Maya Khankhoje, poet, critic, essayist and short-story teller, is working on her first novel.

Speaking of Empire and Resistance. Conversations with Tariq Ali, by Tariq Ali and David Barsamian. The New Press, New York, 2005.

Speaking of Empire and Resistance. Conversations with Tariq Ali , is a series of interviews conducted over the last few years by David Barsamian, founder and director of Alternative Radio, based in Boulder, Colorado, with Tariq Ali, Lahore-born, Oxford-educated novelist, filmmaker and historian. Tariq Ali is also an editor of the New Left Review and most importantly, a passionate advocate of the people vs. the empire. He is to South Asia what Eduardo Galeano is to Latin America: a passionate critic of the American empire and a compassionate chronicler of popular resistance to it.

In The Empire Strikes Back , the first interview in this collection, Ali explains how the United States succeeded in converting Pakistan into “the condom that the Americans needed to enter Afghanistan” as crudely put by a Pakistani general. It also examines the similarities between Islamists and Protestant Puritans who “have become spiritual literalists”. Imperialism: Then and Now discusses the implosion of the USSR, the installation of Hamid Karzai as a puppet in Kabul and the importance of the nation-state in the defence of so-called multinationals. Here, Ali decries the callousness of Madeleine Albright who justified UN sanctions against Iraq even at the cost of the lives of 500,000 children.

For Ali, the “war on terrorism” is actually the war that promotes terrorism. In the chapter titled Bush in Babylon, which refers to his book by the same name, Tariq Ali reminds us that “nothing is more crucial than a vigorous opposition, here in the heart of the empire itself.” In the chapter that follows it, Ali points to Cracks in the Empire”. In Pakistan: the General Rules, Ali says that “ Pakistan is like Israel – both controlled by the British and both were created out of partitions which have left an enormous legacy of death, destruction, dislocation and refugees.” He also adds ruefully: “But these states are now both nuclear states, and nothing can dismantle them.” Enablers of Empire denounces Academia for denigrating “the study and pursuit of history as a grand narrative” and praises visionary poets like Iqbal and Brecht. Palestine and Israel throws light on a very dark reality.

Tariq Ali’s thoughts can be summed up in the words of Iqbal, his favourite Urdu poet:

Arise, awake even the wretched of the earth

Shake the foundations, tremble the walls

Of the mansions in which the wealthy sleep;

And in every field where a peasant starves,

There go and burn every bushel of wheat.

 This collection of interviews covering a variety of subjects in overlapping time-lines is difficult to review, but it is not difficult to read. On the contrary. Read this book and you will get a very clear understanding of the history that the media and academia are so assiduously trying to obliterate.