[Newspoetry] Arundhati Roy brought to court for charges of writing

[gillespie william k]

South End Author in Eastern Courtroom Again

The courtroom is becoming a familiar battleground for South End. Just a
few weeks after it saw author Noam Chomsky travel to Turkey to support a
local publisher, the Cambridge press has watched another of its activist
authors get in hot water for something they wrote.

Arundhati Roy, the Booker Prize winner and most recently the author of a
9/11 essay linking globalism and terrorism, has been sentenced to a day
in jail and fined for an affidavit in which she criticized the Indian
court system. The argument, which runs as an essay in South End's new
Roy collection Power Politics, was filed by Roy in defense of a suit
that alleged she was inciting protest at a rally opposing the Sardar
Sarovar dam project. Charges against her were dismissed in that case,
but she was brought up on new ones for the critical affidavit.

Roy could be subject to six months in jail if she doesn't pay the fine,
a move Arnove says she is considering. "I think she'll want to make a
statement. If she pays the fine she's accepting a fundamental
abridgement of her rights."  Arnove says that despite the publicity it
brings, Roy did not welcome the suit, and that it was causing a
disruption in her travel and research schedule.

Roy jumped into the headlines in September after her essay The Algebra
of Infinite Justice, which made a cause-and-effect argument between
companies like Nike and anti-American feeling abroad, came out in The
Guardian. That essay is included in Power Politics. Besides that piece
and the one submitted to the court, the book also features three other
essays.

Penguin India bundled all five essays from Power Politics and two
additional articles into a book that has since become a bestseller in
India. Roy fiction house Harper retains the rights to those two essays
stateside, though there are reports that South End is in talks to
acquire them. Steven Zeitchik (from Publishers Weekly)