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Interview with Naomi Klein (page 4 of 4)
by: Yogesh Chawla and Sachin Pandya
This interview is available free of charge, however we encourage
you to support PGI by purchasing this issue, subscribing, or you
can also donate to the Fences and Windows Fund. We are a volunteer
run organization so we depend on your support to continue.
NK: But I think that there’s a really insistent, tenacious narrative about how
movements work, and how political change works, that has a life very much
outside this movement, that has to do with charismatic leaders who write
manifestos and then people following them. We all know that narrative, it’s a
pretty hackneyed one, and it’s on the History Channel every night.
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This movement hasn’t produced that narrative because it hasn’t allowed leaders
and followers to emerge in that sense. If you think about the anti-war
movement on February 15, there were tens of millions of people on the
streets around the world, but you’d be hard-pressed to name who led that
movement. Which is extraordinary.
So yeah, it troubles me when I’m used to subvert-the only thing I can do is
do less media, in terms of interviews, which I have done a lot of-which I
guess we’re doing now, but this is-
SP: We appreciate that.
YC: We’ll make sure the least amount of people read it as possible.
NK: Well, you never know-and also to refuse to extend the brand. We got
a movie proposal, and things like that. I said from the beginning-it’s not a
brand, it’s a book. I haven’t built the brand. Other people have taken it and
used it to sell things, and that’s been a little difficult. It’s a complicated
process, because I am also so pleased every time I get a letter from a 16-year
old kid in the suburbs who doesn’t really have access to the alternative press,
and was able to get the book at a superstore. And it becomes sort of a bridge
to hooking up with the activist world. I hear those stories, I think writers
always hear those stories-so it does balance out.
YC: Going beyond this whole crazy notion of Naomi Klein as a
brand, let’s get back a little bit to your writing. In Fences and Windows
in particular, you describe writing dashed off, late at night
after protests, e-mailed from tear gas-filled community centers.
This kind of resembles the way a poet would rip out some poems in
their journal, or how an artist would document an event in their
sketch pad as it’s happening. Have you ever felt the urge to send
poetry or prose into your editor instead of your article or column,
or have you ever felt one of your speeches or lectures turn into kind
of a poetry slam-type spoken word performance? Anything like
that?
NK: I said in the book that a lot of this whole process since the book came
out was difficult for me, because I hadn’t done any public speaking, and I
was battling stage fright at every turn. But since I’ve become more comfortable,
I think that there have been some examples verging on what you’re
describing. I’ve definitely been loosening up a little bit. And I’ve been telling
my publishers when they ask me what my next book is-I keep telling them
it’s going to be a science fiction novel. They just stare at me really frightened
and pretend I didn’t say it. But that’s the plan. That’s the current plan.
YC: Have you ever dabbled in poetry? Have you ever had any secret
fantasies of being one of the Marcos poets who sends your writing
down through the mountains to the people?
NK: I’ve written plenty of bad poetry in my time.
SP: I think everybody has-that’s nothing to be ashamed of.
YC: If you’d like to send some of it along, I’m sure we’d be more
than happy to see it.
NK: I think I’ll save the world from that. It’s the one thing I can do. It’s the
one thing in my power.
SP: Obviously words are getting to be a dangerous thing in times
like these. I think about Donald Rumsfeld saying empty, empty
things like "the absence of evidence isn’t the evidence of absence"
or some such thing about weapons of mass destruction (in Iraq). I
think about the way words are getting used, particularly right now
with all this parsing of the sixteen words that shouldn’t have gone
into the President’s State of the Union.
I think about us as poets, you as a writer of nonfiction. How do we
get our words back and get them to mean things again when they’re
being so brutalized by corporate and by governmental language
right now?
NK: I could be wrong, but I actually think that the answer is to speak them
with passion. I think on the left, we tend to be really cautious because we’re
so afraid of being dismissed as hysterical and dogmatic. We end up saying
incredibly powerful things far too calmly. We’re talking about the fate of the
planet, but we’re so worried about being perceived as reasonable, that we
drain our discourse of all passion.
I actually don’t think it’s that hard to reclaim words and meaning from the
Donald Rumsfelds of the world, because I think that people are so able to
identify and relate to words that are connected to beliefs and passions. I
think that the left and progressive movements in the U.S.- because they’re
so embattled by the media, so mocked and dismissed and silenced, etc.- we
really internalize this idea that there’s something wrong with what we’re
saying, that we have to say it so carefully.
I think about somebody like Arundhati Roy. To me her political essays really
are poetry. And she gives people permission to write from the heart. When
she writes about war, it’s so filled with rage and love. And she’s completely
unashamed and embarrassed by that. And it’s such a relief when you read it,
because everyone’s always trying to be so reasonable, and it comes out so
bloodless. I think that’s a role that poets and fiction writers can play at this
point. And I think that Arundhati, who is a real model for this-she understands
that she is doing it very consciously-allows people to get mad. This
is what we need from our artists and theorists and critics right now.
SP: Well, I think we’ve taken a fair bit of your time, and we
appreciate that. We wanted to ask you one last
question. Do you have any particular poets or artists that have
strongly resonated with you and inspired you, and kind of perhaps
led you down this path?
NK: I talked about a couple of them in terms of the current activist world
right now-Arundhati Roy and Marcos. Their writing has I think had a big
effect on me and on the movement in general, in terms of a permission, that
everything doesn’t have to be linear. And that it’s as important to speak to
people’s hearts as it is to speak to their heads.
I think music for me has a big effect as well. We just saw Spearhead last
week, and Dead Prez. And we just hung out with Billy Bragg last week.
[Another band is] Orishas. And there’s an amazing Argentinean band called
Bersuit that is really deeply involved in the occupied factory movements. I
guess I tend to get more of that inspiration from music, although after this
conversation I’m going to read some poetry.
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