Roy & Sejpalcourt.” In spite of this, Roy remains outspoken. In this interview, she
reflects on the relationship between the aesthetic and the political in
her work, how to think about power, and what it means to live and
write in imperial times.avni sejpal: You once wrote that George W. Bush “achieved what
writers, scholars, and activists have striven to achieve for decades. He
has exposed the ducts. He has placed on full public view the working
parts, the nuts and bolts of the apocalyptic apparatus of the American
empire.” What did you mean by this, and ten years and two presidents
later, is the American empire’s apocalyptic nature still so transparent?
arundhati roy: I was referring to Bush’s unnuanced and not very
intelligent commentary after the events of 9/11 and in the run-up to
the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. It exposed the thinking of the
deep state in the United States. That transparency disappeared in the
Obama years, as it tends to when Democrats are in power. In the Obama
years, you had to ferret out information and piece it together to figure
out how many bombs were being dropped and how many people were
being killed, even as the acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize was
being eloquently delivered. However differently their domestic policies
play out on home turf, it is a truism that the Democrats’ foreign policy
has tended to be as aggressive as that of the Republicans. But since 9/11,
between Bush and Obama, how many countries have been virtually laid
to waste? And now we have the era of Trump, in which we learn that
intelligence and nuance are relative terms. And that W, when compared
to Trump, was a serious intellectual. Now U.S. foreign policy is tweeted
to the world on an hourly basis. You can’t get more transparent than