Arundhati Roy.

• Author: Gupta, Arun
• Position: THE PROGRESSIVE INTERVIEW - Interview

Sitting in a car parked at a gas station on the outskirts of Houston, my colleague Michelle Fawcett holds an audio recorder to my cell phone. At the other end of the line is Arundhati Roy, author of the Booker Prize-winning The God of Small Things, who is some 2,000 miles away, driving to Boston.

"This is uniquely American," I remark to Roy about interviewing her while both of us are in cars but thousands of miles apart.

Michelle and I are driving some 7,000 miles and visiting twenty-three cities (and counting) to report on the Occupy movement.

Ending pervasive corporate control of the political system is on the lips of almost every occupier we meet. And what's most striking about the trip is seeing how many Americans now live in poverty, on the edge, or fear a descent into the abyss. It's why a majority still support Occupy Wall Street even after weeks of disinformation and repression.

Roy speaks to me before most of the police crack-downs start. She offers her thoughts on Occupy Wall Street, the role of the imagination, reclaiming language, and what is next for a movement that has reshaped America's political discourse and seized the world's attention.

Q Why did you visit Occupy Wall Street and what are your impressions of it?

Arundhati Roy: How could I not want to visit? Given what I've been doing for so many years, it seems to me, intellectually and theoretically, quite predictable this was going to happen here at some point.

But still I cannot deny myself the surprise and delight that it has happened. And I wanted to, obviously, see for myself the extent and size and texture and nature of it. So the first time I went there, because all those tents were up, it seemed more like a squat than a protest to me. But it began to reveal itself in a while. Some people were holding the ground and it was the hub for other people to organize, to think through things. It seems to be introducing a new political language into the United States, a language that would have been considered blasphemous only a while ago.

Q: Do you think that the Occupy movement should be defined by occupying one particular space or by occupying spaces?

Roy: I don't think the whole protest is only about occupying physical territory, but about reigniting a new political imagination. I don't think the state will allow people to occupy a particular space unless it feels that allowing it would create a kind of complacency, and the effectiveness and urgency of the protest would be lost. The fact that in New York and other places where...