Race and Gender in The Hunger Games

Well, everyone else has written about it. I was beginning to feel left out.

Let me begin by saying that I am not the most authoritative speaker on the Hunger Games in the blogging world. I imagine tha twoud be a highly contested title. And I can guarantee I'd lose it. Lawks, I'm not the most authoritative speaker on the Hunger Games IN MY HOUSE. I haven't even read the second and third books.

Yes, there will be spoilers

I mostly only wrote because I finally picked up on something very interesting to me - in District 11, the home district of the much mourned Rue, the citizens are publicly whipped if they are caught stealing bread. And, they're black (to clarify - they usually have very dark skin, and they are geographically located in what is now the deep South - I am interpolating the rest myself, though this seems to be the most common interpretation, and that of the movie).

I don't know why I didn't put this together when I read it, but the I-almost-have-it feeling I got when originally reading the book, with Rue and Thresh, finally clicked, and I realized where I recognized Rue from - "Birmingham Sunday" (I highly recommend the Joan Baez version, if you don't know the song - the song itself begins about 1:00 in). The story behind Birmingham Sunday is a simple one - it retells a real incident, where the black church headed by Martin Luther King was bombed by white extremists. Four people were killed: four young black girls, all around 12 years old.

Now let me tell you what I almost wrote next - "Four young girls, innocent of any of the trouble of their times. So young, so beautiful, and all ended." I stand by that - and I stand by my affection for the emotional power of Baez's performance in the song memorializing them. But the description is troubling in a number of ways - why do I remember this song more than, say, the equally poignant 'Emmet Till'? "Young girls," "Innocent," "Beautiful."

The same words of course could be applied to Rue (or to Katniss's sister, Prim, notably), and her death strikes the same string (I admit it, I cried, in the book and the movie). The formula is a very effective one. Take a little girl, it helps if they're slender and beautiful, tell them to offer up innocent eyes. You'll notice that you never have to watch Rue kill anyone. The closest she comes is to suggest to Katniss how SHE can kill the people who are waiting to murder her (Katniss, too, only kills when forced to, a different, interesting thing to consider. If she had fought for her life by killing, say, Foxface on purpose, even when Foxface made no attempt on her life, how would that change our perception of her?). The story could just have easily have involved Rue cutting down a hornets nest in her OWN tree to save Katniss. But it doesn't.

Because, we want Rue to be pure, when she dies, we want her to be innocent. It is interesting, now, to trace this backwards in the history of American race relations. Rue, yes, in the Hunger Games. Or the girl who is raped and murdered in Grisham's 'A Time to Kill'. Birmingham Sunday. Or go way back - there is Eliza in 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'. To get sympathetic white people riled up and willing to stick their necks out for their disadvantaged black brethren? Kill a fresh faced young black woman. If there is sex involved, all the better. Now, draw this narrative out to its logical conclusion - when a grown black man is beaten or killed, as a society, it affects us, sure, but not quite so viscerally. And for many of us it doesn't relaly affect us at all. When asked we might say its sad, but the underlying feeling when a black man is killed is that he's just a part of a rash of these murders. Think about the stereotypes of these murder victims - drug dealer, gang banger, petty criminal. These black men (or, older black women who carry their own stereotypes. Or unnatractive or non-docile black children - see 'Topsy' in Uncle Tom's Cabin) are not sufficiently innocent for us to really mourn them, in our collective consciousness as a nation. We mourn them differently. When a newscaster tuts over them the 'what a waste' is looking backward - he could have been so much had he not driven himself to here, instead of 'What a waste, he was so much, and cut off so young,' the way we feel about our Rue-characters.

Keep in mind, for a moment, that Rue clearly had a strong will to live. And so did Katniss. And that, eventually, one would have had to kill the other if noone else had. If Rue, to save herself and feed her family, had in some alternate version of the story, ended the book by pushing Katniss out of a tree, would we hate Rue? We hate, say, Glimmer, after all.

The horror of the Hunger Games, after all, should not be that it kills innocent children. ITs that that it takes innocent children and makes them into monsters. That is one of the things I loved about the movie (that, in Collins' defense, the structure of the book would not have allowed) - that after Rue dies, you see all these men, all these, essentially, slaves, rise up and start to push over their master's edifice of slavery, not from any kind of blind race hatred, the way we portray these actions now (take, say, the LA Riots and our national understanding of them), but rather out of love, and desperation. You love them, you ache for them, as they rip over the grain scales, and get in fistfights with the riot police. That was one of the victories of the movie for me - it doesn't glamourize social upheaval, it doesn't say that those men made any real difference - they didn't. But it tells that anger and frustration, even violently so, is a real, human emotion, with real, human causes, and that its presence as part of our culture, today, is not simply somethign to be tutted over - its a sign that we have promises that need keeping, broken hearts that need mending, love that needs to be given, apologies to offer.

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Leviathan by Scott Westerfield

This was my book for our family book club this month. As you may have guessed, Amanda drew my name, and chose a book for me. Hence Leviathan, which she chose largely, I think, because it doesn't have the raging giant worm action that is purportedly to be found in Peeps.

That being said.

This was my first experience with Mr. Westerfield, though Amanda is a devoted fan. I really was looking forward to the book. Leviathan is the first in what will be a trilogy, telling a steampunk alternate history of Europe, and encompassing the events that triggered World War I (one of the characters, for instance, is the son of Archduke Ferdinand). World War I is one of my favorite periods of history - as a child, we had a book in our library that (for some reason) had instructions on how to build a scale replica of the World War I trenches, and I always wanted to build it. I later wrote, in my head, an entire romance that centered around biplane pilots. Something in the conflux, the meeting of the old and new ways of war, of horse cavalry appearing on the same battle field as tanks and mustard gas, is beautifully blind and sad, to me. On top of this, the steampunk ethos is lovely to me, being a history fan anyway, and particularly a fan of Regency/Victorian/Edwardian history. A number of my favorite heroes are from the period, as well. I was a bit nervous, because Amanda had warned me not to take the book to seriously, but I AM capable of enjoying a book 'just for fun', really I am, so I was ready for a romp.

I didn't hate the book. I didn't even dislike the book. It was kind of just meh.

The premise was fairly clever, and the way that the competing branches of science are integrated with the Axis/Allies split of World War I was well thought out. The world building was fairly well done (if unquestionably geared to the technological over the sociological), and I found the setting to be interesting enough that I could argue with it - that's a good thing, I promise.

The characters, though - and I LOVE characters - were just kind of so-so, to me. The two protagonists (I'm trying to avoid spoilers here, sorry), both felt kind of like stereotypes, there more for window dressing for their two technological backgrounds, than like real people. I was interested, sort of from a dispassionate point of view, in what happened to their machines, but honestly never got terribly fond of either of them. Or terribly unfond.

And the action kind of got tiresome. I am not saying the book was morally bad - there is a nice lesson in it about how people need to work together, and one of the heroes had a father who was a peacenik, more or less. But most of the big action scenes were pretty much just battle scenes. I'm not the biggest fan of battle scenes. I know they can be well written and engaging, and I have read some that felt meaingful to me. But by and large, even the best of them don't do a lot for me, personally, even in books that I love like Lord of the Rings or Dune. The battles are there, they're important, but they're not what I love. In this book, I felt like everything was a battle or a chase scene, and neither of those things were terrifically exciting to spend several hundred pages alongside, without first feeling like I really deeply cared what happened to the characters.

In short, I think the problem was me. I'm not a big huge fan of books where the clever premise is the main attraction (i.e. this felt like it was more about the technology and less about the people), and I'm not a big huge fan of battle and chase scenes, which were very well done here, and probably just in too thick a concentration for me. Oh well. But then, I didn't like A New Hope when I was a kid for much the same reasons, then I liked Empire Strikes Back, which had a lot more bridgey, character driven moments. So, maybe the next book (Behemoth, I'm told) will be more to my liking.

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Fantasy Comes in Stages

Nymeth wrote a review on Octavia Butler's Cheek by Jowl, yesterday, that continued the conversation she started in an original post on the subject, which went on into the comments below, which I reflected on in a Weekly Geek on a somewhat unrelated subject recently. Poor Ms Nymeth! Poor dear lady, she hasn't learned the art of ignoring me yet. Perhaps noone gave her the notice that I can't shut up on a subject once I start to Nova Scotia it, as Amanda calls it :P. So, I started writing a response to her review, and it was kinda long for a comment. So, I'll just write it here.

Having never READ Cheek by Jowl, this isn't a response to the book, per se, but more to the ideas Ms Nymeth presents in her review of it. Disclaimer ends here. Also, Ms Nymeth knows about 120 times as much about fantasy as I do, it seems, just fyi, my gentle readers. Second disclaimer ends here.

First off, I just want to quickly address the idea of there being a bias against fantasy and science fiction. Yes, there is, I will not disagree with Nymeth or anyone else on that one. However, I believe it has reached it's wax, and is starting to wane - honestly the current feeling on sci-fi novels reminds me of the old 19th century attitude towards novels of any sort, an attitude that lasted through at least the early 20th century, as shown in 'Anne of Avonlea' by L.M. Montgomery:

And I can tell you, you redheaded snippet, that if the cow is yours, as you say, you'd be better employed in watching her out of other people's grain than in sitting round reading yellow-covered novels," . . . with a scathing glance at the innocent tan-colored Virgil by Anne's feet.

At first glance it might be thought that by Ms Montgomery's time, snobbery against novels was something that old farmers such as the one in this scene felt, but it's worth pointing out that Ms Montgomery apparently found it pertinent to tack on the fact the the book wasn't a novel - it was Virgil, a more suitably highbrow choice. This was the time when novel writing was developing into some of it's highest forms, at the turn of the century. So, I guess the point is that, obviously, snobs will as snobs will, and it is frustrating, but novel-writing wasn't too low brow for great artists to take it up then, and that's the only snobbery that would have truly mattered. The same is true of sci-fi fantasy today. Not to belittle the problem, just to offer the comforting veil of history - this too shall pass.

Now, for my points about this book in specific. First of all: I thought one point Ms Nymeth brought up was interesting:

Fantasy is often accused of being nostalgic and anti-progressive; of offering escape from contemporary problems by constructing pseudo-medieval societies... But focusing on something other than contemporary society doesn’t mean avoiding human concerns. It just means remembering that we are not alone on the planet, that there are things beyond us, there were things before us, and there will probably be things after us.

I thought this point was interesting, because it puts a wrinkle into the nature of the conversation we were, originally having, where we (sort of) lumped in Fantasy and Sci Fi together. Understanding, of course, that there is great breadth of variety in both sci fi and fantasy, and that the two genres definitely meet, I'd nonetheless make the point that one might suppose that the two would have basically diametrically opposed viewpoints. I'm actually not the only one who has noted this: David Brin, a sci-fi writer, pointed it out several years ago in an essay attacking Tolkien's fantasy writing (not that I agree with his particular position on the subject but the idea of there being two different basic ideas is an interesting one). Perhaps it would be better to say that there are two different kinds of fantastical fiction in general - stuff that looks forward to a bright future, and stuff that looks backward to a golden past, and sci-fi might classically have a tendency to the former, fantasy the latter, because there are certainly many exceptions to the rule, but nonetheless, the idea is an interesting one - and actually one that points out something very interesting about fantastical fiction in general: that it really has become a venue for honest debate about the big questions of humanity, particularly the destiny of the race. I know, though I can't cite it, Kurt Vonnegut made a similar point about why he wrote Science Fiction, because it let him grapple with questions of what we are as a race. In a sense, it's always been this way, for whether it was conscious or not, I'm sure that's part of what the greeks were doing in the Illiad, or the Hebrews in the Old Testament. Mythmaking is a way to couch real questions in a place where we can look at them and think about them. Much like a physicist creates an artificial environment to test theories, by removing as many complicating factors as possible (testing in a vacuum for instance, or outside of the pull of gravity), a writer can, in fantasy or science fiction, construct an environment uniquely suited to testing their theories in. There are a number of good examples of this in literature: dystopian literature, for instance, takes the world, presupposes certain conditions, and shows what those conditions will result in, as a way of warning humans to avoid those conditions.

However, there is another point I wanted to make, and it's one that I really appreciate Ms Nymeth for sparking in my mind, because it made me think of an idea that might clear up why there are so many conflicting ideas abotu what sci-fi/fantasy is FOR. The idea of animal fantasies is where I originally conceived of the idea, so let me discuss this idea with these as an example.

Alright, to start with go back to the explosion of popularity of Grimm's fairy tales and the other fairy tale revivals of the Victorian period, back in the mid-Victorian period. Look at the stories in these fairy tales about animals: the Frog Prince (a man is forced to become a beast and is transformed by marriage back into a man), the Swan Maidens (a man attempts to force a beast-woman to be human, but she reverts into beast form), or Snow White and Rose Red (two girls love a bear, and change him into a man). Then, read the literature of the period - book after book after book talks about how the changing world of the industrial revolution forces men to be bestial and cruel. Books like North and South try to find a way to transform these powerful beast-men into civilized society (notably, the main character begins thinking with beastly idea that success is measured by profit, and by love is transformed into someone who loves his fellow men and wants to help them). Books like Oliver Twist present a world in which Beast-men (like Sykes) can be temporarily transformed, but the savage, bestial power cannot be bottled up forever. Eventually it bursts out, and the main becomes beast again. Did these books seek to reconnect men to the natural world by way of their animals, the way Le Guin seems to say animal literature does? No, just the opposite. The natural world is a symbol of the unknown, the terrifying, the uncivilized, and it's pictured as being TOO much a part of men's souls, rather than not enough. Then, we get into the early 20th century, and we have books like Beatrix Potter's wonderful stories, stories in which the animal world is little more than a simpler, child-like version of the human world, where creatures can be pardoned for their childishness, and not expected to grow up. This is the same period as Peter Pan, it's worth noting, and it's the same period as such paeans to childhood as 'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn', or books that struggle with the disillusioning, impossible truths of adulthood that books by Joseph Conrad or Ernest Hemingway protray. By this point, the Industrial Revolution had run it's course, and the world was in the terrifying period of the world wars. This was the age of immigration, the age of socialist internationalism, an age when the centuries long traditions that made nations be nations (a shared history, shared language, shared faith, shared folklore) began to dissolve, particularly in America and Britain. People had no real moorings, and were searching back to their childhoods to try to understand the simple rules, to try to find the bedrock that everyone could agree to build a society on. Now move into the 70's, when books like Watership Down and the Rats of Nimh were written, books that truly tried to leave the human perspective altogether, and talk about societies outside of humanity. This was a period where people were losing faith in their institutions, the Hippie era, the Vietnam era, the Watergate era, when on the one hand people had learned what power there governments had (they had atomic bombs, they could fly to the moon) and on the other, they learned how little they were prepared to weild it properly. The books, thus, go back and forth between talking about the problems of the outside human society (they are destroying the ecology of the rabbits home, they are experimenting on the rats in ways they don't even understand), and showing alternative ideas, or simpler insights into how those dynamics work (the simple loyalties of the rabbits are much more effective than the more human-like organization of the General's warren in producing happiness and welfare).

This is true in general sci-fi and fantasy as well. George MacDonald is much different from Tolkien, who is in turn much different from Rowling. The point is that what Le Guin describes as the power of animal stories is a very apt description of why we need animal fantasies right now. It may have nothing to do with what they did for us 50, 100, 1000 years ago. I don't think this invalidates her argument - I think it broadens it, because the power fo the best of these stories is that they are so primal and mythic that we can project them over whatever our current needs are. Fantasy, after all, is highly akin to myth and faith, and myths are often written to explain, to understand, to grapple with the incomprehensible ideas of their ages. Explaining Narcissi with a beautiful boy looking into a pool isn't REALLY so different from explaining Russian Communist dictators with a group of sneaky pigs and a beleagured horse. Whether we believe the stories literally, after all, is somewhat irrelevant.

Anyway, I don't think I have the idea fully worked out in my head yet, but I thought I'd throw it out there, and see what everyone else thought.

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