After I read her memoir last month, Arundhati Roy made such an impression on me that i decided to read her two fictional novels. Luckily, they were in the library and my friend, who works at the library let me monopolise them (make friends with your librarian).
22. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
The most fun thing about reading this book was seeing the real life occurring things that were mentioned in the memoir become fictionalised.
The God of Small things is about twins Rahel and Estha, their immediate family and the saga of their lives. The story about the twins webs out to include immediate family, extended family, and even the village they live in. All of which comes together to tell the twisted story of their lives.
The true best way to describe Arundhati Roy’s tone is that of a coy and wicked story teller giving you tidbits to make your own deductions. The books themes are so intertwined that it makes you feel sick to think of children experiencing such a world. Child sexual assault, political affliations, caste system, and the subjugation of women and children are inferred from in between the pages.
The world adults create is not one in which children can thrive in. It’s one that children have no choice but to absorb and grow into just another agent of creating such a world. People are so torn apart, and no flesh is thick enough to withstand it due to the choices and systems that we have created for ourselves. Countries where segregation policies exist as a norm, like India create a frantic and hectic stampede of uneducated masses getting radicalised and riled up by knowing puppeteers who tactically choose which group to create an enemy out of, given any day and time.
Arundhati Roy creates a narrative for you. With brilliant prose, that is as I mentioned earlier, so coy and wicked, she shows how India’s predicament is one of ‘a-tishoo, a-tishoo, we all fall down’ at the slightest provocation. She brilliantly shows the absurdity of it, how a large of scheme of self conditioning and that of others created a hierarchy maintained through mass passivity and ‘routine’ explosions of violence to sustain it.
God of small things is crafty in one specific way. No one is explicitly said to be bad. But from the dialogues, and historical recollections, you uncover absurdity and infer blame all on your own. It is an incredibly witty book that is heart wrenching, volatile and so revealing of human nature.
23. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy
The real life things becoming fictionalised also occurs in this book. It felt like hunting for clues at some point. A fun easter egg hunt.
The Ministry of Utmost happiness is honestly a little difficult to summarise. It has my favourite type of storytelling where different, seemingly unrelated stories all merge into one timeline. It’s about transgender and queer rights and it’s also about the India’s invasion of Kashmir.
The Ministry of Utmost happiness is a heart warming, character dense, and eclectic novel that is such a marvel to read and experience. The stories are incredibly fleshed out and each segment feels like an entirely different world, and entirely different timeline but it’s happening all within the same country and timeline.
The great thing about Arundhati Roy’s films is that you expect such historical relevant, fictionalised or not, to feel like you’re being preached at. It doesnt feel didactic. Like i mentioned earlier, all you have to do is look at actions of both sides, and the outcomes and you can decide for yourself who the oppressor and oppressed are.
24. Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire
I’ll have to read this book a second time, a third time, maybe even a fourth time for it to really cement itself into my brain. I need to memorise the ideas in this book.
Pedagogy of the oppressed is Paulo Freire’s idea that the way we teach is what determine the sort of society we created. What we are taught, how it is taught and who learns it all determines the oppressors and the oppressed that we create in a society.
The book is split into four chapters carrying succinct and comprehensively explained dogma on teaching and learning. Each section builds on the other, and although i kept getting lost sometimes, i always found the underlying point. It is a humbling book that dismantles your assumed ideas of what it means to be a revolutionary. It’s also humbling in how it challenges your understanding of what it means to be an educator.
It teaches you the cumulative nature of what the relationship between teacher, student, and society. A society that is oppressive in nature begins with an oppressive home and an oppressive teaching environment. The greatest idea in this book was the relationship between humanisation and dehumanisation. according to Freire, the ultimate goal of human society is to become humanised. Dehumanisation is something we are all so familiar with in today’s fabricated rhetoric. Immigration coverage is a great example of this. The way people talk about immigrants, you’d honestly think that they’re talking about corrupting cockroaches that have no human right to live on earth. It is the strongest aphrodisiac for racists who need their own humanity to be affirmed through the dehumanisation of others.
This is a one of a kind book that honestly shatters your worldview in ways that makers your reality seem like a big fat shitty lie. But also, it sort of confirms suspicions you’ve held your whole life. For example, we always jokingly say hey we are taught in schools in Kenya honestly feels like subjugation and abuse. Reading this book had me saying ‘I was right. The reason why it felt like subjugation was because it was subjugation.’
“After I read her memoir last month, Arundhati Roy made such an impression on me that i decided to read her two fictional novels” this made me think about when i manage to publish my work 🥹🥹 and then i imagined seeing myself on your book reviews :o what a cool thought