Rat 🛸
Contains spoilers
Love how it shows the community and coming together behind a revolution - katniss was not the first to revolt, neither was Haymitch. The movement just needed it's time.
20/03/26, From second read:
I had this whole big review planned for this reread and now I've finished it and I'm crying again and I'm too emotional to get it all out. I'll give it my best go, though:
Collins is clearly really interested in implicit submission and I think that this book explores it well - we see Haymitch grapple with why he does as the Capitol tells him to do, even in situations where he has a temporary upper-hand, we see the self-hatred this inspires, and the way that this differs from Lenore Dove's actions. Later we see him refuse to submit, doing everything he can to rebel, and face the horrific consequences. We are given our answer; this is why we submit. We can ask if it's worth it, both from looking at Haymitch, and to a lesser extent Beetee, see if it's worth risking other peoples lives so that you can be the one to rebel. I obviously found this pretty thought provoking, and I really appreciate how blatant Collins is at expressing the themes of the book and what she wants her readers to consider; this is a book for teens, and it treats readers accordingly. They can deal with hard topic, serious thought, but in a lot of cases it will be their first time encountering these ideas and the lack of subtlety is valuable in making sure they can be processed by this age range.
But as I talk about being impressed by this topic, I'm also a little hesitant. The book begins with a series of quotes, two of them from philosopher and enslaver David Hume, who I believe coined the term 'implicit submission'. One of the quotes even seems to the be the source of the book's title. I don't personally know a lot about Hume's philosophy - I know more about him in a cultural sense, as someone who lives in Hume's hometown of Edinburgh. He's been a big source of controversy here - one of my university's buildings was named after him, but this was changed after the BLM protests, when more people started talking about his history as an investor in the slave trade.
There are times where I would say 'you can separate the art from the artist'. But Hume was an enslaver who wrote about implicit submission. This is not separable, these are directly linked. There's either a massive amount of cognitive dissonance going on here, or he was thinking in detail about this idea and using it to justify slavery by saying that these people were submitting to it. We know that this was not the case - just look at Haiti, look at Palenke, look at any of the thousands of rebellions of enslaved people. People who lived through and did not rebel were survivors, and no matter what Hume thought, we should not put any responsiblity for their enslavement on them.
I am not remotely saying that Suzanne Collins did something wrong in writing this book, or in finding inspiration from Hume's work. A terrible person can still give you enourmous food for thought (I'm writing this as someone who just had an amazing time reading The SCUM Manifesto for god sake), but I would really like to read an analysis of this from someone else, someone more educated in philosophy or black history and the idea of implicit submission than I am. Collins, for what it's worth, seems to come to a very well reasoned conclusion about implicit submission; never putting the blame on the districts, but still showing that without their struggle there will be no change to the status quo.
Really wanted to like this a lot more but some of the characters (especially Padmini) felt shallow. Would hugely recommend to anyone who likes Neil Gaiman books like Neverwhere and American Gods because it's of the same ilk (although I think I prefer Jemison's punchy way of writing action). It did hit on a couple pet peeves for me though (eg. Bel talks in a very stereotypical English way not really representative of how people in our area speak).
