Marta's Mathoms

Spoiler Warnings: A few references to passing comments from books two + three are scattered throughout. No major plot spoilers. One more substantive (but still fairly minor) spoiler for "Catching Fire" is included under a spoiler cut.

I want to get back to blogging about the Hunger Games. If you remember, a few days back I told the story of Katniss, Peeta and the bread. In that post I limited myself to telling the story, because it's great fn just to read through it and enjoy it without necessarily looking for deeper themes. But deeper themes are there if you're looking for them.

I think it holds the key to Katniss's character in a powerful way: that, unlike so many of the characters in the book, she's still able to hope on some level. I also think it's deeply relevant that this hope has been extinguished, or at least pushed so far down that she can't quite get hold of it, and that it's an act of kindness by a stranger that wakes her up again. I think this is part and parcel with Plutarch's later comment that the people of Twelve still have a spark of spontaneity that other districts lack. Because the capitol has been less onerous with Twelve than you see in other places, they are a little less protective of what they have, a little more willing to risk it. There's an element of hope woven through their lives that you don't necessarily see in the other districts.

So Katniss's hope Is in a certain sense tied to Peeta's generosity. But that's Peeta. It's Peeta's mum that I really want to talk about. You'll recall that Katniss was looking through her trash-cans, looking for something edible that had been thrown out. Peeta's mum tries to drive her off, mumbling something about how the Seam kids are always pawing through their rubbish. Then when faced with ruined bread, she doesn't consider giving it to Katniss or even donatingit to some kind of food bank (is there even such a thing?). She just tells Peeta to throw it to the pigs.

The first time I read this, I was disgusted with her. It didn't help that she hit Peeta. But on rereading I found myself trying to work out just why she and Peeta reacted the ways they did. I have two theories.

The first: Peeta's dad almost married Katniss's mum. Here's how Peeta remembers the first time he meets Katniss:

"Oh, let's see. I guess the first day of school. We were five. You had on a red plaid dress and your hair ... it was in two braids instead of one. My father pointed you out when we were waiting to line up," Peeta says.

"Your father? Why?" I ask.

"He said, 'See that little girl? I wanted to marry her mother, but she ran off with a coal miner,'" Peeta says.

"What? You're making that up!" I exclaim.

"No, true story," Peeta says. "And I said, 'A coal miner? Why did she want a coal miner if she could've had you?' And he said, 'Because when he sings ... even the birds stop to listen.'"

"That's true. They do. I mean, they did," I say. I'm stunned and surprisingly moved, thinking of the baker telling this to Peeta. It strikes me that my own reluctance to sing, my own dismissal of music might not really be that I think it's a waste of time. It might be because it reminds me too much of my father.

Try flipping that dialogue the other way. Katniss's mum is a town girl, one of the privileged few. Peeta's dad – also (I'm assuming) – a child of privilege loves her. Katniss's mum makes a choice that condemns her to a much harder life, pulled by a whim. And Peeta's dad obviously still loves her in his own way. His wife must have picked up on that. And while there's never any indication that Peeta's dad ever cheated on her or anything, I think the realization that someone in her position (or her children) could so easily be swept out of privilege would get to her. Make her insecure and brittle, and mean that she'd be too scared to give something up if it didn't benefit her. When your world feels unsafe, generosity seems too extravagant.

The other possibility is less forgiving of her – and more damning of our real world, too. But I think it's a big part of the puzzle. Namely: Peeta's mum has a certain degree of privilege. The Capitol can still "reap" her children, and by any reasonable metric even the townspeople are impoverished. (Peeta at one point mentions that they only got to eat the food that was burnt it couldn't be sold.) She and her family are still subject to the severe and often arbitrary laws that characterize life in the districts.

But she's also not having to go hungry, and her sons aren't having to go hungry. By district standards, she's probably pretty rich. And she's got to realize how arbitrary that privilege is. She's living in a world with (a) a lot of income inequality, and (b) no real opportunity to move up the social ladder, for either her or those children of the Seam. It reminds me palpably of stories I've heard recently, including one in particular from a Leonard Pitts editorial. He wrote of a woman he met at the DNC convention:

Sharkara Peters is a 35-year-old single mother of two. She works 34 hours a week at a fast food restaurant. A few months back, she was hospitalized with a blood clot in her lung. Then, one of her daughters needed surgery. As a result, Peters lost about three weeks of work, and could not muster her $335 monthly rent. When I met her last month while in Charlotte reporting on poverty on the eve of the Democratic National Convention, she was facing eviction.

I asked Peters what President Obama should do for people in her economic situation and she answered without hesitation. Obama, she said, needs to do something about girls on welfare that just sit up and have baby after baby and never try to better themselves.

Like Sharkara, Peeta's mum has some degree of security. Sharkara has a job and an apartment and somehow can even afford healthcare. (How she does this on less than full time at a fast food restaurant, I won't hazard a guess.) But both Peeta's mum and Sharkara realize that their world is tenuous. You can't live your life thinking the world might sweep it away from you. So what do you do? You convince yourself that those other people are moochers. That they're takers. That they are grubbing through your trash, not because they're so hungry and freezing they can't even risk bending down to pick up Prim's babyclothes, but because they're lazy. The ungrateful wretches. Just sitting around having baby after baby and never try to better themselves? Sub in "pick up their monthly tesserae" for "have baby after baby" and I can easily see Peeta's mum buying into something like that.

In this moment, I don't think Peeta's mum sees Katniss as a human – certainly not as a human worthy of help. If anything, people like Katniss are a reminder of the depths she and her family could fall. The fact that Katniss's dad has now died so Katniss's mum is really stranded in her poverty and doesn't even have her mate to sustain her? On some level, that future has to terrify all of the district's "elite." (Demographics aren't helpful here. Think about it. Peeta has three brothers, and there's no room for commerce to grow so each of them could support families. The only mobility available is downward.) The only way not to be eaten up by that uncertainty is to convince yourself you really are better than such people. Better to throw the burned bread to the pig than to the Seam girl. A fattened pig will help her family some day. It's an investment in her own well-being of a sort. Giving the bread to a starving girl wouldn't work that way.

On some level, I pity Peeta's mum. Or I want to, at least. I think this is because deep down I feel like I need to pity her. This is a human instinct I've seen on full display at the hospital: a kid gets seriously ill, and the various in-laws great the illness like a moral failing, attributable to something the parents did or didn't do. The idea that a kid could get ill for no reason, could even die - it rocks the comfort zone. But this element scares me because at the same time, of course I'm repulsed by the idea that any woman could drive a starving child away from her garbage like a dog, then just minutes later could throw fresh bread to the pig rather than even seeing if she was still around.

I'd like to say I have some great solution. If I did, I'd probably be running for office, because this is I think the problem of our day, in a society with as much inequality as us: how to see the poor not as causes or as moochers but as fellow citizens. I think the key lies in realizing what you're doing and being aware of it – and I like to think that her son's reaping might have changed her perspective a bit. Taken away the illusion that anyone is truly safe, or at least start acting like safety isn't the most important thing.

Actually, writing this up, something occurred to me that hadn't occurred to me before. In "Catching Fire," Peeta and Katniss are given homes in Victor's Square – truly extravagant homes by district standards. Easily large enough for Peeta's family. Katniss's family moves in with her, but Peeta's doesn't. I wonder how his family's history with Katniss's plays into all of that. It seems significant, though I can't quite figure out how. Would Peet ahave wanted them around? Would Peeta's mum have felt comfortable living so close to Katniss's. Was Peeta's walking-wounded status – the nightmares, the inevitable mental scars of the Games, the artificial leg – a palpable reminder of how unfair life is? Could they maybe not bear to be around that, if Peeta's brothers were still eligible? As far as I can remember, Suzanne Collins never tells us why they lived separately.

What do you make of Peeta's mum's actions here? I keep tottering between hating her for being so heartless and self-absorbed, to seeing her as utterly normal (and hating myself for being reflected in her). Are you bothered by her lack of mercy here? Or does it just seem to "fit" somehow? I'm curious – what do you think?

I've been blogging a lot about the philosophical issues touched on in The Hunger Games. One of the things I love most about those books is their potential as metaphor, so perhaps that's not so great a surprise: they made me think, not so much about the events themselves, but the "deep thoughts" they brought into a new focus. Tonight, though, I'd like to share a story. It's touched on in the movies but really only told in the books. Does that warrant a spoiler? I'm really only flagging for the later two books, but I thought I'd mention it.

Anyway. As I mentioned Katniss's father dies in a mining accident. This happens several months before her twelfth birthday (when she'd be allowed to sign up for grain in exchange for Hunger Game entries). The district gives her mum a cash settlement that's supposed to support their family for a month, at which time Katniss's mum is supposed to find work. However, Katniss's mum is so weighed down with depression she can't do this, and so Katniss and her sister are basically starving. Here's how Katniss describes that point in her life:

The rain had soaked through my father's hunting jacket, leaving me chilled to the bone. For three days we'd had nothing but boiled water with some old dried mint leaves I'd found in the back of a cupboard. By the time the market closed, I was shaking so hard I dropped my bundle of baby clothes in a mud puddle. I didn't pick it up for fear I would keel over and be unable to regain my feet. Besides, no one wanted those clothes.

I couldn't go home. Because at home was my mother with her dead eyes and my little sister, with her hollow cheeks and cracked lips. I couldn't walk into that room with the smoky fire from the deep branches I had scavenged at the edge of the woods after the coal had run out, my hands empty of any hope.

This reminded me of a day maybe two years ago, when I was taking a course at the New School. It meant a long subway ride, and this particular day I'd been caught offguard by the weather. So it was early November and I just had a thin sweater on, no jacket or gloves, and there was a kind of frozen mist and a harsh wind that day. It was miserable, until I got to the subway and the heat coming out of it felt sooo good I almost laughed. It was that feeling of contentment, almost like smelling fresh-baked bread.

And keep in mind, I'd been walking for twenty-minutes, not standing around all day after having boiled mint leaves and nothing else for three days. I can hardly imagine how despondent Katniss would have been.

Hope awakens for Katniss pretty quickly, and it's that same refreshing promise of comfort that does it. But it doesn't last very long at first. She's walking through the rich part of town on the way home when the following happens:

All forms of stealing are forbidden in District 12. Punishable by death. But it crossed my mind that there might be something in the trash bins, and those were fair game. Perhaps a bone at the butcher's or rotted vegetables at the grocer's, something no one but my family was desperate enough to eat. Unfortunately, the bins had just been emptied.

When I passed the baker's, the smell of fresh bread was so overwhelming I felt dizzy. The ovens were in the back, and a golden glow spilled out the open kitchen door. I stood mesmerized by the heat and the luscious scent until the rain interfered, running its icy fingers down my back, forcing me back to life. I lifted the lid to the baker's trash bin and found it spotlessly, heartlessly bare.

Suddenly a voice was screaming at me and I looked up to see the baker's wife, telling me to move on and did I want her to call the Peacekeepers and how sick she was of having those brats from the Seam pawing through her trash. The words were ugly and I had no defense. As I carefully replaced the lid and backed away, I noticed him, a boy with blond hair peering out from behind his mother's back. I'd seen him at school. He was in my year, but I didn't know his name. He stuck with the town kids, so how would I? His mother went back into the grocery grumbling, but he must have been watching me as I made my way behind the pen that held their pig and leaned against the far side of an old apple tree. The realization that I'd have nothing to take home had finally sunk in. My knees buckled and I slid down the tree trunk to its roots. It was too much. I was too sick and weak and tired, oh, so tired. Let them call the Peacekeepers and take us to the community home, I thought. Or better yet, let me die right here in the rain.

The boy here is Peeta, who is sent to the Hunger Games along with Katniss. His family runs the bakery and so is well-off by District standards. And he's the one that helps her hope again:

There was a clatter in the bakery and I heard the woman screaming again and the sound of a blow, and I vaguely wondered what was going on. Feet sloshed toward me through the mud and I thought, it's her. She's coming to drive me away with a stick. But it wasn't her. It was the boy. In his arms, he carried two large loaves of bread that must have fallen into the fire because the crusts were scorched black.

His mother was yelling, "Feed it to the pig, you stupid creature! Why not? No one decent will buy burned bread!"
He began to tear off chunks from the burned parts and toss them into the trough, and the front bakery bell rung and the mother disappeared to help a customer.

The boy never even glanced my way, but I was watching him. Because of the bread, because of the red weal that stood out on his cheekbone. What had she hit him with?

My parents never hit us. I couldn't even imagine it. The boy took one look back to the bakery as if checking that the coast was clear, then, his attention back on the pig, he threw a loaf of bread in my direction. The second quickly followed, and he sloshed back to the bakery, closing the kitchen door tightly behind him.

Now, I could get fixated on the fact that Peeta's mum wants to feed the pig rather than the girl, or the other starving people who would benefit from it. This seems to be common feature of all the districts, and I'll get back to this if I'm still doing this when we come to "Mockingjay," because this lack of commitment to the common good becomes significant there. Here, though, it's Peeta I want to think about. He threw her the bread, purposely. As we learn later it wasn't an accident; he burned the bread for the girl who could sing so beautifully. (Peeta's dad had a bit of a crush on Katniss's mum in their youth, but Katniss's mum of course fell for Katniss's dad precisely because she loved his songs.)

At the time, it doesn't occur to Katniss that Peeta had done this on purpose. That night, she considers it but dismisses the idea. But seeing him the next day at school, the thought that some seeming-stranger would do this for her touches her deeply:

I had just turned away from Peeta Mellark's bruised face when I saw the dandelion and I knew hope wasn't lost. I plucked it carefully and hurried home. I grabbed a bucket and Prim's hand and headed to the Meadow and yes, it was dotted with the golden-headed weeds. After we'd harvested those, we scrounged along inside the fence for probably a mile until we'd filled the bucket with the dandelion greens, stems, and flowers. That night, we gorged ourselves on dandelion salad and the rest of the bakery bread.

More than just giving Katniss and her family a few days' food, it gives them hope:

I had just turned away from Peeta Mellark's bruised face when I saw the dandelion and I knew hope wasn't lost. I plucked it carefully and hurried home. I grabbed a bucket and Prim's hand and headed to the Meadow and yes, it was dotted with the golden-headed weeds. After we'd harvested those, we scrounged along inside the fence for probably a mile until we'd filled the bucket with the dandelion greens, stems, and flowers. That night, we gorged ourselves on dandelion salad and the rest of the bakery bread.

"What else?" Prim asked me. "What other food can we find?"

"All kinds of things," I promised her. "I just have to remember them."

That very concept of promising - it's so full of hope, at least IMO. Suicidal people do not make promises, nor do the terminally ill. A decent person who promises expects to be around to fulfill it. I cannot imagine a Katniss who expected to die making a promise like that to Prim. But back to that scene...

"All kinds of things," I promised her. "I just have to remember them."

My mother had a book she'd brought with her from the apothecary shop. The pages were made of old parchment and covered in ink drawings of plants. Neat handwritten blocks told their names, where to gather them, when they came in bloom, their medical uses. But my father added other entries to the book. Plants for eating, not healing. Dandelions, pokeweed, wild onions, pines. Prim and I spent the rest of the night poring over those pages.

The next day, we were off school. For a while I hung around the edges of the Meadow, but finally I worked up the courage to go under the fence. It was the first time I'd seen there alone, without my father's weapons to protect me. But I retrieved the small bow and arrows he'd made me from a hollow tree. I probably didn't go more than twenty yards into the woods that day. Most of the time, I perched up in the branches of an old oak, hoping for game to come by. After several hours, I had the good luck to kill a rabbit.

I'd shot a few rabbits before, with my father's guidance. But this I'd done on my own.

We hadn't had meat in months. The sight of the rabbit seemed to stir something in my mother. She roused herself, skinned the carcass, and made a stew with the meat and some more greens Prim had gathered. Then she acted confused and went back to bed, but when the stew was done, we made her eat a bowl.

The woods became our savior, and each day I went a bit further into its arms. It was slow-going at first, but I was determined to feed us. I stole eggs from nests, caught fish in nets, sometimes managed to shoot a squirrel or rabbit for stew, and gathered the various plants that sprung up beneath my feet. Plants are tricky. Many are edible, but one false mouthful and you're dead. I checked and double-checked the plants I harvested with my father's pictures. I kept us alive.

It's tempting to say that without being so overrun with her immediate needs Katnill would have seen this earlier - that that is what lets her remember her abilities at woodcraft. Katniss's greatest ability, time and again, is her drive to survive. Even on an unconscious level, she's willing to risk defying the Capitol in order to get home (and get home as herself). She's someone who will fight to live, and one reading of this story is that she's so beaten down by life, she's lost sight of herself.

I think there's a more fundamental change going on here, though. It's not just that Katniss needs to be reminded of her abilities. She has good reason, looking at the situation realistically, to think she doesn't have what it takes to survive. She's eleven; it usually takes two adults working full time to keep families running. She attributes that first kill not to skill but to luck. And I think that's the key here. The bread and the dandelions and her eventual slipping into the woods represent a real leap of faith on her part. Starvation isn't uncommon in District Twelve, as Katniss notes, and these greens are around for others to kiss. It's almost like they're dying as much from a lack of hope, an inability to believe they could possibly survive, as from a lack of food.

I may come back to this in another post in a few days. There's an interesting philosophy slinking behind this, but at the same time I'm afraid to examine it too closely. Tolkien fans will appreciate what I mean when I say that she who breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom - and there's some power in a story that you lose in logical analysis. (Plato would, undoubtedly, be astonished to hear one of his ilk say such a thing.) So for the moment I want to just sit with the story and enjoy it on this level.

What do you make of this story? Did you read it differently from me? Latch on to elements I overlooked?

This morning I finished the final Hunger Games book, Mockingjay, and I loved them. They have their flaws to be sure, but it's saying something that my first response to getting to the ending was to want to start at the beginning once more - and actually do it. While the books are tragic and dark, they are tragic and dark in a way that I found compelling and realistic. It's not often that I can say that.

As I'm rereading them, I thought I'd blog about them this time through. I will assume everyone has read the first book or at least seem the movie, so if you haven't and still want to remain unspoiled, just avoid any posts with this "Hunger Games Post:" subject line. If a book involves substantive details from later books I'll put that under an LJ-cut.

Anyway. We're just starting off, so no need for a spoiler-warning. The Hunger Games is set in a world where global warming has made the old status quo unsustainable. This resulted in a rather authoritarian regime with a very unequal society, between the districts (outlying regions that produce, in the words of movie!Snow, "Things we want, things we need") and the Capitol (a pampered head of government and power). All of this led to a rebellion seventy-five years before the book begins. As penance for this rebellion, the districts have to offer up one boy and one girl, between the ages of twelve and eighteen that will fight in a bloody gladiatorial type competition. The one winner is allowed to live and even given a lifetime of riches. In the later books we also learn that all the families in their districts get free food that whole year. Some of the districts more cozy with district see it as a kind of sporting event, but in the poorer ones being chosen is seem as a death sentence.

Here's where things get really interesting, IMO. When you're twelve you get one entry into the reaping lottery, and then an extra entry is added on every year. So it's more likely that older kids will get chosen than the younger ones, although sometimes younger tributes really are chosen as we see in the books. (The heroine's little sister, Prim, is chosen, as is Katniss's ally Rue and several others.) On top of that, kids can sign up for tesserae - a monthly supply of grain and oil for a single person. You can sign up for you and anyone else in your immediate family. That carries over, too, so if you still need tesserae the next year you have the extra entries from the previous years and this one. 

The upshot is that Katniss's friend Gale has fifty-odd entries in the yearly drawing. He's eighteen and has been signing up for tesserae for his younger siblings and mother in addition to himself. Katniss has a high number as well, for similar reasons. On the other hand, the mayor's daughter Madge has never really had to worry about having enough food, only has six or so entries - making it at least eight times more likely that Gale will be picked than that Madge will.

Thinking about this I found myself wondering: is it fair. I mean, obviously the Hunger Games itself is massively unfair. The whole concept that you could take kids at random for something that happened before they were even born (and that wasn't uniquely the districts' fault in any event) outrages me, as it's intended to. But going along with that, is this a good way to allocate those spaces in the Games? On the one hand, those kids who receive tesserae are receiving something that the rich kids didn't (food), but on the other hand the only reason the rich kids didn't need the tesserae is because they were born into privilege. The book makes it seem like social mobility is impossible, and it's not Gale's fault he wasn't born to one of the few shopowners rather than to mining parents.

Think about it this way. Say that the army, rather than being all-volunteer with bonuses, you did a draft. Would it be more fair to be one-citizen-one-entry or let the poor "buy" more entries into the draft as a way to prevent hunger at, say, $1,000 of any government subsidy (public school, welfare, food stamps, Medicaid, etc.) in exchange for an extra entry into the draft. Say there's also an actual war going on, so some proportion of those drafted will actually die. In a lot of ways that's similar to the Hunger Games reaping.

It's really interesting to me to think about why the reaping (as opposed to the games per se) are unfair. On a gut level I believe they are, but working out why is a bit tricksy. I can see a lot of American political parties being behind a system like this, for instance, if the games themselves weren't so unfair in the first place. After all, no one's forcing the poor to accept tesserae, and surely they prefer that to starvation.

What are your thoughts on this? Is this a good way of choosing tributes?

(More posts to come as I read through the Hunger Games; feel free to suggest things you'd like me to talk about and I'll think about it.)