"to make revolution irresistible"

notes on the politics of literary production

The Palestinian writer and revolutionary Ghassan Kanafani, who served as the spokesman of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine until his assassination by Zionist intelligence services in 1972. Kanafani’s obituary described him as a “commando who never fired a gun, whose weapon was a ballpoint pen, and his arena, newspaper pages.” (Image source: Literary Hub)

In May 2019, the Indian novelist, essayist, and political activist Arundhati Roy was invited to deliver the Arthur Miller Freedom to Write Lecture at PEN America’s annual World Voices Festival.¹ Her speech, initially published in The Guardian under the title “Literature provides shelter. That’s why we need it,” was later included in her 2020 collection Azadi as the essay “The Language of Literature.” As is characteristic of Roy’s writings, “The Language of Literature” is expansive and meandering in the best way. Touching on everything from the imperial overreach of the American military to lynching attacks by Hindu nationalist mobs in Modi’s India, the essay somehow manages to weave these disparate threads together into a spellbinding, cohesive whole. A central theme running throughout the piece, however, is the trajectory of Roy’s own literary career, and how it has evolved in relation to her stature as a public intellectual and political figure.

For those unacquainted with her biography, Arundhati Roy was born in 1959 and raised by her mother, a prominent educator and women’s rights activist in her own right, in the South Indian state of Kerala. After studying architecture in Delhi, she worked for a time at the National Institute of Urban Affairs, and collaborated on a series of film and television projects with her husband, the independent filmmaker Pradip Krishen. In 1997, her debut novel The God of Small Things was published to immediate and resounding acclaim, making her overnight a darling of the literary world—both in India and abroad—and the first Indian writer to win the Booker Prize.

It would be another twenty years before Roy published a work of fiction again—a trend that was finally broken with the 2017 publication of her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. During this time, Roy turned her sights instead to focus on political essays, beginning with 1998’s “The End of Imagination.” This essay, which fiercely criticized the Indian government’s recent nuclear bomb tests (“the air is thick with ugliness and there’s the unmistakable stench of fascism on the breeze”), was met with a considerably less celebratory response than her novel, prompting widespread outrage amongst many segments of India’s English-speaking, dominant-caste urban elite. It marked the beginning of a career trajectory that would establish Roy over the next two decades as one of India’s foremost political commentators, penning essays on subjects ranging from the devastation of tribal communities by dam-construction projects to the Maoist insurgency in rural Chhattisgarh to the brutal, decades-long occupation of Kashmir by Indian military forces. With their unflinching honesty, explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist political alignment, and sympathy for the right of the oppressed to resist their oppression, these political writings frequently courted controversy. More often than not they landed Roy in hot water, earning her a steady stream of violent threats, political condemnations, and even legal troubles—at the time that I am writing this, Roy is facing potential prosecution under India’s draconian anti-terror law for a speech she gave more than a decade ago, in which she (accurately) pointed out that “Kashmir has never been an integral part of India.”

In “The Language of Literature,” Roy traces the evolving response to her writing as she turned away from the novelistic style that had catapulted her to fame and embraced instead an explicitly political form of nonfiction—one which sat uneasily with many in the literary world due to the fact that it could not be shoehorned so easily into this or that genre. “When the essays were first published,” she writes, “they were viewed with baleful suspicion, at least in some quarters”—not because people necessarily disagreed with her politics (though they often did), but because “the writing sat at an angle to what is conventionally thought of as literature.” Many readers, she explains,

couldn’t decide exactly what this was—pamphlet or polemic, academic or journalistic writing, travelogue, or just plain literary adventurism? . . . Over time, an unspoken compromise was arrived at. I began to be called a ‘writer-activist.’ Implicit in this categorization was that the fiction was not political and the essays were not literary.

I first read this essay before I’d started to pursue my own writing seriously, but when I returned to it as a reference for this piece, I was struck by just how much Roy’s dilemma resonated with me. I’ve been calling myself a writer for about two and a half years now, an era of self-identification that began in early 2022 when I started working on a draft of my first novel. While I continued to produce a steady stream of essays as well, this novel—a straightforward, up-and-down work of literary fiction—remained my primary project for the next two years. The fact that I was working on such an incontrovertibly ‘literary’ project made me feel more secure in my own authorial self-identification, and it gave me a convenient, satisfaction-guaranteed answer to the dreaded question of So what do you write? that would inevitably follow every time I told someone new that I was a writer.

All of that changed, however, earlier this year, when I made the decision to shelve my novel. It was by no means a permanent decision, but given that I was more than two years and 130,000 words into the undertaking, it was a significant one. Like a relationship gone stale but not quite dormant, I’d come to the difficult realization that my manuscript and I simply needed to take a break—to spend some time apart, to remind ourselves of who we are independently of one another. I have no doubt that I’ll return to it eventually—perhaps even in the not-too-distant future—but for the time being, I’ve decided to let the unfinished draft rest comfortably and undisturbed in a folder on my desktop.

Since shelving my novel draft, my literary pursuits have turned more or less exclusively to writing essays—some that I’ve published on Substack, and some that I’ve pitched out to other publications. In many ways, this shift represents the continuation and intensification of a trend that began after Israel launched its genocidal assault on Gaza last autumn. Over the last ten months, I’ve found it more and more difficult to write about anything other than politics, and virtually every essay I’ve written during that time has been what one might reasonably describe as ‘political.’ (Of the eight essays that I’ve published on my Substack since October, five are about Palestine in one way or another—and that’s without counting the several essays I’ve drafted for other outlets on a variety of subjects relating to empire, decolonization, and anticolonial resistance.) And while it wasn’t necessarily a conscious part of my thought process at the time, the clarity of hindsight has since allowed me to see that my decision to shelve the novel stemmed in large part from a sense that I was being pulled in too many directions by trying to balance my essay-writing with my fiction-writing.

In many ways, this dramatic shift in my priorities as a writer has been profoundly liberating. It has, however, also forced me to wrestle with difficult questions about what constitutes ‘real’ literature—in particular, whether my own political essay-writing can be accurately characterized as such. There’s little doubt, of course, that the essay is a straightforwardly literary form. But it seems to me that oftentimes, when people talk about essays as a form of capital-L Literature, what they are often referring to is a particular kind of essay—the kind whose argument, if it even makes one, is filtered through a heavy layer of narrative abstraction. These are the essays, often (though not always) told as a first-person account of the author’s own experience, that are usually grouped under the umbrella of ‘creative nonfiction’—and they are decidedly not the kind of essays that I usually feel inclined to write. The defining feature of such writing is that while it engages with political subjects, it rarely, if ever, makes concrete political arguments—at least, not without fully or partially cloaking its ideological message behind an opaque aesthetic veneer.

I should pause here to note that while I am naturally inclined, as an essayist, to cite the essay as the literary form with which I have the greatest familiarity, the phenomenon I am describing here absolutely applies to other forms as well. Consider, for example, the reception that a memoir or even a novel recounting the author’s experience as a refugee from a war-torn country is likely to receive in literary circles. Now consider the likely reception in the same circles for, say, a polemical work of nonfiction in which a scholar or activist indicts the role of American imperialism in destabilizing that country in the first place. No matter how aesthetically rich the latter’s prose may be, the fact that it is making an explicitly ideological argument—especially one that does not shy away from advancing a structural or systemic critique—means that it is far less likely than the former to be perceived as a work of ‘real’ literature. Put simply: relative to fiction, where the presumption of ‘literariness’ is strongest, nonfiction writing already suffers from a greater barrier to entry in terms of being considered ‘real’ literature—and the more overt the political argument or ideological content of such writing, the greater that barrier becomes.

When a piece of nonfiction writing does manage to strike the balance of tackling political questions while still being recognized as ‘literary,’ it is usually the kind of writing that approaches these questions obliquely rather than facing them head-on. Often, this means acknowledging the existence of a social problem and even incorporating it into the setting of a larger narrative, but limiting the analysis of said problem to the ‘micro’ level of how it affects individual psyches and interpersonal relationships without confronting its structural and systemic dimensions at the ‘macro’ level. This literary myopia is precisely what makes it possible, for example, to write a viral essay or a bestselling book about alienation in the contemporary workplace without ever necessarily having to use the word ‘capitalism’—or, as in the previous example, to write about war, displacement, and the refugee experience without ever using the word ‘imperialism.’ One might say that this kind of writing is characterized first and foremost by the sheer number of elephants that it allows to remain comfortably in the room.

By contrast, writing that wears its ideology on its sleeve—particularly when that ideology offers any sort of radical challenge to the status quo—is considerably more likely to be looked down upon in ‘high’ literary circles as uncouth and even vulgar. It is telling, for example, that the phrase “reads like a manifesto” is used so frequently as a pejorative by many ‘serious’ literary critics. Of course, there have certainly been many ‘political’ writers throughout history—George Orwell, James Baldwin, and so on—who did not shy away from advancing explicitly ideological arguments in much of their writing, and whose works (including their most political works) are now included in the hallowed canon of ‘classic literature.’ But these figures are the exception rather than the rule, and in many cases the literary legacies of their political output have the additional advantage of historical distance. By this I mean that the subjects of these authors’ nonfiction writing—the Spanish Civil War, the Civil Rights Movement, etc.—now sit squarely in the past (though of course their reverberations still echo into the present), and this temporal remoteness is precisely what allows their work to be viewed as ‘properly’ literary rather than as emblematic of some ‘lesser’ form of journalistic or polemical writing. Those of us who write about explicitly political subjects in the present day—whose work sits, as Arundhati Roy puts it, “at an angle to what is conventionally thought of as literature”—enjoy no such luxury.

• • •

The gatekeeping of literary recognition, to the exclusion of overtly political writing, is deeply problematic for a number of reasons—not least because it reinforces the same patterns of elitism and exclusivity that are so persistent in the world of arts and letters. Ever since the emergence of mass commercial publishing, the realm of literature as an artistic and professional discipline has always been beset by a fundamental contradiction that has indelibly shaped its relationship to politics. On the one hand, it’s true that the democratic nature of writing as a pursuit gives it a certain political potency, in the sense that just about anyone can pick up a pen and express their ideas in the hopes of influencing others and inspiring social change. It is equally true, however, that the ‘literary community’ (to the extent that such a thing can be said to exist) has long been dominated by a fairly narrow set of institutions, publications, and individuals who function both as gatekeepers and tastemakers, and who have a vested structural interest in ensuring that the world of ‘high’ literature remains first and foremost a playground for a privileged elite—or at least, for those who are comfortable with allowing the interests of said elite to remain unchallenged. Under such conditions, literature becomes a dangerously rarefied pursuit—a vehicle for detached observation and dispassionate analysis, existing at a significant remove from the material realities of the world we live in.

This state of affairs, of course, creates a difficult situation for those of us whose work challenges the status quo rather than reinforcing it, or who embrace the power of polemical writing as a tool for advancing revolutionary politics—a contradiction which revolutionary figures throughout history have long understood and wrestled with. In his 1965 essay “Socialism and Man in Cuba,” for example, the Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara locates the heart of the problem in the structural limitations imposed on all artists (not just writers) by bourgeois society. The “superstructure” of capitalism, he writes,

imposes a kind of art in which the artist must be educated. Rebels are subdued by the machine, and only exceptional talents may create their own work. The rest become shamefaced hirelings or are crushed . . . Meaningless anguish or vulgar amusement thus become convenient safety valves for human anxiety. The idea of using art as a weapon of protest is combated. Those who play by the rules of the game are showered with honors — such honors as a monkey might get for performing pirouettes. The condition is that one does not try to escape from the invisible cage.

The artificial separation of capital-L Literature from mere ‘political’ writing is both a catalyst and a product of the phenomenon that Guevara is describing here—a way to ensure that anyone who seeks literary recognition is forced to “play by the rules of the game” and refrain from ever using their work to challenge the status quo in any meaningful way. It’s tempting, perhaps, to read this as a matter of literature being ‘depoliticized,’ and therefore to respond with the oft-repeated assertion that “writing is a political act.” Of course, to the extent that a piece of writing (like all art) cannot be separated from the political positionality and orientation both of its creator and of the broader social context in which it exists, this isn’t necessarily wrong. In this sense, it’s fair to say that writing is inherently political—and it’s also fair to point out that the refusal to recognize explicitly political writing as ‘real’ literature is itself a form of depoliticization. But if our analysis stops there, we risk swinging the pendulum too far in the other direction, valorizing literature in a way that overstates its political significance—and thereby falling into the trap of self-mythologization to which we writers are so infamously prone.

To avoid this, we need to shift the focus of our analysis from literature to politics itself. Yes, we must resist the depoliticization of literature. But if we are serious about harnessing the much-vaunted ‘power of the written word’ in service of a better world, then we must also resist the deliterarization of politics. By this, I mean the tendency to privilege ideological subtlety in writing as a paramount virtue—to look down on naked political expression as unwieldy and even gauche; the sign of a lesser talent and something that can only be rendered truly ‘literary’ through the careful application of layer upon layer of metaphor and abstraction. In other words, the real problem isn’t that there is some supposedly inherent political quality to literature itself which has not been adequately recognized. Rather, it’s that in our failure to acknowledge the true literary potential of political writing, we reinforce literature’s role as a tool for the preservation of elite interests in bourgeois society—suitable, perhaps, as an avenue for escapist fantasizing and the disciplining of would-be revolutionaries, but never as a battlefield for any meaningful form of direct political contestation or struggle.

To be clear: this is not an argument against nuance in literature, political or otherwise. Nuance, simply put, is the lifeblood of good writing. Any writer worth their salt must always remain as finely attuned as possible to the intricacies of their claims; a misplaced or overly broad generalization all too often proves to be the Achilles heel of an otherwise cogent argument. A literary culture that has abandoned nuance in favor of lazy black-and-white thinking is a literary culture that has lost itself, and it is one in which I decidedly want no part.

Nuance, however, is not the same thing as subtlety. If nuance is concerned with ensuring that none of an argument’s complexities go unaddressed, subtlety is concerned with obscuring the fact that an argument is being made in the first place. It is nothing more and nothing less than a means of ideological control, intended to neuter and suppress any trace of overt radicalism in a written work. “The bottom line,” James Baldwin once said of literature’s social purpose, “is this:”

You write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world . . . The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks or people look at reality, then you can change it.

It’s true that modifying one’s writing to make it more ‘subtle’ might make it more likely to be recognized by the dominant culture as having ‘serious’ literary value—it might, if one is lucky, even lead to a New Yorker byline or a workshop spot in Iowa or some other coveted signifier of one’s acceptance into the upper strata of the so-called ‘literary world.’ But by making the arguments contained in that writing less direct, this impulse towards subtlety consequently reduces their power to “alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks or people look at reality.” Truly radical writing, therefore, should always be nuanced, but never subtle, because subtlety is counterrevolutionary. As writers concerned with changing the world, we have a responsibility to avoid it at all costs.

• • •

On December 8th, 2023—two months and one day after the beginning of Israel’s genocide in Gaza—Protean Magazine published an essay by the Palestinian-American writer Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, titled “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide.” In the essay, Tbakhi critically examines the idea of ‘Craft’—that ill-defined but all-important combination of skill, artistry, and rhetorical best practices that, we are told, makes writing an art form in its own right. In literary circles, craft is regularly held up as one of the most important aspects of writing—the internet is chock-full of blog posts and virtual courses that promise to help writers hone their craft, and so-called ‘craft books’ constitute an entire publishing genre unto themselves.

Tbakhi, however, takes a rather different view of the subject. “I use ‘Craft’ here,” he writes,

to describe the network of sanitizing influences exerted on writing in the English language: the influences of neoliberalism, of complicit institutions, and of the linguistic priorities of the state and of empire . . . The Craft which is taught in Western institutions, taken up and reproduced by Western publishers, literary institutions, and awards bodies, is a set of regulatory ideas which curtail forms of speech that might enact real danger to the constellation of economic and social values which are, as I write this, facilitating genocide in Palestine and elsewhere across the globe. If, as Audre Lorde taught us, the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house, then Craft is the process by which our own real liberatory tools are dulled, confiscated, and replaced. We believe our words sharper than they turn out to be. We play with toy hammers and think we can break down concrete. We think a spoon is a saw.

Craft, in Tbakhi’s formulation, “asks us to consider the language first and the politics second.” It represents the means by which literature becomes divorced from agitprop, by which writing-as-literary-production becomes divorced from writing-as-political-education. And importantly, according to Tbakhi, it must be contrasted against the “political thought” which is “not only an option for artists but a duty, an obligation and a fundamental necessity, and which is “the enemy of Craft . . . This must be our constant betrayal, to know now that the lyric is not as valuable as the polemic.” A writer who is serious about using their work as a tool for liberation must therefore “learn, or build, or steal, or steal back” a new, truly revolutionary writing craft—“the craft we need for the long Intifada, which we carry with us to liberation and beyond.”

While Tbakhi wrote this essay in response to the Gaza genocide, its lessons extend far beyond the particular context of the present moment—or even of the Palestinian liberation struggle writ large. Even if Palestine were not subjected to Zionist colonization, even if there were no ongoing genocide against the people of Gaza, we would still find ourselves ensnared and strangled by the Craft that Tbakhi so powerfully excoriates. Craft would still be all around us; it would still function as a tool for disciplining radical political thought and constraining the ideological bounds of literature. As writers, we would still have a responsibility to, as Tbakhi puts it, “poison and betray Craft at all turns.”

• • • 

The revolutionary Black feminist Toni Cade Bambara once famously said that “as a cultural worker who belongs to an oppressed people, my job is to make revolution irresistible.” Amid our current moment of heightening contradictions, interlocking crises, and unprecedented revolutionary upheaval, Bambara’s words arguably ring truer now than ever before. Clearly, the writer’s role under our present conditions must be more than that of a mere witness or stenographer. As writers, our responsibility now is to harness our command of language in service of liberation, to use the written word to make the revolution irresistible. But if the message of revolution is hidden away behind a veil of impressionistic obfuscation, its urgency and legibility sacrificed on the altar of Aesthetics and Craft, how can it ever be made irresistible? How can people avoid resisting something that they don’t even know is there?

Rejecting the artificial separation of literature from revolutionary politics means recognizing, as Tbakhi points out, that we are all writing “amidst the long middle of revolution”—the “affective experience of moving inside the dailiness [of] structural and therefore constant violence,” as well as the “dailiness of resistance and unrelenting struggle.” In the long middle of revolution, there is no room for any form of literary production that fails to engage with this “dailiness” at the most granular level, that fails to keep the gears of the revolutionary process turning and therefore bring us closer to liberation—and therefore, to victory.

Whether we realize it or not, we are already locked in struggle. The war has already begun, and literature is just one of its many battlefields. The time is therefore long overdue for writers to come to terms with the crucial role we have to play in making the revolution irresistible—to recognize that we are foot soldiers in the revolutionary struggle; that when we pick up the pen, we are also picking up the gun.

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culture shock is a blog by the Indian-American writer, organizer, and cultural critic Pranay Somayajula. Click the button below to subscribe for free and receive new essays in your inbox:

1. Given that this essay is about the relationship between literature and politics, I would be remiss if I failed to point out the ironic setting of Roy’s address. The World Voices Festival is an annual event held by PEN America, an organization that was founded in 1922 as the American affiliate of PEN International. With the stated purpose of “[standing] at the intersection of literature and human rights to protect free expression in the United States and worldwide,” PEN America has long positioned itself as a leading defender of free speech for writers, academics, and artists.

In the ten months since the beginning of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, however, PEN America has faced widespread condemnation from writers for its shameful equivocation regarding the genocide in Gaza—a position which stands in stark contrast to the organization’s vocal solidarity with the people of Ukraine following Russia’ February 2022 invasion. The 2024 iteration of PEN’s World Voices Festival—the same event where Arundhati Roy spoke in 2019—was cancelled in April after many of its headlining guests withdrew from the festival and signed an open letter excoriating PEN America’s leadership for “[betraying] the organization’s professed commitment to peace and equality for all.” And earlier this month, Writers Against the War on Gaza—a “coalition of media, cultural, and academic workers who are committed to the horizon of liberation for the Palestinian people,” which takes its inspiration from the 1960s “umbrella organization” American Writers Against the Vietnam War—announced a “complete boycott” of all PEN America-affiliated grants, prizes, events, and programs.

In many ways, I think, the PEN America debacle represents the logical conclusion of what I have attempted to criticize in this essay—a literary culture that claims to honor the transformative potential of the written word while simultaneously closing the door to any attempt at genuinely revolutionary literary production.