishes something all too rare in works of political nonfiction: the construction of a collective subject that is expansive but emphatically not universal, a “we” that insists upon difference and gross inequalities while implicating the writer and the reader as both participants in the pandemic and potential actors in creating something new out of it":

“We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”

Two years later, these were words I needed to read. The choice of how we walk through this ongoing pandemic, of whether we use it as a portal back to a brutal “normality” or into a more just world, is still ours to make.