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War, Peace, and the Hunger Games
By lynmiller-lachmann on 2010-09-27 11:53:43
Last month the finale of Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games trilogy, Mockingjay, came out to great fanfare—including
midnight release parties, half-price hardcovers, and giveaways of mockingyjay stickers and pins. This cultural phenomenon
accompanied a series of futuristic books for teen readers that depicts a totalitarian nation, Panem, in what is today North
America. Consisting of a wealthy Capitol and twelve exploited Districts reminiscent of the Roman Empire, the regime
survives in part through the distraction of the populace via reality television, culminating in the bloody Hunger Games.
Established 75 years earlier, following a thwarted rebellion of the Districts, the Hunger Games pit Tributes—boys and girls,
aged 12 to 18—from each District in a televised fight with only one survivor. Collins’s heroine, 16-year-old Katniss
Everdeen, is a coal miner’s daughter in District 12, forced to support her family by hunting illegally with family friend and
sometime love interest Gale Hawthorne after the deaths of both their fathers in a mine explosion. When the Tributes are
drawn by lottery for the 74th Hunger Games, Katniss volunteers to take the place of her 12-year-old sister. The other Tribute
from District 12 is Peeta Mellark, a baker’s son who has had a crush on Katniss for years. In the first volume, The Hunger
Games, Katniss and Peeta battle—and kill—children from the other Districts in this violent spectacle. Their “mentor”—
combination coach and fundraiser—is District 12’s lone Hunger Games survivor, middle-aged alcoholic Haymitch
Abernathy. A team of image consultants from the Capitol dress and coif the teens to make them attractive to the viewers of
Panem. Katniss and Peeta’s joint victory in the 74th Hunger Games leads them into an even more violent challenge in the
following year’s Games, the Quarter Quell, conducted in the midst of a rebellion in the Districts that Katniss is accused of
instigating because of her failure to follow the rules of the Games. In Catching Fire, the two teenagers must fight other
winning Tributes, all of whom are now adults. The escalating rebellion is the focus of Mockingjay, where the artificial
government-created battle gives way to a real war between the regime of Panem and rebels aided by breakaway District 13,
located in a massive underground bunker ever since that region was nearly obliterated in a nuclear attack 75 years earlier.
While District 13 offers refuge and support to Panem’s freedom fighters, readers learn early on that District 13 is also a
totalitarian regime. If Panem is based on the Roman Empire, District 13 is the China of Chairman Mao, complete with drab
uniforms and reeducation cells. Ever since The Hunger Games appeared in 2008, the novels have enjoyed widespread
popularity, including months on bestseller lists, as well as critical acclaim. Like much dystopic fiction, the novels contain
frequent and graphic violence, torture, and humans converted into beasts called “muttations.” In contrast to other hyper-
violent fiction, however, readers see the impact of this violence on young characters forced to kill or be killed. Katniss is at
first reluctant to kill other children; in fact, her first victims die indirectly as a result of her cutting loose a nest of deadly
hybrid yellowjackets (“tracker jackers”). Later in The Hunger Games, she covers the body of a dead ally, a 12-year-old girl
from District 11, with flowers. In Catching Fire, she and Peeta are tormented by nightmares of their weeks in the arena, and
in Mockingjay, she wanders around in a drugged stupor for much of the book, crippled by her physical wounds, flashbacks
to the Games, and guilt. As well-written and politically and emotionally insightful as the Hunger Games trilogy is, I found
the novels, read by themselves, to be a dead end in terms of raising awareness of the issues they presented. The Hunger
Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay are above all entertaining, and that entertainment rests on the same nonstop violence
that entertains the citizens of Panem and keeps them from questioning their poverty, lack of freedom, and powerlessness. It
is easy to read the trilogy and believe that the world depicted is a remote fantasy divorced from our lives today. That would
be a huge mistake. In my interview last week with Mitali Perkins and in earlier blog posts, I have tried to raise awareness of
the situation of child soldiers in the here and now. The characters of Chiko and Tu Reh in Perkins’s recently published
Bamboo People (Charlesbridge, 2010) are, like Katniss and Peeta, forced to kill or be killed—not by a fictional government
300 years in the future but by the military dictatorship that has ruled Burma for the past 50 years. That dictatorship has
persecuted ethnic minorities just as the ruler of Panem repressed the 12 Districts. It has arbitrarily changed the country’s
name to Myanmar, controlled information coming in and out, and even denied the reality of a devastating cyclone in 2008 to
prevent outsiders and their aid from entering. Pegi Deitz Shea’s Abe in Arms (PM Press, 2010) is another book for teen
readers that describes the horrific conditions of child soldiers, this time in Liberia, as well as the struggle of one former
soldier to break free of the nightmares and flashbacks that threaten to destroy his new life in the United States. Abe in Arms
is particularly relevant and deserving of our attention today, as former Liberian strongman Charles Taylor faces charges in
the International Court of Justice in The Hague, and the United States has not yet recognized the Court’s jurisdiction. Much
of the Hunger Games trilogy resonated with me because my novel Gringolandia (Curbstone Press/Northwestern University
Press, 2009) portrays the impact of torture and political violence on survivors and their families. Like Katniss and Peeta’s
mentor Haymitch, Daniel’s father in Gringolandia has turned to alcohol to dull the pain and nightmares after having been
tortured by officials of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Several of the other Tributes have become addicted to drugs for
the same reason, including Katniss for a time in Mockingjay. Torture and violent repression—and their long-term
consequences—are not the stuff of fantasy either, as regimes throughout the world, including many the United States has
installed or supported, use torture as a means of social control. The United States itself has tortured prisoners in Iraq,
Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay and turned over prisoners to be tortured by allies in the process known as “extraordinary
rendition.” I would like to see readers of the Hunger Games trilogy take the next step—to read about the events that inspired
Collins's story and those places where the Games are real. Teachers can help by developing units that compare the Hunger
Games trilogy to books like Bamboo People, Abe in Arms, Gringolandia, Anna Perera’s Guantanamo Boy (about a British
youngster of Pakistani heritage arrested on a family visit to Pakistan), Patricia McCormick’s Purple Heart (about a young
soldier in Iraq struggling to recover from battlefield trauma), and others that address similar themes. The world of Panem
may seem very far in the future, but the future is closer than we think, and the time to change that course is now.
THE
HUNGER CATCHING |MOCBINGUAY
GAMES FIRE BN
SUZANNE
COLLINS SUZANNE
COLLINS SUZANNE COLLINS
