“I think we need a reconsideration of the whole of the post-1945 period, which is an era in which both authoritarian and semi-democratic governments across the region engaged in massive arms acquisition and then deployed many—in some cases most—of those weapons against their own populations. We usually see this as a process of violent decolonization and then an equally violent postcolonial descent into either authoritarianism or fractured forms of democracy, which is a pattern that of course we can identify elsewhere in the world as well. But actually, when we look through this lens of mass violence, we can see that there are many ways in which this is not a period of decolonization at all. It is a period of recolonization: a recalibration and a recasting of empire into new shapes, in which superpowers control spaces by combining economic dominance with a deliberate flooding of weaponry in the relevant territory, alongside the careful—and sometimes not so careful—creation of specific ethnic or sectarian client populations. I hope that this book begins to shed light not just on the past but also on the present of this kind of neocolonial violence, and helps readers to understand that contemporary mass violence is not somehow endemic to the Middle East but is a manifestation of an ongoing system of imperial colonization, domination, and oppression that has continued long past the era of formal empire.”
I think hard times are coming, when we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies, to other ways of being. And even imagine some real grounds for hope. We will need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries— the realists of a larger reality . Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. The profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable; so did the divine right of kings. … Power can be resisted and changed by human beings; resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art—the art of words. I’ve had a long career and a good one, in good company, and here, at the end of it, I really don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. ... The name of our beautiful reward is ...
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