‘Orwell Knew the Moment You Discover that the Other is Also You, a Whole Range of Bullshit Just Drops’

Hardeep Matharu speaks to the award-winning Haitian film-maker and director Raoul Peck about his new documentary, Orwell: 2+2=5, exploring the prescience of the English writer’s warnings of authoritarianism through his own words

HM: It seems increasingly true to suggest that we live in an Orwellian world. What were the personal origins of Orwell: 2+2=5?

RP: I’d read Orwell in school like everybody else. Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four, but my particular, personal relationship to him was from afar: he was a cultural good, a cultural icon, but in terms of the type of work I needed for my political fight, he was not a priority because I was reading other people like James Baldwin and needed voices that would help guide me in my own reality. In school, Orwell was sold to us as a science fiction, dystopian writer – and you didn’t have time for that, in my reality. That writing was more or less about a sort of European playground, the sense that ‘they have everything already so they can play with science fiction’. I did not have time for that.

So it took me time to understand the real Orwell, to discover him, and to become close to him, and he became as close to me as Baldwin [whose work Peck explored in the 2016 documentary I Am Not Your Negro], because I understood the link with both of those men to humanity – the fact that they both went to the other side of the planet, they went to find the ‘other’. That is the key to being able to shed all your prejudices, of whatever kind they are. The moment you discover that the other is also you, a whole range of bullshit just drops.