by ARUNDHATI ROY, RIMA RANTISI, RIMA MAJRD, & NADIA BOU ALI
“We Are Trees: A Conversation between Arundhati Roy, Rima Rantisi, Rima Majed, and Nadia Bou Ali” originally appeared in the Interviews & Lectures section of Rusted Radishes on 24 February 2025. It is republished in abridged form on Communis with the permission of Rusted Radishes. Its Spanish translation for Communis can be read in «Somos árboles».
“From the time I was very young, I knew that the language that I was looking for wasn’t about whether it’s Hindi or English or Malayalam; the language I was looking for is a language that I use, not a language that uses me. And that is the difference between being a writer and not being a writer. Does the language dominate you, or do you dominate the language? Do you use it, change it, break it, force it to do things that other languages you speak do or don’t do? It’s a game, it’s a play, it’s a form of wrestling. And yet, underneath it all, the real language is not that. The real language is what my Estonian translator asks, How did you know about my childhood?”
— Arundhati Roy
The following conversation between Arundhati Roy, Rima Rantisi, Rima Majed, and Nadia Bou Ali took place on June 7, 2024, at the American University of Beirut, who awarded Roy an honorary doctorate.
Arundhati Roy arrived in Beirut halfway through the genocidal war on the Palestinians and the war in South Lebanon. Her arrival was also in the wake of Narendra Modi’s reelection, which she had campaigned tirelessly against. In her fiery commencement speech at the American University of Beirut, which she was charged with delivering as a newly minted honorary doctor, she called the Modi regime one “that has persecuted and murdered minorities — Muslims and Christians — incarcerated its critics, and brought us so close to what we in India thought could never happen to us. Fascism.” She went on to critique Modi’s friendship with Israel, the exploitation of thousands of Indian workers who were sent to take Palestinians’ place as they lived and died in Gaza, and the American police and universities who beat student protestors. She asked: “Can there be anything more immoral than that?” She slammed western liberal democracies and the “two eighty-year-old white men” as the meager choices of the American people for president. Her speech was not poetic, but instead seized a rare opportunity on an Arab stage at an American institution to speak in solidarity with Palestine.
Roy greeted a full auditorium of both readers and people who know her politics though not necessarily her work with characteristic shunning of grand labels, institutional favor and awards. After being introduced as a 2024 recipient of an honorary doctorate from the American University of Beirut, where the conversation took place, she stood up, lifted her arms toward the cheering audience, smiled, and said, “Thank you so much. I didn’t come for the honorary doctorate. I came to see you.” Despite her display of modesty, she carried her petite frame like a diva, wearing a salmon kurta with rolled up khaki pants and bejeweled boots, as if it were just another outing for her. Even though in this moment, and later in the conversation, she downplays her own success, she does not fail to leverage it to speak freely on international stages.
Over an hour and a half, Roy spoke about the futility of the search for authenticity in language; the disconnect between belonging and nationalism; India’s nuclear tests as the spark for her nonfiction writing; caste as preclusion to solidarity; the idealization and misconceptions about Gandhi; the exploitation of nature for capitalistic gains, and more. All of her arguments cling to the same conclusion for her, a conclusion that stems from what she believes about language and humans’ fundamental connection to the natural world: “The real language is that we all deeply understand each other because we are trees, we are creatures.” Going back to the forest, Roy addresses humans’ shared nature, our rootedness in it, outside the man-made borders that run through people as a way to reject the systemic forces that wish to colonize people, land, and language.
Many of us, regardless of where we were in the world, grew up with Arundhati Roy’s voice as part of the soundtrack to our education. As an English major, I must have seen Roy anthologized in nearly every English literature and composition reader between high school and university, on topics of capitalism, environment, globalization, diversity, and the infinite injustices in the world. Her words have filled the minds of readers across the globe, her influence immeasurable. But as readers of Arundhati Roy know, she does not stop at outlining or analyzing these injustices, she persists in the fight to envision a new world, at every turn in our present-day histories. For this reason, her presence in Beirut at this time was no coincidence, amidst this seismic shift in global politics, just 200 kilometers away from an unabated genocide.
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