Bookless in Baghdad: Reflections on Writing and Writers (26 page)

It has also provoked a reaction in the United States that will, in turn, leave an indelible mark on the new century. The twentieth century was famously dubbed, by
Time
magazine's Henry Luce, “the American century,” but the twenty-first begins with the United States in a state of global economic, political, cultural, and military dominance far greater than any world power has ever before enjoyed. The United States enjoys a level of comparative military power unprecedented in human history; even the Roman Empire at its peak did not come close to outstripping the military capacities of the rest of the world to the extent that the United States does today. But that is not all. When the former French foreign minister, Hubert Vedrine, called the United States a “hyperpower”
(hyperpuissance),
he was alluding not only to American military dominance but also to the United States as the home of Boeing and Intel, Microsoft and MTV, Hollywood and Disneyland, McDonald's and Kodak — in short, of most of the major products that dominate daily life around our globe.

And yet — before 9/11, Washington had been curiously
ambivalent about its exercise of that dominance, with many influential figures speaking and acting as if the rest of the planet was irrelevant to America's existence or to its fabled pursuit of happiness. After September 11, I was not alone in thinking that there would be no easy retreat into isolationism, no comfort in the illusion that the problems of the rest of the world need not trouble the United States. I found myself on CNN the night after, expressing the outrage and solidarity of those of us working at the United Nations, and I found myself saying not just that “we are all New Yorkers now” — a sentiment many have echoed — but something else: that Americans now understand viscerally the old cliché of the global village. Because 9/11 made it clear that a fire that starts in a remote thatched hut or dusty tent in one corner of that village can melt the steel girders of the tallest skyscrapers at the other end of our global village.

From this observation I went on to suggest in an op-ed in the
International Herald Tribune
that the twenty-first century will be the century of “one world” as never before, with a consciousness that the tragedies of our time are all global in origin and reach, and that tackling them is also a global responsibility that must be assumed by us all. Interdependence, I argued, is now the watchword. Today, two years later, I wonder if I wasn't wrong. One of my favorite stories about the UN Security Council is one about the American diplomat and the French diplomat arguing about a practical problem. “I know how we can solve this,” says the American; “We can do this and this and this, and we can solve it.” The Frenchman responds, “Yes, yes, yes, that will work in practice. But will it work in theory?” Interdependence is a reality in practice
in our globalizing world; but in theory, how can there be genuine interdependence when one country believes it needs everybody else that much less than everybody else needs it?

But I am not rushing to disavow my earlier faith in international cooperation. Global challenges require global solutions, and few indeed are the situations in which even the
hyperpuissance
can act completely alone. This truism is being confirmed yet again in Iraq, where the United States is discovering that it has a greater capacity to win wars alone than to construct peace alone. The limitations of military strength in nation-building are readily apparent; as Talleyrand pointed out, the one thing you cannot do with a bayonet is sit on it. Equally important, though, is the need for legitimacy. Acting in the name of international law, and especially through the United Nations, is always preferable to acting in the name of national security, since everyone has a stake in the former. So multilateralism still has a future in Washington.

All the more so because the age of terror is a multilateral threat. The terrorist attack of 9/11 was an assault not just on one country but, in its callous indifference to the lives of innocents from eighty countries around the world, an assault on the very bonds of humanity that tie us all together. To respond to it effectively, we must be united. Terrorism does not originate in one country, its practitioners are not based in one country, its victims are not found in one country — and the response to it must also involve all countries.

Terrorism emerges from blind hatred of an Other, and that in turn is the product of three factors: fear, rage, and incomprehension. Fear of what the Other might do to you, rage at what you believe the Other has done to you, and in-comprehension
about who or what the Other really is — these three elements fuse together in igniting the deadly combustion that kills and destroys people whose only sin is that they feel none of these things themselves. If terrorism is to be tackled and ended, we will have to deal with each of these three factors by attacking the ignorance that sustains them. We will have to know each other better, learn to see ourselves as others see us, learn to recognize hatred and deal with its causes, learn to dispel fear, and above all just learn about each other.

This is no small challenge. When the United Nations helped reconstruct East Timor after the devastation that accompanied the Indonesian withdrawal, we had to rebuild an entire society, and that meant, in some cases, creating institutions that had never existed before. One of them was a judicial system of international standards, which in practice meant Western standards, complete with the adversarial system of justice in which a prosecutor and a defense attorney attempt to demolish each other's arguments in the pursuit of truth. The UN experts had to train the Timorese in this system. But they discovered that there was one flaw. In Timorese culture, the expected practice is for the accused to confess his crimes, and justice to be meted out compassionately. In order to promote the culture of the “not guilty” plea required by Western court systems, the UN experts had to train the Timorese to lie. Their mental processes — their imaginations — had now truly been globalized.

This brings me to the second half of my argument today. In one sense, the terrorists of 9/11 were attacking the globalization of the human imagination — the godless,
materialist, promiscuous culture of the dominant West, embodied in a globalization from which people like them felt excluded. Certainly those who celebrated their act did so from a sense of exclusion. If we speak of the human imagination today, we need to ask what leads surprisingly large numbers of young people to follow the desperate course set for them by fanatics and ideologues. A sense of oppression, of exclusion, of marginalization, can give rise to extremism. Forty years ago, in 1962, the now all-but-forgotten UN secretary general U Thant warned that an explosion of violence could occur as a result of the sense of injustice felt by those living in poverty and despair in a world of plenty. Some 2,600 people died in the World Trade Center on 9/11. But some 26,000 people also died on 9/11, around the world — from starvation, unclean water, and preventable disease. We cannot afford to exclude them from our global imagination.

But that is, of course, not all. If a state cannot even offer its people hope for a better life for their children — by providing access to basic education — then how can we expect those people or those children to resist the blandishments of terror? It should come as no surprise that the Taliban recruited its foot soldiers from the religious schools or madras-sas that were the only source of nurture and “education” for many children who had no other source of knowledge available to them; who learned not science or mathematics or computer programming at these schools, but rather only the creed of the Koran and the Kalashnikov — the Koran crudely interpreted, the Kalashnikov crudely made. Their imaginations were, as a result, anything but global.

Which brings me back to the question I raised at the
beginning: Have we fallen into the dangerous illusion that the human imagination can be globalized? In considering an answer, we have to look at the global mass media. The mass media reflects principally the interests of its producers. What passes for international culture is usually the culture of the economically developed world. It's your imagination that is being globalized. American movies and television shows, in particular, can be found on the screens of most countries.

Who else makes the cut to enter the global imagination in our brave new world? Yes, there is the occasional Third World voice, but it speaks a First World language. As far back as the first Congo civil war of 1962, the journalist Edward Behr saw a TV newsman in a camp of violated Belgian nuns calling out, “Anyone here been raped and speak English?” In other words, it was not enough to have suffered: one must have suffered and be able to express one's suffering in the language of the journalist. Which leads to the obvious corollary question: Are those speaking for their cultures in the globalized media the most authentic representatives of them?

Can the Internet compensate? Is it a democratizing tool? In the West, perhaps it has become one, since information is now far more widely accessible to anyone anywhere. But that is not yet true in the developing world. The stark reality of the Internet today is the digital divide: you can tell the rich from the poor by their Internet connections. The gap between the technological haves and have-nots is widening, both between countries and within them. The information revolution, unlike the French Revolution, is a revolution with a lot of
liberté,
some
fraternité,
and no
egalité.
So the poverty line is not the only line about which we have to think; there is also the high-speed digital line, the fiber optic line — all the lines that exclude those who are literally not plugged in to the possibilities of our brave new world. The key to the Internet divide is the computer keyboard. Those who do not have one risk marginalization; their imagination does not cross borders.

These concerns are real. If they are addressed, if the case for overcoming them is absorbed and applied, the twenty-first century could yet become a time of mutual understanding such as we have never seen before. A world in which it is easier than ever before to meet strangers must also become a world in which it is easier than ever before to see strangers as no different from ourselves.

Ignorance and prejudice are the handmaidens of propaganda, and in most modern conflicts, the men of war prey on the ignorance of the populace to instill fears and arouse hatreds. That was the case in Bosnia and in Rwanda, where murderous, even genocidal ideologies took root in the absence of truthful information and honest education. If only half the effort had gone into teaching those peoples what unites them, and not what divides them, unspeakable crimes could have been prevented.

Freedom of speech also guarantees diversity. As an Indian writer, I have argued that my country's recent experience with the global reach of Western consumer products demonstrates that we can drink Coca-Cola without becoming coca-colonized. India's own popular culture is also part of globalization — the products of Bollywood are exported
to expatriate Indian communities abroad. The success of Indian films and music in England and the United States proves that the Empire can strike back.

And it's not just India. A recent study has established that local television programming has begun to overtake made-in-America shows in more and more countries. And as the globalizing world changes, it does not do so only in one direction. In England today, Indian curry houses employ more people than the iron and steel, coal and shipbuilding, industries combined.

In my first novel,
The Great Indian Novel,
I reinvented a two-thousand-year-old epic, the Mahabharata, as a satirical retelling of the story of twentieth-century India, from the British days to the present. My motivation was a conscious one. Most developing countries are also formerly colonized countries, and one of the realities of colonialism is that it appropriates the cultural definition of its subject peoples. Writing about India in English, I cannot but be aware of those who have done the same before me, others with a greater claim to the language but a lesser claim to the land. Think of India in the English-speaking world even today, and you think in images conditioned by Rudyard Kipling and E. M. Forster, by the Bengal Lancers and
The Jewel in the Crown.
But their stories are not my stories, their heroes are not mine; and my fiction seeks to reclaim my country's heritage for itself, to tell, in an Indian voice, a story of India. Let me stress,
a
story of India; for there are always other stories, and other Indians to tell them.

How important is such a literary reassertion in the face
of the enormous challenges confronting a country like India? Can literature matter in a land of poverty, suffering, and underdevelopment? I believe it does.

My novel begins with the proposition that India is not, as people keep calling it, an underdeveloped country, but rather, in the context of its history and cultural heritage, a highly developed one in an advanced state of decay. Such sentiments are the privilege of the satirist; but as a novelist, I believe, with Molière, that you have to entertain in order to edify. But edify to what end? What is the responsibility of the creative artist, the writer, in a developing country in our globalizing world? In my own writing I have pointed to one responsibility — to contribute toward, and to help articulate and give expression to, the cultural identity (shifting, varie-gated, and multiple, in the Indian case) of the postcolonial society, caught up in the throes of globalization. The vast majority of developing countries have emerged recently from the incubus of colonialism; both colonialism and globalization have in many ways fractured and distorted their cultural self-perceptions. Development will not occur without a reassertion of identity: that this is who we are, this is what we are proud of, this is what we want to be. In this process, culture and development are fundamentally linked and interdependent. The task of the writer is to find new ways (and revive old ones) of expressing his culture, just as his society strives, in the midst of globalization, to find new ways of being and becoming.