I’m in the midst of moving, but I’ve been carrying a few books around with me this summer as a way of decompressing when the total craziness of picking up house (after 19 years!) gets to me. Looking at my stack, there is a pattern. I’ve been reading about Appalachia, or about the folks who are persistently forgotten in American life, in Suzanne Collins’s Sunrise on the Reaping, Barbara Kingsolver’s, Demon Copperhead, and Arlie Russell Hochschild’s Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right.
My family is from the region, since, in one of geography’s deep ironies, Appalachia stretches into the hill country of eastern Mississippi. This means I am arguably from both of the most benighted places in the US, and, as I pack up to move further away, I have been thinking constantly about what it means to be from a place that remains culturally remote, and politically undervalued.
I begin thinking through my summer reading with Suzanne Collins, whose Sunrise on the Reaping is a breathtaking intervention at a moment when structural critique seems hopelessly belated, if not woefully tedious. Who has time to sift through the myriad ways that class, gender, and race are mobilized to minoritize when longstanding institutions—which have their own inbuilt problems, to be sure—are being fed into woodchippers on the daily? How can structures of domination be linked to histories of exploitation when the latest formation of broligarchy implodes on social media as we all watch? If I were looking for the bravest iteration of a patient, thoroughgoing critique of our current attention-frenzied culture of domination, I would not have immediately reached for the next volume of The Hunger Games. And yet here I am, devastated and inspired.
[Spoilers Ahead. Stop here before I ruin it all.]
I should have known, fans will say. And I did. I am a longtime fan of this series, and its willingness to show us what we will watch, what we will do. But I did not expect a deep and searching engagement with the Enlightenment, or with traditions of protest and revolution. I will save what I have to say about Collins’s expanding engagement with Locke, Hume, and Hobbes for another post.
Here I put Collins’s emergence as an Appalachian writer into conversation with her depiction of resistance.Sunrise on the Reaping continues her development of an artistic, freedom-seeking form of community by extending the importance of the Covey, the musical-nomadic group confined to District 12 (members of whom are important to The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, and therefore to the institution of the Hunger Games as it comes to be developed by President Snow). Regional ballads retain radical salience, and some of the book’s most haunting scenes elaborate political protest as a community tradition that is passed down between generations. The answer to totalitarian oppression, whether deliberate or mundane, is shared creativity.
But when the 50th Hunger Games are convened, Collins confronts the challenges of explicit resistance. We all know that Haymitch Abernathy will be reaped; that he is chosen by mistake, and as the product of a botched ceremony, is Collins’s first acknowledgment of the shoddy workings of authoritarianism. Woodbine Chance, who is originally drawn as tribute for District 12, lives up to his family’s rebellious reputation when he runs rather than serves; but he also gets his head blown off in the middle of the reaping. Haymitch reflects on this gesture of refusal with respect, wishing that he had also run when he is hastily conscripted into serving as a replacement tribute.
But he also thinks of himself as too weak to run, to resist in any deliberate way. Haymitch does not find himself taken up as a new tribute because he protests the execution. Instead, Haymitch’s beloved, Lenore Dove, decries the killing. In a bid to shield her, Haymitch is taken. The haphazard way in which he is made tribute becomes a point of shame for Haymitch. But it also seeds Collins’s larger point about resistance across the novel. For Collins, resistance is part of daily life—it is not a public performance or curated spectacle. In the rush of the moment, resistance is spontaneous, it is shared, it is punished.
Haymitch prepares to accept his punishment to protect those around him. Again and again, however, he is tormented by his inability to keep anyone else safe. Almost immediately after he vows to look after Luella McCoy, she is killed. In his anger, Haymitch presents her lifeless body to President Snow, making a spectacle of the murder and of himself. As he immediately learns, however, he is not in charge of this visual domain. The tortured, starved, surgically altered girl who enters the arena as “Loulou” demonstrates to all the District 12 tributes how little control they have over what viewers of the games actually see.
Even so, Haymitch is repeatedly recalled to his father’s advice, “Don’t let them paint their posters with your blood. Not if you can help it” (49), advice which his fellow District 12 tribute, Maysilee Donner, instinctively grasps. Her resistance against the Capitol’s faux civility manifests almost immediately when she answers Drusilla blow for blow—verbally and physically. She is not impressed with the lavish spread provided for the tributes, but asserts her own dignity when she demands cutlery to eat the sandwiches that the others hungrily devour. Her ability to personalize all the tributes’ tokens, and her willingness to fix Kerna’s sunflower token after Panache breaks it, shows her respect for each player’s creative connection to home. Haymitch revises his own narrow perspective, having regarded Maysilee as a spoiled town girl before he comes to appreciate her toughness and inventiveness.
His awareness of undercurrents of resistance surrounding him is a balm for the most painful challenge that Haymitch faces: his recognition that no one might ever know about his resistance against the Capitol. After Beetee recruits him to forward a campaign of sabotage, Haymitch struggles with the performative invisibility required for the plan’s success: as he confronts the fact that Beetee must knowingly sacrifice his young son, Ampert, in pursuit of the Capitol’s destruction, Haymitch realizes that even those who care about him, including Maysilee, Lenore Dove, his mother, and little brother, Sid, can never become aware of his actions. Not only would his attempt to blow up the arena bring danger to them, but the visibility of his resistance would assure its failure. Instead, he is burdened by the knowledge that almost everyone he knows—including the “newcomers” who look up to him—will only see him as “a selfish troublemaker who’s determined to get home and live out his life as a rich and famous victor” (157).
Haymitch’s public persona, moreover, haunts him: as he fails to protect those around him, as he fails to bring down the arena, he wonders if he really is just the swaggering rascal who only looks after his own interests. To be sure, there are those who know he failed then succeeded in blowing up the arena, but as Haymitch’s doubts about Plutarch Heavensbee affirm, there is no way to affirm a person’s loyalties, and it is impossible to convey your own ethical commitments, especially in a dangerous domain. One’s avowed obligations, finally, are fatally hazardous to those they are expressed to protect: because the Capitol knows of Haymitch’s love for Lenore Dove, and his longstanding support for his mother and younger brother, all die in a gruesome private communication that, Haymitch understands, “…this was no accident…Ordered by Snow. For my homecoming” (359).
For me, Collins’s novel offers hope by insisting not only that tyranny will not prevail, but also, by showing that a crucial part of human creativity is connected to resistance itself. Anything that suppresses imagination, even invention’s most mundane, seemingly irrelevant expressions, becomes resistance. Haymitch remembers promising Sid to teach him to use a flint striker. He is also astounded to learn that Lenore Dove secretly scrawled anti-Capitol messages along District 12’s backstreets, and that Maysilee knew more about his beloved’s rebellion than he did because she noticed orange paint on Lenore Dove’s fingernails. Resistance might take overt shape, but it also might be communicated through the pettiest personal details.
What I take from this element of Collins’s novel—and there are many other neglected dimensions of this fabulous book—is that resistance is happening around us, even when we cannot see it, even when it does not announce itself. When we ask, “why are people going along?” or we wonder, “where is the resistance?” Collins’s novel affirms that even in the most oppressive regime, plenty of people are stepping up, standing up, and suffering punishment. It might be hard to see, but it is happening across districts, amongst unexpected allies, even when it doesn’t make the Capitol news.
Holly A. Crocker 