December 26, 2023

narrative shifts

on the stories we tell about security, freedom, and what is possible

Dear friend—

While writing this, I came upon a recent essay by Palestinian writer Hala Alyan with similar threads and ideas. I recommend the whole essay, but I’ll preface today’s letter with her closing words:

In the urgency of moments like this, indeed, art is not a replacement for policy. Poems will not save us. Poems will not save Gaza. I say that as a poet. They will not stop what needs stopping, or single-handedly bring about action, policy change, Palestinian self-determination, rights, and dignity.

It is also true that poetry—and art and music and film—are offshoots of bearing witness: they fortify us, sustain us, especially in times of erasure. They help us rehearse empathy, and build the necessary muscle memory to call upon it regularly. They can also remind us what we’re doing and why, becoming useful as compasses, rest stops, places to sharpen our ideas and counter dissonance, to clarify our thinking, and our hearts, and to rest in community. They are where we unlearn stories, where we cut our tongues on new ones.

Dialectically: a story isn’t enough, and one cannot triumph in any social justice struggle without examining the stories that have been turned into gospel. This is true for any project of imperialism, occupation, or persecution: narratives get us into them. Narratives will get us out.

My voice is very far down the ladder of priority, so if this is not what you need right now, I enthusiastically invite you to skip this letter. This is true of all of these letters, but especially today’s: It’s a personal exploration made public, in the chance that it connects with someone. If you do read it, thank you in advance for your generosity in time and good faith.

It’s so chillingly timely for the movie The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes to have come out recently. This prequel to The Hunger Games series is based on the book that Suzanne Collins published in 2020. I haven’t seen the movie, but the trailer piqued my curiosity just enough to give the book a read.

In the film and novel, the country of Panem (a dystopic United States) is still reeling from a war between the Capitol and the Districts, 10 years later. The main character, a teenaged Coriolanus Snow, is haunted by his childhood in the Capitol during war time: hunger and fear, the loss of both parents, the destruction of his city, and witnessing horrors like mass starvation and cannibalism, as the Districts laid siege on the Capitol.

Ultimately, though, the Capitol won the war and punished the Districts for their rebellion: heavy policing, taxes, repression of political activity, control of goods in and out, indiscriminate wanton violence. And, of course, the Hunger Games. An annual tournament in which 24 District children (“tributes”) are randomly selected and forced to kill each other in an arena. The lottery system—and the fear it engenders—serve as collective punishment for the destruction that the Districts wrought on the Capitol.

Snow and his classmates, in their final year of secondary school, are enlisted to mentor the tributes from each district. The story follows Snow as he prepares the tribute from District 12, Lucy Gray, for the Hunger Games, and all that follows—how a young man becomes the murderous dictator in The Hunger Games series.

What struck me most about The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes was how Snow used his trauma and fear to justify the Capitol’s and his own violence. He fully believes that the Games, or at least some sort of intense collective punishment like it, is necessary and rational to keep the Capitol safe—and so are all its other methods of control, such as its constant military presence in the Districts.

Again and again, Snow commits a violent or underhanded act and thinks to himself, “I had no choice. It was me or them.” Those acts of violence become greater and greater, and further and further removed from immediate danger. The mere possibility of danger, and later the mere possibility of lost power and status, drives his actions, which he always justifies.

Additionally, Snow thinks that because the Capitol is richer and has more technology, that gives it license to use those resources to defend itself by any means necessary; a “might is right” kind of perspective.

One character opposes this view explicitly, in one of the most pointed passages in the novel:

“You’ve no right to starve people, to punish them for no reason. No right to take away their life and freedom. Those are things everyone is born with, and they’re not yours for the taking. Winning a war doesn’t give you that right. Being from the Capitol doesn’t give you that right. Nothing does.”

Of course, despite having been written three years ago, the horrors in Gaza and all of Palestine echo throughout this novel. The parallels are imperfect, but stark.1 Readers who see Snow’s moral bankruptcy can see similar threads in the genocidal statements of Israeli hawks.

I studied the history of Palestine and Israel for a decent chunk of my post-secondary education. Given my usual desire for nuance and my need to understand all points of view on most issues, I’ve tried to stay attuned to all the different experiences and stories intertwining that history. And while I’m constantly learning new things, here is (one of many) thoughts I have landed on:

At their core, emotions like fear for your safety, loved ones, and community are valid and universal. They are often borne from material experiences and traumas, current and historical. But the danger comes when people—especially people in power—allow this all to justify and drive violence.

At the same time, other forces—greed, revenge, prejudice, hatred—exploit those emotions and heighten them. And this clouds the reality of the situation, including the severe imbalance of resources and power. It magnifies any perceived danger until anything and anyone—from a doctor, to a journalist, to a baby—can be seen as a threat, or just the “unfortunate cost of war”—”war” being a euphemism for securing your own security.

Moreover, power, and the very capacity to commit violence, implicitly encourages people to use them for their own ends, to “protect their own,” no matter the cost.

This has been the basis for American foreign policy, especially post-9/11, for a long time: “To make America safe, we had to commit war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Throughout history, the U.S. has used the causes of order, freedom, democracy, and security to tear down order, freedom, democracy, and security abroad.

Young people in the United States are once again rejecting this narrative, and the myth of American exceptionalism in general. There are so many reasons for this, but I think at least a small part of it has to do with the stories that many people around my age were consuming during their formative years. Popular dystopias like The Hunger Games were especially political, often depicting a powerless, unlikely person or group toppling a massive, repressive enemy or system.

Such stories both feed into the American mythos and then disrupt it. America (the institution, the Culture) loves an underdog. At least in my neck of the woods, we were raised on foundational tales like that of the Revolutionary War; of plucky colonists gleefully subverting tyrannical British rulers with exploits like the Boston Tea Party. Even that formulation is present in The Hunger Games—13 Districts, 13 colonies.

But, it turns out, America is not the plucky underdog—it is the Capitol. As an institution, as an actor on the world stage, it has more in common with Snow than Katniss, the District 12 heroine of the original Hunger Games.

Just as the Capitol stations “Peacekeepers” in the Districts, the U.S. maintains a sprawling network of military bases around the world. And just as the Capitol demands tithe of resources and goods from what dependency scholars called “the periphery,” so has and does the U.S. For example, more people are learning that the vast majority of cobalt used in consumer electronics comes by way of horrors such as child slavery in the Congo.

More broadly, I think, young, progressive Americans are confronting how much of our comfort is built on the backs of others’ suffering: land theft and genocide of Indigenous peoples; imperialism and colonization; the intentional undervaluing of Black and Brown and immigrant and poor communities; the exploitation of natural resources and the planet. We are drawing attention to the zero-sum game that our various systems have created, which entrench existing power imbalances and hatreds.

Now, we see this dynamic play out in Gaza and throughout Palestine. The premise of Israel’s horrific collective punishment seems to be that every starved, imprisoned, wounded, expelled, or killed Palestinian will make Israelis safer. This is the premise the U.S. is supporting when it makes, sells, and subsidizes the bombs raining down on Gaza—it is a premise it has enacted itself, again and again, in different countries and contexts around the world.

But what I sense in my own observations2 of justice movements across the U.S., including the one for Palestine, is a turning of the narrative of what it means to be free and secure. This new narrative challenges the idea that any freedom or security can truly be free or secure if it is predicated on violence against other people. We are all connected.

Detractors call this naive or idealistic; that it’s ignorant about “how the real world works.” People who shout “Free Palestine!” clearly don’t understand the realpolitik of international affairs and wars and history! They need to be more realistic! But I think this moment is also questioning what the word “realistic” even means; the boundaries it draws and the implicit narratives it embodies.

When it comes to Palestine, the shape of reality—what is and isn’t a country, who does and doesn’t have a connection to the land, what is and isn’t rational or excusable—have largely been circumscribed by Britain and the United States as imperial superpowers. All the way from the Balfour Declaration in 1917 to the U.S.’s recent veto of a UN Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.

It seems to me that this moment—in response to Palestine but also to the climate crisis, our deeply unequal economic system, all kinds of prejudices and violences and disparities—is striving toward a vision of shared freedom and shared flourishing.

This inherently calls for, not an imbalancing, but a rebalancing—a lifting up of the voices, experiences, fears, needs, histories, and dreams of those who have been beaten down, demonized, and ignored. New stories, new narratives, per Hala Alyan.

On another level of storytelling, this vision is a reimagining of what is even possible. It is deconstructing the stories that pit us against each other in a zero-sum game of eat or be-eaten. It rejects the premise that our freedom requires another’s repression; that our comfort requires another’s suffering. It invites us to build a world in which we are all free and freeing, caring and cared for.

This is the foundational, essential first step—imagining how beautiful the world could be, and that we could make it so.

Thanks for reading, take care,
—mia xx

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