Writer Arundhati Roy and actor-screenplay writer John Cusack have nothing spectacularly revealing to say in their book Things That Can and Cannot be Said. In fact, you would think a lot of it is what Roy has already said ad nauseam. And yet, it will be a blunder of incalculable proportions to ignore the book and not pay heed to what underpins what has been said—and not said. The book is 129 pages of transcripts of conversations between Roy and Cusack, between Roy, Cusack, Daniel Ellsberg, the whistleblower who leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, and exiled NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
The book also has essays penned by the two authors, excerpts from the writings of others that help explain what Roy and Cusack are thinking and extensive annotation. The conversations between Roy and Cusack—that form the backdrop to the two, along with Ellsberg, travelling to Moscow to meet Snowden—are free-wheeling for sure. But they are also almost born constrained, having assumed a quality of despondency that comes with being perfectly aware of the locus of ‘histories’, events, people and the politics that move them and knowing that the more things change, the more they stay the same. That leaves very little room for even a happy delusion, let alone hope.
The authors discuss Snowden’s picture for the Wired in which he cradles an American flag, the post-9/11 world and how the US persists with the notion of American exceptionalism. They speak of “new morals and new indignations” being manufactured in a “disappeared history, disappeared context”, where ‘truths’ are cherry-picked, shaved of any associations with history and presented as the beginning of history itself by global superpowers (the authors say this in the context of the US, but it is true of any global power). For instance, in its narrative of the rise of the ISIS in west Asia and the threat it poses to the western world, the US always divorces it from the context of its war on Iraq and the support it has provided to anti-Assad forces in Syria. Curiously, their respective essays read as dialogues with their own selves, but explain more about the true nature of power and how the state as an institution—whether in the US or in India—shapes, and is shaped by, it.
Given the Snowden backdrop, it is a given that surveillance and how it ties in with state power would be a leitmotif in the book, if not the prime focus. But discussions and the ruminations—even in the conversation of the authors with the two whistleblowers—remain centred on the state’s will to power, for the lack of a better phrase.
Though there are no actual expositions—except perhaps small details of the Cold War-era espionage that Ellsberg intermittently gave away—the re-statement of what Roy has always surmised to be at the roots of the geopolitics of today is chilling. Of course, there could be reasons to be sceptical of what Roy, Cusack, Ellsberg and Snowden are saying. But what can explain more convincingly why what should have been a debate solely about the government snooping on citizens is now bogged down by a link to public security? If the threat to it is real, what caused it to arise? And isn’t the risk of it becoming a cover-all term for more insidious use of such surveillance real? Whose interest is served to maximum effect by this?
Roy could be unjustifiably extrapolating from Snowden’s words here, but there seems to be some ring of truth to it when she writes: “I was glad to see that when Snowden made his debut on Twitter (and chalked up half a million followers in half a second) he said, ‘I used to work for the government. Now I work for the public.’ Implicit in that sentence is the belief that the government does not work for the public. That’s the beginning of a subversive and inconvenient conversation. By ‘the government’, of course, he means the US government, his former employer. But who does he mean by ‘the public’? The US public? Which part of the US public? He’ll have to decide as he goes along. In democracies, the line between an elected government and ‘the public’ is never all that clear. The elite is usually fused with the government pretty seamlessly.”
In parts, the book talks of the NGO-isation of any resistance, justice getting trumped by the vocabulary of human rights—familiar, yet always disquieting, Roy tropes. A political critique of everything that afflicts common people everywhere, yet has ceased to be obvious for decades now, the book will make you sit up and question things, even if parts of it will read like some conspiracy theorist’s ramblings. One of the most curious things in the book is that Cusack lets Roy largely be in charge of the narrative, but that is also what lends the books its particular alkaline bitterness.