Oddkin and alter-families. ‘Staying with the trouble’ in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy

“The task is to make kin in lines of inventive connection as a practice of learning to live and die well with
each other in a thick present” (Haraway 2016, 18). With these words, Donna Haraway, in Staying with
the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene, started to reason on the role of new possible forms of
‘oddkin’ to contribute to the redefinition of living with, becoming with, and dying with, on this planet. By
reading Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), this contribution aims at inquiring
into new practices of kin-making, in particular from, the perspective of adoptive forms of maternity and
inter-racial, inter-caste, and inter-religious communities, with an eye and a sensibility for new
arrangements for human-animal cohabitation and life-death intercourse. Conceived as a chance for
endurance in discomfort and devastation, Roy’s novel explores possibilities to cope with trauma through
inventive, less structured, ways of making family and building alternative communities: beyond
singularities, looking for innovative relational ontologies, and unexpected mutual interactions between
mourning and survival.