Episode Six: The Writers CL: From Public Radio International, I'm Christopher Lydon...this is The Whole Wide World. In the frenzy of fundamentalist Iran 20 years ago, when Iraqi bombs were bursting left and right and mullahs were enforcing Islamic dress codes with flogging, a clandestine book club met every Thursday morning in Tehran to read "Lolita" and other forbidden literature. Seven young Iranian women and their teacher met in that secret sanctuary for two years, because imaginative reading gave them fresh eyes on themselves and history they were living, gave them different ways of seeing altogether. It's what the best fiction gives us: visions – sometimes distant early warnings of what we'll learn in life. So we're listening this hour to writers as the antennae of the species, the real authors of global consciousness, writers – in this case from Lebanon, Iran and India – who grew up seeing America as "the Other." What artists and writers can tell us is next…on the Whole Wide World. [Music] CL: I'm Christopher Lydon, and this is the Whole Wide World…through the eyes this hour of novelists who see Americans as "the Other." I love the idea that artists and writers get there first. The best of them see the future, and they tell the truth. They're the antennae of the species; they live in their imaginations what you and I will face in life. Maybe you have your own favorite prophetic writers: mine include Dostoyevsky, who foresaw the criminality of the Soviet Century in Russia; Graham Greene whose "Quiet American" envisioned the Vietnam quagmire a decade before the U.S. got stuck in it; and Joseph Conrad, whose "Secret Agent" envisioned something very like 9/11 almost a century before it happened. Add three more writers that we'll meet this hour, authors, in a sense, of the global consciousness. Amin Maalouf moved to Paris from Lebanon 25 years ago. He's a best-selling novelist and essayist in Europe, a global spirit and a border jumper: AM: I love to see a debate in which an Arab and a Jew debate, but the Arab is defending the opinion of the Jews, and the Jew is defending the opinion of the Arabs. And I feel I belong to this kind of debate. CL: Amitav Ghosh, from Calcutta, now living in New York, has made a specialty of the tragic marks that empire has etched in all of our minds. AG: I'm Indian. I live in America. The conflict that we see almost seems to be bringing my life full circle. CL: Azar Nafisi, an Iranian scholar at Johns Hopkins, knows exactly why we feed on imaginative literature in times like this. AN: Great works of fiction become automatically subversive, not because they take political position, [but] because they basically question reality as it is. CL: The Whole Wide World is the radio program that keeps looking under the hood of globalization: this sudden shrinking of the worlds of trade, culture, disease, medicine, and instant Internet communications about all our hopes and fears for the planet. The spirit this hour comes from the Robert Burns line: "O wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us!" So we're taking a double jump into the minds of writers, first, but writers from afar. On the Paris Metro going to meet Amin Maalouf, I felt like a pilgrim to Canterbury, or Mecca, or the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, or all three because Amin Maalouf knows all three "religions of the book." He knows all the borrowings and buffeting among them, of course, and the tensions. But in his head it's not so much a culture clash as a culture bath in the shared rituals, and also the food and music of the old Mediterranean. We talked for two days in his Paris apartment near the Arc de Triomphe. Maalouf's most famous creation is "Leo the African." He's a happy wanderer from Andalusia in 15th Century Spain, to Morocco, to Egypt, to Rome. He's a cultural sponge and a complete global citizen in his time, as Amin Maalouf is in ours. Leo's life in the 15th and 16th centuries turns out to be a dream version of Maalouf's own. AM: It's some kind of symbolic autobiography, in the form of a biography. I was born in Lebanon, in a very small community. And I was always, from my childhood, always asking myself: to what do I belong? To what country? To what part of the world? To what religion? To what culture? CL: He decided as a boy to embrace the whole multiplicity of perspectives as a gift from heaven. And then he bestowed the same gift on Leo the African at a multicultural moment and location in Southern Spain. AM: It was an area where three religions met at one point of history: Christians, Muslims, and Jews built something together. Of course there were tensions; of course it was never paradise on earth. But still they built a worthy civilization together, each one with its own cultural flavor. And for me it's a mythical time. Sometimes many events come at the same moment, and the year 1492 is one of those years, because it's the year of the discovery of America. It's also the year when the Arabs and Jews were expelled together…and I love that idea. And at the same time it was the year – because of those expulsions – the time when the intermingling between those cultures stopped. CL: There is the start of what became Amin Maalouf's life project, that is, to inter- mingle cultures anew, to reopen spaces where individuals could shed their labels and cross lines as they like. On the Internet, I said to him, "Everybody can be Leo the African." But of course it's not that simple on the ground. AM: Living together is something very difficult. I come from Lebanon, which means that I come from a society where there are people from different backgrounds, but in a society which has known very violent conflicts. I had to leave my country because of one of those conflicts – a very, very bloody conflict. And I cannot see the coexistence as something easy. For me coexistence is something…one has to fight for something. We have to think about it every moment. CL: The disarming of identities has in fact become a sort of vocation: AM: I try to speak to every person [who] takes a book into his hands, and tell that person: you're different; just discover it, in what way you're different. And that's why your life is worthwhile. I think this is the message of "Leo the African," and this is frankly the main message of my work, of my life: to try to dissolve groups, dissolve the monstrous groups that give the impression that the world is made of blocs. And…we have to dissolve blocs into human beings, individual human beings, each one different from the other, each one having his and her own life, only one life, a beautiful thing, but only one life to live fully, freely, and to make a masterpiece out of it. CL: Maalouf's slim, non-fiction book, called "In the Name of Identity," became required reading in Europe at the end of the Balkan Wars. Religious and ethnic identity, he said, had become in practice a weapon, a reason to hate or kill someone. He had observed identity in the Lebanese civil war of the 1970s as a wild beast, a panther, as he called it. AM: What I call a panther is something very specific. During the few months in which I lived in Lebanon during that war, I understood that any person put in specific conditions could become a monster. And I felt that (probably) if the war had begun when I was 16, instead of 26, I would probably have been with other young people on some barricade, and at one point maybe I would have been engaged in fighting and would have killed people. And I felt very strongly that the killer in each one of us, that panther…it's there. Identity, in the accepted sense of today – and in my view the accepted sense is the sense that promotes killers – the accepted sense is that identity can be summed up with one element of identity. Whenever one feels that he is just this or that – just a Christian, just Muslim, just Serb, just Croat, just… – whenever it is summed up in just one word, that means automatically that it is defined by opposition to somebody else, usually a neighbor. So it becomes…it becomes a definition for war. CL: How have you worked it out for yourself? When people ask you – and you've lived your life roughly half in France, half in Lebanon – are you Lebanese? Are you French? How do you deal with it? AM: I say, "I am Lebanese and I am French. I am Mediterranean and I am Arab. I'm European, and I am a few other things, and I would like to be more things again." But it's not easy, even that. My struggle as a writer is to make people feel that their identity is many things, and that what is important is not just to limit oneself to this or that element of identity, but to let their identity explode like fireworks. CL: The trick for each of us is to get comfortable with compound identities, on the way to feeling human. AM: It's becoming a matter of survival. For me in this age…in this age of globalization, of accelerating globalization, we can no more afford to assert aggressive identities. Either we go beyond those identities, and we build common societies, the common world society, or we risk disappearing in a sea of blood. CL: There's a wonderful close of your book about identity; it brought tears to my eyes the first time I read it. You said most authors finish a book hoping it will be read forever. Your hope was that your grandson – perhaps growing up, and finding it one day by chance on the family bookshelves – would look through the pages, read a passage or two, then put it back in the dusty corner where he found it, shrugging his shoulders, and marveling that, in his grandfather's day, such things still needed to be said. AM: But I'm not sure it's going in that the world in which my sons and my grandsons will be living will be a friendlier world than the one I lived in. It can go both ways. When I look at what happened in the twentieth century – all the danger that we went through: Nazism and Stalinism, [the] atomic bomb, all what seems to be on the verge of destroying mankind – and almost miraculously we escaped. Against all odds, we escaped. That's also what makes me a bit puzzled and sad. When the century ended, my feeling…the feeling was: we are going in the right direction. We have…we have overcome so many dangers, and now we are going to be able to settle the last remaining regional problems and then concentrate on what is, in my view, the most important human adventure in biology and culture, which is the only real thrilling future that I can imagine. And then things began to go wrong. Sometimes I feel the future is…can be extremely dark. CL: We were speaking as the diplomatic offensive around Iraq collapsed into war, the sort of war that invariably (in Arab memory) rips open an 800-year-old wound of the Crusades. AM: There is a profound lack of understanding of "the Other," you know? I'm not sure, for example, that my neighbor in this street knows more about Islam, for example, than his ancestor of the twelfth century. CL: In Arab Islam, he picks out the people who have lost faith in the future and would just as soon destroy the world and themselves. In America he sees people who would love to rule the world by force, as if it were something that could be done forever. AM: I trust…I trust none of them. I belong to none of them. And I'm not even content with my status of observer. I'm just... sometimes it looks like a bad dream. CL: In the last words of "Leo the African," Maalouf's invention in fiction tells his son to flee all groupings by skin or by prayers. In the final place, he says, "no man is a stranger before the face of the Creator." Maalouf today is more urgent about it: it's our tribal attachments, he says, that could bring us all down together. When we come back: novels that talk back to totalitarians. You are listening to the Whole Wide World, produced in association with WGBH Radio, Boston, from PRI, Public Radio International. [Music] CL: I'm Christopher Lydon. This is the Whole Wide World… at the link between literature and life. Azar Nafisi made her own breakthrough connection with a peculiar combination of a book and a setting. The book was "Lolita." The setting was Iran in the heyday of the mullahs' Islamic Revolution. Azar Nafisi had gone home from the States to teach. Her key class was underground. There was a clandestine book club in her living room in Tehran. Every Thursday morning for two years seven women arrived, removed their robes and veils, and talked about forbidden works of literature like "Lolita" and about their own lives as women in an Islamic republic. AN: When I went back home after the revolution in '79, I was absolutely shocked at, you know, the transformation that my country had gone through. And, by and by, as I lived there, I discovered that the form of totalitarianism I had read about in books, which had happened in my country. What it does…it takes…tries to take control, not over your political life and social life, but also control of your mind, your feelings, and your emotions. And when you are deprived of the most precious aspects of your life, you constantly and instinctively try to move towards them, and books, especially "Lolita," became ways for me to take back the confiscated aspects of my life. CL: It sounds like an odd focus for Iranian women, that novel about a nymphet named "Lolita." AN: They called "Lolita" immoral, but after the Islamists took over Iran, they changed all the laws related to women, and they lowered the age of marriage from 18 to nine (plus the fact that, of course, they reintroduced polygamy and all sorts of good stuff like that). So, for me "Lolita" was confiscation of one individual's life by another. Humbert Humbert is living this illusion about his childhood love, Annabelle, who has died, you know, two decades ago, almost. And he…in "Lolita," he tries to rediscover Annabelle, and he tries to stop Lolita's life and impose his own dream on Lolita, and he destroys her and ultimately himself. This is what totalitarian societies do to their people: they confiscate the reality of their life; they want them to become the object of their dreams. And Lolita became for us very relevant. CL: Azar Nafisi, you write in such fresh ways things that we intuitively have known for a long time: that fiction is not just a refuge; fiction of all kinds is a kind of truth, even in the worst storms – war, crisis, agony. AN: Fiction is not only just a refuge, but it's a wake-up call. I think great works of fiction become automatically subversive, not because they take political positions (because we can change our political positions with time), but because they basically question reality as it is. And I'll take the most politically conservative ones. Take Jane Austen…you know, the way that I see it and my students in Tehran saw it was that Jane Austen…at the center of her novel is not the issue of marriage, but the issue of choice. And the fact that a young woman, Elizabeth Bennett, refuses…(against the dictates of her family, her society, the norms…and the fact that she might starve to death, if she doesn't marry into some form of money)…she refuses to marry a man whom she does not love. And, of course, the form of the novel is so democratic because there [are] so many voices there. Austen allows all these voices (even the villains) to talk, which goes against the grain of all totalitarian mindsets, whether they are in America or they are in Iran or in Baghdad…you know, it doesn't matter. And Rushdie, of course, is another form of rebellion. I love the way he plays with words! How could anyone say that he's talking about a religion or a specific…he is in love with words and with fiction-telling, and he's subversive because he questions our basic smug values, not because he's anti-anything. CL: So for Azar Nafisi and her secret book group, novels and literature provided a window on their own experience, a perspective on history and maybe a different way of seeing altogether. AN: I remember that Nabokov, in one of his novels, talks about how writers have the "third eye of imagination," and the great Persian poet, Rumi, also talks about the other kind of the eye, that opens towards the heart, that sees the unseen. And I think with novelists, they have the passion that scientists have for discovery of truth beyond what is real. So they go deep into things that are ordinary and normal with us, and they give it to us in a fresh way. You know…and novelists themselves die, and they might be conservative, they might be reactionary, they might be extreme radicals, but what remains is that "third eye of imagination," and the best examples maybe…(well, not the best examples, but one of the best examples)…is Tolstoy's "Hadji Murat," which is about an actual conflict between the Russians and the Chechens in the mid-1800s, and Tolstoy was himself there as a young military man in the Caucasus. And Hadji Murat was one of the Chechen chieftains who had problems with their leader, Shamil. And he decided to defect to the Russians in order to fight against Shamil, but he's betrayed by both sides; he's betrayed both by Russians and the Chechens, and in the end, while he's trying to make [an] escape, he's killed. But Tolstoy talks about the fact that what he wanted to examine was not just the heroism of Hadji Murat, but the absolutism of the two leaders – both the Chechen leader and the Russian Tsar – and to show that how their eyes are closed, not only to their enemies – obviously, whenever we try to kill someone, we call them "vermins" and, you know, "less than"…you know, to justify the fact that we kill them – but also the absolutism on both sides. The fact is that what we should fear is not other civilizations, but absolutism, both at home and abroad. I mean…you know…at the center of [the] novel, or any art form – poetry, music, painting, film – is curiosity about the other. Even when we write about ourselves, we write in order to discover what we don't know about ourselves. And the absolutist minds go against this grain. CL: This matter of curiosity about "the Other" and confrontation with "the Other" seems to me very close to the heart of the problem today, in that…you know, we've been through 40, 50 years of a kind of postcolonial "getting acquainted" with new people, new writers, new artists, new musicians, but sort of the Salman Rushdie era – Michael Ondaatje, Rohinton Mistry, V.S. Naipaul, C.L.R. James (is a favorite of mine), Derek Walcott, all those Nobel Prize winners from parts of the world that we simply didn't know before – I sometimes wonder if that period, and that sort of postcolonial discovery, is now running head-long into a kind of neo-imperial, reclassifying "the Other" as a problem. AN: Well, you know, the great thing about culture is…I think cultures have always gained when they've opened up. I mean, Muslims in [the] Middle Ages rediscovered…discovered Plato and Aristotle, and they translated them from Greece, and introduced them through Spain to Europe. So, in fact, Europe owes its St. Augustine and Aquinas to the Islamic tradition. This is how cultures interact. And I think that those who lived in the former colonies – in India, in Africa, in the Middle East – by absorbing the forms that came to them from the West – like the novel, theater, music, painting – they recreated the novel, they re-introduced different forms to the novel. You mentioned the names of Naipaul or Salman Rushdie and also the…we have the Latin Americans like Marquez and Llosa…and, of course, we owe so much to the East European writers like Milosz or Kundera or one of my favorites, Scambrovitch, all of the people who reintroduced the concept of freedom to us. People over here sometimes become very smug. One reason they don't read Nabokov or Austen as much as they should comes out of what Saul Bellow calls "the ordeal of our sufferings of freedom,"…that we forget that we have fought for these values. So, people in those other countries remind us that these values are fragile and precious, you know, and they should be guarded. CL: What do these writers, that you admire, tell us about the shape of a global culture? AN: I think it was last year…the well-known Latin American writer – I think he's now teaching at Georgetown – Vargas Llosa, wrote an article about globalization and about the fact that many people in other countries are scared of the American influence. But he was also talking about how this could be reversed. I mean, the great thing about the Internet, if we use it correctly, is that we can genuinely create a dialogue of civilizations. In Iran right now, the former Iranian revolutionaries who constantly quoted Ayatollah Khomeini are now quoting Hannah Arendt, and Karl Popper, and Kant, and Spinoza. CL: Iranians reading the Western classics could be our cue to discover the sensuality of the Syrian poet Naza Aboni or the Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish. AN: Now when you go to the writings, to the work of these artists and writers, you discover that they negate all the claims that their politicians are making, [CL: Explain.] when they say, "This is our culture," you know, our culture is stoning women to death, you know, beheading people…This is not the Islamic culture; their culture is Rumi, their culture is Hafez, or these other writers. So they teach the West a lot about what these cultures genuinely are about…and they teach the West something about itself. You know, one other thing people should read is "One Thousand and One Nights"…Shaharazod…that shows people how sensual and imaginative and playful people of the East are. After all, Shaharazod has been influencing writers since…from time immemorial in the West, CL: In the sanctuary of her living room, that scene outside – of scared, shrouded faces – disappeared. A city and a book and readers were for the moment transformed. AN: The room for us became a haven. I was always surprised by how many people showed up, you know, when there was the threat of the war. And one of my students one day in the room told me that, "When I come up stairs and, you know, I take my robe off, I feel as if that other reality that I have to go back to does not exist." I encouraged them to write about that through a poem or a writing. And that very much empowered them because, you know, one thing writing does, it empowers you, because a life that is not controllable (and in the Islamic Republic of Iran, life was not controllable)…We had to dress from head to toe, we had to cover ourselves…There were militia patrols, Toyota patrols, in the streets of Tehran in the time that I was there, with two armed men and two armed women, just – not looking for political opposition – [but] looking for girls showing a bit of hair [or] wearing, you know, lipstick. And they would be flogged. Many of my students were flogged for wearing lipstick in the streets. In that room, by talking about this reality, we reshaped it; we recreated it. And I think Nabokov, who lost all his life…everything he had in the Russian Revolution, also did the same thing. That is how he recreated his life. He had no power in real life, but he had the power to talk about those son-of-a-guns any way he wanted to when he wrote. And he took his revenge. And…how many people remember Stalin now, and how many people remember Vladimir Nabokov or Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky? That should be a warning to all politicians, all over the world. [Music] CL: When events are in the saddle, riding mankind, remember that it's artists and writers who will crystallize the meaning even of the days we're living through. When we come back, an Indian novelist on the backdrop of empire. You're listening to the Whole Wide World from PRI, Public Radio International. [Music] CL: I'm Christopher Lydon…this is The Whole Wide World.. We're talking about novelists as prophets. The Iranian Azar Nafisi was just speaking about grand old dead ones, like Tolstoy. Before her, Amin Maalouf was speaking as a living witness of tribalism, East and West. Amitav Ghosh is a rising star among the post-colonial writers, in the Salman Rushdie constellation of novelists from the other side of the British Empire. Early on in the bombing, slogging war with Iraq, he was dismayed at how little Americans have absorbed about the perils of empire – for everybody. AG: I felt a profound sense of despair; we have achieved so little in making, as it were, the world aware of the real dangers of empire, of what is implicit in the whole business of launching upon an empire. This became clear to me recently when I was having conversations with various people in America who, you know, displayed to me in conversation such a truly shocking ignorance of the very complex history of empire. It just made me realize that for them…they saw empire really…whichever side of empire they might be on…they saw it merely as a projection of force, which isn't at all. You know…I mean, empire is essentially a circumstance of remaking, reinventing a reality that you meet. It's the fantasy of the Creator in some sense, you know? CL: Amitav Ghosh has lots to tell you about empire: first, that it's always been about capturing minds as well as resources; second, that the imperial enterprise typically leads its masters to excess and its opponents over the edge into horrific madness; third, that this newborn consciousness of American Empire could be the closing chapter in the history of several centuries; fourth, that the old European masters of empire are happily out of the business; and fifth, from his perspective as an Indian who now lives, writes and raises his American children in Manhattan, Americans look unprepared for the global mastery that we've stumbled into. AG: I think it really is a sort of turning point in history. We've come to the culmination of one very, very long process. I think it's something that I would call, you know, the Anglophone Empire. And I've actually seen this process develop in America over the last ten years; and it's been very, very disturbing to me, you know, because…When I first arrived in America…the first time I visited America was in 1988, and at that time empire was really a bad word. America was still at a moment when the word empire really was redolent of Ronald Reagan's "Evil Empire" and so on. And, you know, after the Soviet Union fell, straightaway, you know, my deepest misgivings were really about, you know, what it implied for the future of America. CL: Amitav Ghosh is a novelist, a child of post-colonial India. His father was a Lieutenant Colonel with the British-Indian army in the "Bridge over the River Kwai" Burma campaign against the Japanese in World War II. Amitav was born in the India that Mahatma Gandhi had liberated from the Brits. But that English-speaking empire, he says, never died. AG: I'm talking about a project which has been in the making for 300 years. Imagine yourself to be a historian from Mars, you know, who arrives on the planet Earth, you know, and looks at the history of planet Earth. How would you read its history? What…500 years ago, a small group of people from a small island began to expand outwards. Today, in effect, they control really three continents. And it's an extraordinary thing this, I mean, this amazing sort of global Diaspora, and there's no word for it. So, you know, if you look at this phenomenon, which is perfectly self- evident to people everywhere in the world, you know, that this group of Anglophone countries really has in some sense shouldered the responsibility for running the world. But it's not just shouldered the responsibility; it's also shouldered all the benefits. Not only that…if you look at…I mean, if you look at say the global media…let's say just the global voice – it's almost overwhelmingly dominated by…I mean, Hollywood…Australians, Americans, Canadians, British figure in it almost completely to the exclusion of everybody else. So, if you look at it from the world outside, you know, you can see in some sense that this is a project which has really reached, as it were, its complete culmination, which is absolute global dominance and absolute dominance of global resources, but not absolute control of the global mind. CL: Amitav Ghosh's masterpiece, titled "The Glass Palace," is an epic of the British in Burma over the span of a century. It reads at moments like a parable of the US in Iraq, but it was written before 9/11, and it's rooted in real history, starting in 1885: the "shock and awe" of British forces that captured Burma and its teak forests and its oil. AG: Burma's a very good example. You know, in 1885 when the British fought the Third Anglo-Burmese War (and they actually destroyed the Kingdom of Burma) it was preceded by exactly this narrative. King Tabor of Burma was set up as a tyrant [and] a bloodthirsty murderer, who'd murdered hundreds of people. And, in fact, he…you know, in some way, he…none of those…I mean, all those conclusions (you know, if you read history in a certain way) could be justified. So the idea was…so that was the first preceding narrative; then, the second one is that, you know…not only is he a tyrant; he's sitting on a whole heap of oil. Because, remember, Burma was the first country to produce oil, you know, Burma Shell. Shell Oil of today was actually Burma Shell, you know. So, they wanted…you know, he was sitting on oil; he was sitting on teak; he was sitting on gems; he was sitting on a lot of minerals, which were very important for the time. So, you know, there was this dual narrative. One that, you know, there's a tyrant and, you know, we have to…we have to liberate Burma. And the other, you know, there is also, you know, this whole world of mineral resources. So they go off…and it's very…they go off with this sort of display of "shock and awe," [a] very powerful army…I mean, completely sort of out-gunned the local people. The local people fought fierce little sort of battles of resistance, but they were completely overrun, you know. They used gunships in a way that they'd never been used before in the Asian continent. And, you know, within a matter of days this place collapsed. What's very interesting is if you look at the English version of this, because…I mean, the English version is all we have. The Burmese, you know, hardly wrote about it. But, for them, this is never called an invasion; it's always called a campaign of pacification. But, you know, what is a campaign of pacification? After that, Burma became the great oil producer. One single port in Burma used to export perhaps more than the rest of India put together. But, at the end of it, it's a completely broken place. CL: For all the oil in Burma then, or in Iraq today, he observes that Imperial conquest is never just about seizing resources. It's bigger than that: empire is the business of reinventing the world in our image; it's the fantasy of the Creator. It presents itself as a high-minded improving project. The Spanish and Portuguese had a church blessing to convert the heathen; the British were certain that real freedom consisted of living under British rule. The story line is always that "we're here to help you." Problem is: the story line is too good to be true, as illustrated in Ghosh's novel, "The Glass Palace." AG: You know, there's a section in this, you know, that has to do with a plantation, and it's a kind of metaphorical section, you know. He's running a perfect plantation; every rubber tree is meant to be alike, is meant to be absolutely perfect. And one day…there's a scene there where one day he tells his friend, "You know, even within this perfection, you can always find a tree, which decides to fight the pattern. And I think that's human nature; it's simply impossible…no matter how perfect a system America may embody or that Britain may embody, simply because it's a system that you want to make, as it were, the only system for the whole world – everybody in the world will resist it, because it's outside the human condition to reconcile ourselves to, you know, the idea of such singularity. You know, it's not...human beings simply cannot live in a circumstance where there's only one way of life – it's impossible for us to imagine that. That would be for human beings the most absolute kind of tyranny. It doesn't matter whether that's a very enlightened way of life; it could be the most enlightened way of life, but simply because it's singular, it would arouse of the hostilities of the whole world. You see, one of the things that we see, you know, that results from empire is that empire, in this process of remolding…because an empire actually recreates the world, you know, within a certain image, if you like, or, you know, recasts it in the direction…in the form of another image. What happens thereafter is that all the ills if the world come to attach to that empire, whether it's responsible for it or not. So, I mean, for example, if you travel around colonial countries…you know, countries that have once been colonized, you can see that, you know, what the British are held responsible for, you know, often is not just the ills that they are responsible for, but for every ill. And, indeed, in a sense they are responsible for every ill. So, you know, there's a very sort of complex relationship there. I mean, for the English as well, the whole idea of wars, you know, to set people free as they conceived it…only this freedom…for the English always, freedom consisted of being under English rule. So, you can imagine that for many people in the world, they didn't see it in the same way. And I was very struck, you know…when I was researching my book, "The Glass Palace," I interviewed so many, you know, ex-Indian army soldiers, who'd actually fought in these colonial wars, you know, who'd fought for the British in the colonial wars. And you know, many of them later became rebels against the British…you know, they joined movements against the British. And I'd ask them, you know, how'd this happen that you suddenly…you know, you were fighting for the British, and then suddenly, one minute you've turned against them. And you know what they all said? They said, you know, there came a time when we realized that for these people what freedom meant is being under their rule, under their control for them means freedom; that's what the word means to them. And that is when we realized that we didn't want to be a part of that particular project. CL: The crushing burden of empire on identity is personified in "The Glass Palace" in the soldier Arjun; he's an Indian fighting (as Ghosh's father did) with the British Army in Southeast Asia. Late in the game he realizes that he's been had; he's just brown-skinned cannon fodder in an imperial project – and he goes berserk. Ghosh's point is that empire creates a conflict of loyalties, an impossible dilemma AG: And there comes to him a moment when he suddenly realizes…when he's facing defeat at the hands of the Japanese in northern Malaysia and he has, as it were, this sort of epiphany. The way he see, you know…he asks himself, who am I and what am I doing? And he realizes that, even though he's fighting for the British, he's always been marginalized within this army, that he and other Indians have been, as it were, the cannon fodder for this army. And at that moment, he…unlike, say, anti-colonial rebels of 1857, Arjun comes from a generation which actually has completely accepted the premises of the British universe, you know. He feels that what the British have offered is a kind of meritocracy. Suddenly, when he's in the army, he discovers that that's not quite the case, and that's when he reaches this really terrifying conclusion. CL: Here's his friend Arjun speaking to his mate Hardy at a moment of truth: AG: "Just look at us, Hardy, just look at us. What are we? We've learned to dance the tango, we know how to eat roast beef with a knife and fork. The truth is that, except for the color of our skin, most people in India wouldn't even recognize us as Indians. When we joined up, we didn't have India on our minds. We wanted to be sahibs, and that's what we've become." But the empire was dead now. He knew this because he had felt it die within himself, where it had held its strongest dominion. And with whom was he now to keep faith? Loyalty, commonality, faith – these things were as essential and as fragile as the muscles of the human heart – easy to destroy, impossible to rebuild. How would one begin the work of recreating the tissue that bound people to each other? This was beyond the ability of someone such as himself, someone trained to destroy. It was a labor that would last not one year, not ten, not fifty; it was the work of centuries. [AG to CL]: Those of us who've seen the empire, you know, really from our end…it's the conclusion which really humbles you. But when you look at it in the end, the empire has made everything you know. It's the only past you have. And it's a…to cross that Rubicon is a very difficult thing, and that's why, in some sense…you know, what's even more difficult than empire is the opposition to empire, because one thing that we see about hegemony, which is for us…which is for me at least the most frightening thing about hegemony is that all opposition to hegemony ultimately becomes grotesque; it takes on grotesque forms. CL: The diabolical attack on civilians in the World Trade Center, or the grotesqueness of Palestinian suicide bombers, fit all too familiarly in Amitav Ghosh's history of empire. AG: You can see exactly the same process operating in the Middle East, really, where…you know, many, many Arabs (I'm sure) feel a great deal of sympathy for the forms of opposition that have been springing up, and yet, when they look at it, they say, "You know, this project is going to destroy us. We will be the first to be destroyed by this." CL: As in the Intifada or the attack on the World Trade Center? AG: Exactly. So, you know, in some…in some really terrible way, you can see some sort of ghastly history playing itself out here, you know? One very good example, you know, is the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, which was again a sort of nationalist project in the end. But, you know, one of the strangest elements of the Khmer Rouge massacres is that they were not killing another ethnic group; they were killing themselves. But, it was done under the guise of killing the enemy within. And the enemy within was the group of people that had, as it were, incorporated aspects of colonialism, you know? So, it was always the middle class. His whole idea was to…you know, he stopped the circulation of money; he destroyed the schools; he destroyed the books. But what was it really? Because he himself, Pol Pot, was educated in France, you know? And, you know, he was sent there…it was possible for him to go to France because he had an aunt who was a famous dancer, and she was a mistress of one of the members of the royal family, and she kept him in the palace, you know? So, he was brought up within the royal palace, you know, and then he went to France, where he was radicalized. And then he came back from France…and, do you know, one of the most appalling things about this whole thing is that eventually the Khmer Rouge…he got his own men to slice the breasts off his aunt. You know, it becomes almost a physical matter of routing out everything in yourself that you recognize to be, in any way, indebted to that past, to that compromised past. And that's what becomes, you know, this absolute grotesqueness. I think that certainly, you know, the Bin Laden variety of fundamentalism is exactly a sort of replica of this. You know, you see here a man who's just completely internalized western forms of organization and western forms of knowledge, and who's launched upon… CL: Airplanes and cell phones and credit cards and… AG: That's right. And so many of those young, Arab militants in Afghanistan were wearing Dolce & Gabana, you know! I mean, it really makes you think. So, you know, the project that they've launched upon is completely…I mean, it's a project which, in some sense, can only succeed at the cost of destroying the people who embody it, you know? So, I mean, in some way, that's the sort of horror of it. CL: India, he says, was an exception; it was a colony that created a democracy in the face of empire: AG: And I think that's really Gandhi's greatness, you know, that we in India were rescued from this fate, you know? It's really just a tribute to Gandhi, who recognized that, you know…if at this point we want to dig out of our hearts everything in it that's English, in the end, we will only mutilate ourselves, you know. And, I think that's his greatness, that he recognized that, you know, whether we like it or not, history has happened, and we have to make our peace with it. CL: Amitav Ghosh still doubts that Americans, on the whole, buy into their imperial role. AG: I think American things often flip over quite quickly. And I think we're beginning to see the beginnings of that. And you really wonder in retrospect one day whether people will wake up and say, "Who dreamt this dream?" You know? CL: A dream, or a nightmare? Of course we can't be sure yet. The news events don't often explain themselves. Life is short; art is long. The story in all of these stories is yet to be written. [Music] Please visit our global community online at www.thewholewideworld.net. The Whole Wide World is a collaboration of Lydon and McGrath Productions and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, in association with WGBH Radio Boston. We had help from producers Ben Walker and Katherine Bidwell, from engineer Tom Tiger, and Jake Shapiro of the Public Radio Exchange. Jay Allison of transom.org, with support from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, is our radio visionary. Thanks also to Keith Kiya Wilson, Justin Grotelueschen, Kezia Parsons, Josh Ward, the Christian Science Publishing Society, and public radio stations WCAI and WNAN on Cape Cod. Support for this program is made possible in part by the PRI Program Fund, whose contributors include the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Mary McGrath is our executive producer. I'm Christopher Lydon.