The Hunger Games -- race and representation
I'm looking forward to seeing this but I didn't go on opening night because I decided I wanted to read all the books and watch the existing films first. Last week I re-read The Hunger Games and watched the film. Now I'm re-reading Catching Fire. Then I'll watch the film, then re-read Mockingjay and then go to the cinema. Now I just need to find someone to go with me who won't have already seen it by next week. My colleague with two teenage daughters, Shivani, took them on opening night last night. Hey ho. I guess I should have started on The Hunger Games a week earlier, but I will still reading a Philippa Gregory novel at the time. (I am devouring Philippa Gregory novels this year. I've read all of the White Queen series and am halfway through the Tudor series.)
I found this article and interview this on Facebook in the (predictable) movie-release storm of Hunger Games-related material. It's about the character of Rue and the depiction of race in the series, specifically, and the search for black female heroes, generally, very interesting. YA needs some heroes of colour and from other minorities. Just some diversity generally.
There are some things I'd pick at in this interview. They are really only details, and part of me wonders whether I am latching onto them as a defensive mechanism. But I do think that in order to have the conversation it should be had accurately.
The first issue is regarding the depiction of District 11. On my reading of the books, District 11 is definitely the deep south, and definitely has more black people in that than District 12 (and presumably than the other districts). But it's not as much of a stereotype as is depicted in the interview. Its produce is agriculture generally, not cotton-picking specifically; Rue works in the orchard. But on the victory tour the narrative specifically states that there are people working in fields as well, possibly including cotton fields (although I can't remember if it's specifically stated. Perhaps relevantly, District 8, not District 11, is textiles manufacturing. But that's factories, not fields). Overall, I'm not sure it's accurate to say that the residents are sharecroppers.
Then, singing. I do think I remember a passage where Rue tells Katniss that the people of District 11 sing around campfires, possibly during harvest, but I didn't get the impression that singing is a particular "talent" of the district. Rue sings, yes. Katniss also sang, with her father, before her father died and she didn't want to anymore. I read it as something the girls share rather than something that distinguishes their districts.
Then, whipping. District 11 is definitely not the only district to use whipping as a form of punishment. It's made clear in all the books that it is a traditional punishment in District 12 as well, but had fallen out of use by the time of the first Hunger Games book. Then it's reinstated in Catching Fire. It is expressly stated that at a time before Katniss was old enough to remember, her mother regularly tended to people who had been whipped. We don't know whether whipping is actively used or not used in any of the other districts. However, it is probably significant that it's something that doesn't feature in the narrative landscape of District 12 at the beginning of the books, is first mentioned in relation to District 11, and is then introduced for the first time with the whipping scene of Gale, which is clearly meant to be shocking. I think there is something in the section of the interview that says, here we have a dystopia, where the dystopian element is a scene where, in the future, something is happening to white people which, in the past, happened to black people. (1. Assuming Gale is white. 2. Of course whipping hasn't only happened to black people throughout history, anymore than slavery has, but these books were written in the US and marketed to a mainly American audience.)
Finally, contrary to what the interview says, we are not told that conditions are the worst in District 11 of any of the districts, and in the books, it is not the first to rebel, District 8 is. (In the movie, however, a riot in District 11 is shown following Rue's death and it is implied that it was full-blown rebellion. This is to fulfill the narrative function of the scene in the book where Katniss receives bread from District 11 following Rue's death, which in the movie, is cut.) Which district has it worst out of them all? It vacillates. Katniss seems to think that 12 is the poorest, but on the victory tour and when talking with Rue we see that authority is wielded more brutally in 11 than 12. Stronger fences, crueller punishments, more discipline. Katniss refers to District 12 as somewhere you can starve to death in peace. As for the others, it's hard to say, because we really don't get much detail about them, just isolated scraps here and there. Specific districts are named as seeming to be on the edge of rebellion during the tour -- 8, I think, 3, and 4. But elsewhere it's hinted that 4, with 1 and 2, is more favoured than the others, thus the fact that it produces "career" tributes.
Then there's the race of various characters. Rue and Thresh are quite clearly black characters right from the books. They are specifically described as having brown skin. An interesting question for me is, would I have caught this on first reading if I had read the book before the movie came out? As it is, I read about the Twitter-storm of horrendous racist comments that were made about the casting of Rue and Cinna before I read the books. So I was tipped off, and on the lookout for the physical descriptions that in Rue's case mandated, and in Cinna's allowed for, the casting of black actors to portray them.
Beetee and Wireless are described as "ashen-skinned," and to be honest, I don't know what that was supposed to mean. Does ashen mean the colour of ash, ie, dark? When someone is described as "ashen-faced" it usually means they are drained of colour through shock, illness, or fatigue. At least three people of District 3 are described as dark-haired -- the tribute in the first book, and Beetee and Wirless. I don't remember any other characters from District 3 appearing. When I read the books I pictured Beetee and Wireless both as very pale-skinned with wiry black hair -- a look seen among some people of Middle Eastern origin (including an ex-boyfriend of mine, who was Turkish with Arab heritage on his father's side and Macedonian on his mother's). And tall and rangy in form.
As for Cinna, I suspect the author did not intend him to be any particular race, so, given she is a white woman, she probably saw him in her head as white (because that is the way white people's brains work, it just is, no matter how we may not want to admit it -- though fighting it can change it to an extent), just as she probably did for any other character she didn't specifically describe as minority ethnic. Unless she deliberately thought about this before she started writing and thought that she would leave certain characters' ethnicities unclear, or thought that the future she was imagining might be one in which many more people are multiracial than is currently the case. Which is possible. I think she may have said or hinted as much in interviews? Any which way, Lenny Kravitz is perfect in the role.
With regards to Katniss, this has uncovered some difficult white privilege in me, with which I am grappling. My first reaction to someone suggesting Katniss might be multiracial was, "but Prim is blonde." But it's by no means unheard of for multiracial people to have blonde hair, depending on their specific ethnic/genetic mix. And it's pointed out that a great deal is made of the fact that the Seam people and the merchant people in District 12 have very different "looks." So maybe Seam people have hispanic or mixed race African-American heritage. This would also make sense of the fact that Katniss says that Seeder, from District 11, looks like she could be Seam, except for the colour of her eyes -- brown rather than grey. On balance, though, again, unless Suzanne Collins thought very specifically about racial issues on a large scale before beginning the books, I expect that the authorial Katniss was white. Because Suzanne Collins is white.
As I mentioned, I'm halfway through reading Catching Fire, but I kind of want to return to the beginning of the Hunger Games now and pay really close attention to all the physical descriptions of various characters.
As for the depiction of characters who are definitely minority-ethnic (Rue and Thresh), I'm not sure how much I can say except that it's probably way better than it would have been certain decades ago.
Thresh is portrayed as powerful to an almost superhuman level, and this is something even I noticed and was not completely comfortable with when reading the books. He's a big, threatening, black young man. There's simply no question. Part of that is as a foil for Rue, but it's still a stereotype. More problematically for me, he could be read as inarticulate. It's never clear whether his being "of few words" is personality- or intelligence-related. It could be argued that given Katniss' admiration for him, her perception at least is that this is part of his deliberate choice "not to play the Games by anyone's rules but his own." But it could have been made more explicit. Even though he is a peripheral character, I wish we could have seen into Thresh's mind just a little bit more.
What are the "buts"? Well, as is pointed out in some of the comments, Cato and some of the other "careers" are also superhumanly large and powerful. There are two provisos to this. One: they are "careers," which means they have trained to be that way, whereas Thresh is that way naturally. ("Black savage" = animalistic, product of nature rather than cultivation.) Second, without going back and re-reading as, as I say, I would like to, I can't say for sure that there isn't room for any of the "careers" to be non-white themselves. Particularly Cato. He was blond in the film and I remember really not expecting that, as I had pictured him more of a Mediterranean complexion. And based on my reaction to Katniss, it looks like, when I think a character might be of a Mediterranean complexion ("olive-skinned"), that means that said character could be racially ambiguous. (Or it could be that I think everyone from District 1 is Mediterranean-looking because they all have Romanic names. Cato sounds like the name of a gladiator.)
Then there's the fact that Thresh is portrayed in both book and movie -- book especially, because there's more time for development -- as a positive character, and a character with moral integrity. Yes, there are stereotypical aspects to his portrayal, but he's not just a stereotype, there is at least some development of his character, although it's all mediated through Katniss' (presumably; or not?) white gaze. But as one of the commenters has pointed out, all of this just points to a breaking down of the "black savage" stereotype. And in order to break it down you have to first bring it up. He is humanised in the film, in this moment, which I loved right from my first viewing of it. But that's really it; and I know that's because there's simply less room to develop him than there is in the book, which just goes back to the fact that the characters that are definitely black are secondary at best. That one little split second scene takes the place of a lot of exposition in the books about how much Katniss admires him, and why.
Finally, though, is the main point of the interview, which I think is caught here:
IBI: ...I remember thinking Rue’s role in the whole novel is what this comic book writer calls “fridging.” Women in comic books serve to bring out the male hero’s deep humanity. The woman dies and then the hero taps into-
ZETTA: His sense of justice.
IBI: Right. And that was Rue. Katniss befriends Rue, who was like a little sister. You want her to make it as much as Katniss, but we know what happens.
It's true. Ultimately Rue's role is mechanistic. She's a lovely character. She's developed, she's got personality traits, skills, flaws -- or at least weaknesses (physical vulnerabilities, some areas of knowledge that Katniss has that she doesn't), and ultimately she's a sympathetic young girl who pops off the page at you. But she's not the protagonist. And there are so few black female protagonists in mainstream Western culture, and even fewer who seem to arise naturalistically, without it being this big thing, "HEY LOOK AT THIS MOVIE ABOUT A BLACK GIRL," like Precious. (The part of the interview about that film was interesting to me too.) The Colour Purple also falls into this category for me. Where are the kickass protagonists who just happen to be BME women? Or people with disabilities? Or LGBT? Like it ain't no thing?
As an aside, I did read Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and its sequels as a child, as well as The Ear, The Eye, and The Arm, and I would recommend them all.
I found this article and interview this on Facebook in the (predictable) movie-release storm of Hunger Games-related material. It's about the character of Rue and the depiction of race in the series, specifically, and the search for black female heroes, generally, very interesting. YA needs some heroes of colour and from other minorities. Just some diversity generally.
There are some things I'd pick at in this interview. They are really only details, and part of me wonders whether I am latching onto them as a defensive mechanism. But I do think that in order to have the conversation it should be had accurately.
The first issue is regarding the depiction of District 11. On my reading of the books, District 11 is definitely the deep south, and definitely has more black people in that than District 12 (and presumably than the other districts). But it's not as much of a stereotype as is depicted in the interview. Its produce is agriculture generally, not cotton-picking specifically; Rue works in the orchard. But on the victory tour the narrative specifically states that there are people working in fields as well, possibly including cotton fields (although I can't remember if it's specifically stated. Perhaps relevantly, District 8, not District 11, is textiles manufacturing. But that's factories, not fields). Overall, I'm not sure it's accurate to say that the residents are sharecroppers.
Then, singing. I do think I remember a passage where Rue tells Katniss that the people of District 11 sing around campfires, possibly during harvest, but I didn't get the impression that singing is a particular "talent" of the district. Rue sings, yes. Katniss also sang, with her father, before her father died and she didn't want to anymore. I read it as something the girls share rather than something that distinguishes their districts.
Then, whipping. District 11 is definitely not the only district to use whipping as a form of punishment. It's made clear in all the books that it is a traditional punishment in District 12 as well, but had fallen out of use by the time of the first Hunger Games book. Then it's reinstated in Catching Fire. It is expressly stated that at a time before Katniss was old enough to remember, her mother regularly tended to people who had been whipped. We don't know whether whipping is actively used or not used in any of the other districts. However, it is probably significant that it's something that doesn't feature in the narrative landscape of District 12 at the beginning of the books, is first mentioned in relation to District 11, and is then introduced for the first time with the whipping scene of Gale, which is clearly meant to be shocking. I think there is something in the section of the interview that says, here we have a dystopia, where the dystopian element is a scene where, in the future, something is happening to white people which, in the past, happened to black people. (1. Assuming Gale is white. 2. Of course whipping hasn't only happened to black people throughout history, anymore than slavery has, but these books were written in the US and marketed to a mainly American audience.)
Finally, contrary to what the interview says, we are not told that conditions are the worst in District 11 of any of the districts, and in the books, it is not the first to rebel, District 8 is. (In the movie, however, a riot in District 11 is shown following Rue's death and it is implied that it was full-blown rebellion. This is to fulfill the narrative function of the scene in the book where Katniss receives bread from District 11 following Rue's death, which in the movie, is cut.) Which district has it worst out of them all? It vacillates. Katniss seems to think that 12 is the poorest, but on the victory tour and when talking with Rue we see that authority is wielded more brutally in 11 than 12. Stronger fences, crueller punishments, more discipline. Katniss refers to District 12 as somewhere you can starve to death in peace. As for the others, it's hard to say, because we really don't get much detail about them, just isolated scraps here and there. Specific districts are named as seeming to be on the edge of rebellion during the tour -- 8, I think, 3, and 4. But elsewhere it's hinted that 4, with 1 and 2, is more favoured than the others, thus the fact that it produces "career" tributes.
Then there's the race of various characters. Rue and Thresh are quite clearly black characters right from the books. They are specifically described as having brown skin. An interesting question for me is, would I have caught this on first reading if I had read the book before the movie came out? As it is, I read about the Twitter-storm of horrendous racist comments that were made about the casting of Rue and Cinna before I read the books. So I was tipped off, and on the lookout for the physical descriptions that in Rue's case mandated, and in Cinna's allowed for, the casting of black actors to portray them.
Beetee and Wireless are described as "ashen-skinned," and to be honest, I don't know what that was supposed to mean. Does ashen mean the colour of ash, ie, dark? When someone is described as "ashen-faced" it usually means they are drained of colour through shock, illness, or fatigue. At least three people of District 3 are described as dark-haired -- the tribute in the first book, and Beetee and Wirless. I don't remember any other characters from District 3 appearing. When I read the books I pictured Beetee and Wireless both as very pale-skinned with wiry black hair -- a look seen among some people of Middle Eastern origin (including an ex-boyfriend of mine, who was Turkish with Arab heritage on his father's side and Macedonian on his mother's). And tall and rangy in form.
As for Cinna, I suspect the author did not intend him to be any particular race, so, given she is a white woman, she probably saw him in her head as white (because that is the way white people's brains work, it just is, no matter how we may not want to admit it -- though fighting it can change it to an extent), just as she probably did for any other character she didn't specifically describe as minority ethnic. Unless she deliberately thought about this before she started writing and thought that she would leave certain characters' ethnicities unclear, or thought that the future she was imagining might be one in which many more people are multiracial than is currently the case. Which is possible. I think she may have said or hinted as much in interviews? Any which way, Lenny Kravitz is perfect in the role.
With regards to Katniss, this has uncovered some difficult white privilege in me, with which I am grappling. My first reaction to someone suggesting Katniss might be multiracial was, "but Prim is blonde." But it's by no means unheard of for multiracial people to have blonde hair, depending on their specific ethnic/genetic mix. And it's pointed out that a great deal is made of the fact that the Seam people and the merchant people in District 12 have very different "looks." So maybe Seam people have hispanic or mixed race African-American heritage. This would also make sense of the fact that Katniss says that Seeder, from District 11, looks like she could be Seam, except for the colour of her eyes -- brown rather than grey. On balance, though, again, unless Suzanne Collins thought very specifically about racial issues on a large scale before beginning the books, I expect that the authorial Katniss was white. Because Suzanne Collins is white.
As I mentioned, I'm halfway through reading Catching Fire, but I kind of want to return to the beginning of the Hunger Games now and pay really close attention to all the physical descriptions of various characters.
As for the depiction of characters who are definitely minority-ethnic (Rue and Thresh), I'm not sure how much I can say except that it's probably way better than it would have been certain decades ago.
Thresh is portrayed as powerful to an almost superhuman level, and this is something even I noticed and was not completely comfortable with when reading the books. He's a big, threatening, black young man. There's simply no question. Part of that is as a foil for Rue, but it's still a stereotype. More problematically for me, he could be read as inarticulate. It's never clear whether his being "of few words" is personality- or intelligence-related. It could be argued that given Katniss' admiration for him, her perception at least is that this is part of his deliberate choice "not to play the Games by anyone's rules but his own." But it could have been made more explicit. Even though he is a peripheral character, I wish we could have seen into Thresh's mind just a little bit more.
What are the "buts"? Well, as is pointed out in some of the comments, Cato and some of the other "careers" are also superhumanly large and powerful. There are two provisos to this. One: they are "careers," which means they have trained to be that way, whereas Thresh is that way naturally. ("Black savage" = animalistic, product of nature rather than cultivation.) Second, without going back and re-reading as, as I say, I would like to, I can't say for sure that there isn't room for any of the "careers" to be non-white themselves. Particularly Cato. He was blond in the film and I remember really not expecting that, as I had pictured him more of a Mediterranean complexion. And based on my reaction to Katniss, it looks like, when I think a character might be of a Mediterranean complexion ("olive-skinned"), that means that said character could be racially ambiguous. (Or it could be that I think everyone from District 1 is Mediterranean-looking because they all have Romanic names. Cato sounds like the name of a gladiator.)
Then there's the fact that Thresh is portrayed in both book and movie -- book especially, because there's more time for development -- as a positive character, and a character with moral integrity. Yes, there are stereotypical aspects to his portrayal, but he's not just a stereotype, there is at least some development of his character, although it's all mediated through Katniss' (presumably; or not?) white gaze. But as one of the commenters has pointed out, all of this just points to a breaking down of the "black savage" stereotype. And in order to break it down you have to first bring it up. He is humanised in the film, in this moment, which I loved right from my first viewing of it. But that's really it; and I know that's because there's simply less room to develop him than there is in the book, which just goes back to the fact that the characters that are definitely black are secondary at best. That one little split second scene takes the place of a lot of exposition in the books about how much Katniss admires him, and why.
Finally, though, is the main point of the interview, which I think is caught here:
IBI: ...I remember thinking Rue’s role in the whole novel is what this comic book writer calls “fridging.” Women in comic books serve to bring out the male hero’s deep humanity. The woman dies and then the hero taps into-
ZETTA: His sense of justice.
IBI: Right. And that was Rue. Katniss befriends Rue, who was like a little sister. You want her to make it as much as Katniss, but we know what happens.
It's true. Ultimately Rue's role is mechanistic. She's a lovely character. She's developed, she's got personality traits, skills, flaws -- or at least weaknesses (physical vulnerabilities, some areas of knowledge that Katniss has that she doesn't), and ultimately she's a sympathetic young girl who pops off the page at you. But she's not the protagonist. And there are so few black female protagonists in mainstream Western culture, and even fewer who seem to arise naturalistically, without it being this big thing, "HEY LOOK AT THIS MOVIE ABOUT A BLACK GIRL," like Precious. (The part of the interview about that film was interesting to me too.) The Colour Purple also falls into this category for me. Where are the kickass protagonists who just happen to be BME women? Or people with disabilities? Or LGBT? Like it ain't no thing?
As an aside, I did read Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry and its sequels as a child, as well as The Ear, The Eye, and The Arm, and I would recommend them all.