oppression and resistance in the hunger games

Do you remember, my fellow degenerates, how I mentioned The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins's delightfully grim and violent post-apocalyptic dystopia, as the book I had to hide in my closet because I was afraid that once I started reading it I could not put it down?

Well, I caved. I started reading it, and I was right. I couldn't stop. I was totally hooked. And despite the million tons of work I had to do that did not involve reading young-adult fiction, I devoured the combined 800 pages of The Hunger Games and its sequel, Catching Fire, in a matter of days.

I think there is an enormous amount to be said about The Hunger Games, and I've been able to find far less serious and insightful commentary on these books as I would have expected. I plan to make up for that with several blog posts, starting now.

What makes The Hunger Games so awesome? I think it's really not very different than what makes Harry Potter awesome, which is that underneath the fantastical and/or futuristic trappings is a really great resistance story that feels utterly and totally authentic.

The Hunger Games trilogy (the third book is due out next fall) is set several hundred years in the future, when the present-day nations of North America have collapsed, to be replaced with Panem, a brutal dictatorship controlled by the rich and technologically advanced Capitol. (I totally thought Colorado Springs, too!) The Capitol rules over twelve impoverished Districts in what is basically an old-school colonial relationship, complete with single-industry extraction economies, but maintained with all the terrifying technology of modern warfare. (Sound familiar?) Some seventy-five years before the start of our story, the Districts rebelled against this state of affairs. The rebellion was crushed. One District, 13, was wiped completely off the map. As punishment and an ongoing reminder of the Capitol's power, the remaining twelve Districts are forced once a year to send two of their children, one boy and one girl, to compete in a bloody fight to the death broadcast to the whole nation on live TV.

The selection of competitors, or "tributes," is supposed to be random, but in reality, there's a poverty draft--you can put your name in the lottery extra times in exchange for meager food rations for you and your family. If you are between the ages of twelve and eighteen, you can also volunteer to take the place of someone else who is chosen--which is exactly what Katniss Everdeen, the book's 16-year-old protagonist, does when her 12-year-old sister Prim is selected for the Games.

The first book follows Katniss, a hard-bitten and refreshingly ungirly heroine, as she competes in, and survives, the seventy-fourth Hunger Games. The Hunger Games are supposed to be a display of the Capitol's unlimited power, and by refusing to play by their rules, Katniss (mostly unwittingly) provides a spark that sets off what could very well be the beginning of a revolution in Panem. Catching Fire explores the consequences of Katniss's actions as the rebellion she never intended to start spreads and the Capitol's response threatens pretty much everyone and everything she loves.

So many things about this formula could so easily be cliched. It's Battle Royale, The Running Man, a gladiator game, a critique of reality TV, and the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur all thrown into a big pot. And yet somehow, Collins makes it work, and creates something brutal and scary and real and utterly compelling.

I have a writing teacher who is fond of telling us to exercise our inner sadist--meaning, figure out what will really hurt your characters, what their worst fears are, and then make them confront that. Well, let's just say that Suzanne Collins's inner sadist is ready for a marathon. (This is extra hilarious since she looks like a Girl Scout leader.) I'm someone who reads about torture in my spare time--it takes a lot to make me shudder when reading a book. In Catching Fire, Collins managed it three times.* She has a masterful understanding of the dynamics of oppression and resistance, and has created a chilling dystopia on par with the worlds of 1984 and The Handmaid's Tale. She gives her characters true horrors to face, and face them they do, and it's riveting.

Much of The Hunger Games deals with what it's like to grow up in a world that is unrelentingly violent--not just the obvious violence of the Capitol's heavily-armed police force (in a wonderful irony, they're called Peacekeepers), but the more insidious violence of generations of poverty, starvation, hard labor, restriction of movement and severely limited opportunities.

Katniss is a survivor, and Collins really reckons with what that means in a world like Panem. Since her father was killed in a mining accident when she was twelve, Katniss has kept herself, her mother and little sister Prim from literally starving to death by hunting illegally in the woods outside her home in District 12. She has grown up driven by a single-minded mission to keep her family alive, and has ruthlessly suppressed any emotion, dream or desire inside herself that does not aid that mission--to the point that she is hardly even capable of understanding her own feelings when they don't concern the immediate survival of those she loves.

The Hunger Games explores, with remarkable insight, how and why people resist oppression in conditions where the price of doing so is staggeringly high. The power of the Capitol is fearsome; its use of violence and state terror is calculated, deliberate, overwhelming and unforgiving. As I read The Hunger Games, a phrase from the Goldstone report, documenting Israeli war crimes in Gaza, kept running through my head: "deliberately disproportionate." Everything the Capitol does is deliberately disproportionate, and the Hunger Games themselves are the perfect example. They are a massive, public, indefinite form of collective punishment. The message couldn't be clearer: resist once, and we will punish all of you, forever, in the cruelest way we can imagine.

And yet the people of Panem do resist, in a thousand different ways, many of which are symbolic and almost all of which are, by necessity, nonviolent. My friend Madeline has written a splendid post about The Hunger Games as an exploration of what nonviolent resistance means in a violent world, and what she has to say is right on, so I don't feel the need to repeat it here. But suffice to say that in a world where the Capitol claims to have absolute control, even purely symbolic acts of resistance can take on enormous power. A salute, a song, flowers, a painting, a loaf of bread, a dress, the act of holding hands with someone you've been told is supposed to be your enemy--all these seemingly mundane things become potent weapons against the Capitol.

One of the things that Collins really nails is the way in which unbearable conditions drive people to resist despite the risks of doing so. The opening chapters of Catching Fire, in particular, beautifully capture the "damned if you do, damned if you don't" logic of oppression. Even if someone in the Districts "behaves" and slaves away uncomplainingly for her entire life, she'll still be oppressed from the day she is born until the day she dies. If the choice is between doing nothing and being oppressed and resisting and being oppressed, on balance, sometimes resistance just feels better. At least it gives you a chance to feel like you're doing something other than passively accepting your own subjugation.

At the beginning of Catching Fire, Katniss is jumping through hoops set up by super creepy President Snow (who has been "president," we learn, for at least 25 years), trying to control the rebellion she has unintentionally unleashed and avoid violent reprisal against her loved ones. At a key point in the book, she realizes that nothing she can do will ever satisfy the Capitol. She can't win by playing by their rules, because the game is fixed in their favor. The realization is terrifying, but also oddly liberating--it means, Katniss reflects, that "I am free to act as desperately as I wish."

Once Katniss decides she's down with the rebellion (although she still doesn't understand quite what that means), she must face the reality that not just she herself, but everyone around her may be punished for her defiance. She decides that she is capable of facing arrest, torture, and death at the hand of the Capitol--after all, she's already had to face these possibilities in the Games. But the idea of her family, particularly her younger sister Prim, being hurt because of her actions paralyzes her with terror.

I need only to think of Prim and all my resolve disintegrates. It's my job to protect her.... I can't let the Capitol hurt Prim.

And then it hits me. They already have. They have killed her father in those wretched mines. They have sat by as she almost starved to death. They have chosen her as a tribute, then made her watch her sister fight to the death in the Games. She has been hurt far worse that I had at the age of twelve.

Prim...Rue...aren't they the very reason I have to try to fight? Because what has been done to them is so wrong, so beyond justification, so evil that there is no choice? Because no one has the right to treat them as they have been treated?

Yes. This is the thing to remember when fear threatens to swallow me up. What I am about to do, whatever any of us are forced to endure, it is for them.

Couldn't have said it better myself.

I realize I've already written quite a lot, and haven't even scratched the surface of some of the many other interesting elements of these books. There is so much to say about Katniss as a heroine and a narrator, and about the Games themselves as social commentary, that I feel at least one more blog post is in order here. And goddam, I haven't even mentioned what I think about Team Gale vs. Team Peeta. (Short answer: silly marketing gimmick engineered by Scholastic.)

There is so much fantastic stuff in these books about the dynamics of how and why people fight back, how the daily insults and humiliations and degradations of oppression build up inside people until they explode, how acts of violent repression are just as likely to propel people forward into struggle as backward into fear, how people move from the instinctive resistance necessary for survival to the organized resistance of revolutions, and the often bitter and brutal choices they must make along the way. Collins has set herself a very high bar for the third book, and I have to admit I'm just a tiny bit nervous about whether she will be able to live up to the truly radical conclusions of her own story. But I certainly know I'm dying to find out.

*In case you've read the books and were wondering, the three shudder-inducing moments for me were: pretty much everything in District 11, Gale's encounter with the new Head Peacekeeper, and that bit with the jabberjays, which is just about the most horrible thing I can imagine.