Speculative Fiction as Warning: Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games and Nnedi Okorafor’s Who Fears Death

Since I defended my PhD thesis a few weeks ago, I have allowed myself to take a break from my research and to read the sort of novels I loved reading before graduate school: speculative fiction novels set in alternate universes or far in this world’s future.It doesn’t take me long to read a book […]

Since I defended my PhD thesis a few weeks ago, I have allowed myself to take a break from my research and to read the sort of novels I loved reading before graduate school: speculative fiction novels set in alternate universes or far in this world’s future.It doesn’t take me long to read a book when I’m reading for pleasure. I can usually whip through a 400-page fantasy novel in one day. It feels good to read like this again, to be possessed by books again. Perhaps I also fled to “fantasy” as a form of escape from thoughts of the hundreds of people who are weekly slaughtered by Boko Haram, the multitude of girls continuously kidnapped, the poisonous selfish politicking of the powerful. However, as I read my “escapist” literature this time, I was struck by how uncomfortably similar the details of these dystopian novels set in the futureare to “real life” right now.
I started my escape attempt with the young adult science fiction trilogy The Hunger Games, Catching Fire, and Mockingjay (Scholastic Press, 2008, 2009, 2010)by Suzanne Collins, which imagines a dystopian society set in a distant future North America called Panem, where twelve districts are ruled by a Capital at the centre. The impoverished districts exist solely to serve and supply the Centre ruled over by a ruthless dictator and inhabited by a ridiculous elite distracted by extravagant parties, extreme surgically-enhanced fashion, and entertainment television that leave no time for thinking about injustice. Like ancient Rome, while the people of the districts starve, the citizens of the capital vomit at dinner parties to make room for more food.As a warning against rebellion, the districts are forcedeach year to send “tributes,” ages 12-18, chosen by lottery to participate in gladiator style “Hunger Games.” Children fight to the death for a reality show broadcast throughout the districts and the Capital. The trilogy revolves around the character ofrebellious sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who volunteers for the games to take the place of her twelve-year-old sister who has been chosen as a tribute. Her bravery sets into motion a series of events that threaten the heart of power in the Capital. The Hunger Games critiques contemporary global injustices, by drawing on imagery from the Roman Empire, the inanity and violence of contemporary reality shows and video games, memories of American slavery, the Cold War and colonialism, as well as the ongoing process of neocolonialism.
The Hollywood company Lions Gate has turned the first two novels into spectacle-filled films, and is in the process of making the final novel into two films. The second film Catching Fire is particularly good; however, to me, the books are more satisfying, and I’m glad I read them first before watching the movies, which no matter how good still can’t quite match my imagination of Panem.
Katniss is a powerful female protagonist in a genre often dominated by male heroes; however, The Hunger Games franchise (particularly the movies), while drawing on metaphors of colonialism, still embodiesa particularly white American imagination of the world. The Hunger Games films and the books to a lesser extent fail in ways that haunt many of the most famous speculative fictions: The main characters are largely imagined as white, and the black characters, while often attractive, are only supporting characters in the white character’s hero’s quest (although Katniss in the novel is more ethnically ambiguous than she is in the film.) Even more problematically, most of the black characters follow the old cliché of sacrificing themselves for the white main character.
Seeking something different, I moved next to the speculative fiction of Nigerian-American author Nnedi Okorafor. Okorafor creates worlds which overlap in her various stories, many of which are available online.Her 2010 novel Who Fears Death(Daw Books, soon to be published electronically in Nigeria with Okada Books), winner of the World Fantasy Award and many other honours, similarly imagines a dystopian future but moves African characters from the periphery of science fiction plots to the center. Who Fears Death, set in an Africa of the distant future resonates distressingly with contemporary events. Okorafor notes in her “Acknowledgments” that an article about “weaponized rape in the Sudan,” inspired her story of the girl Onyesonwu, who was conceived when her mother was raped alongside the other women of her village by a gang of genocidal soldiers. Onyesonwu, whose name means “Who fears death?”, inhabits a future Africa which has become largely desert, and where Yoruba, Igbo, Hausa, and other African languages and cultures including those from the Sudan and Tanzania have merged.
The world of the novel is made up of three main ethnicities, the light-skinned city-dwelling Nuru, thesmall-town dwelling dark-skinned Okeke, often enslaved by the Nuru, and the nomadic “Red People,” who move around in a magically induced sandstorm. All groups worship the goddess Ani and live their lives according to the Great Book, a mysterious volume that compiles ancient stories into a code all must follow. Some of the stories included in the Great Book, including portions of Amos Tutuola’s The Palm Wine Drinkard, are entertaining and even uplifting, but some of them are poisonous. The Great Book, for example, tells a story of how the Okeke are cursed to be the slaves of the Nuru, and the evil Nuru sorcerer Daib appeals to the Great Book in the genocidal war he wages against the Okeke.
Although both peoples are separated by hateful ideologies, the mixed children of rape and occasionally love between the Nuru and Okeke, undermine the system that keeps them apart. Although they are called the derogatory term Ewu by both communities, the two most powerful characters in the book are mixed, the outcast girl Onyesonwu who grows to be a shape-shiftingsorcerer and her companion Mwita who is a healer. Onyesonwu and her lover Mwita question the Great Book and are inspired in their rebellion by the prophecy that a great sorcerer will arise and rewrite the book, breaking the story’s hold over both Nuru and Okeke.
The novel is a classic hero’s quest in a world that combines technology and magic. Like The Hunger Games, it gives a female protagonist a central position in challenging oppressive authority.However, unlike Katniss in The Hunger Games who had greatness unwillingly thrust upon her, Onyesonwu has been born out of her mother’s will and raised to fulfill a prophecy. As a child of rape, her mother’s memories haunt Onyesonwu. She first tries to lessen her family’s shame by conforming to expectations that girls go through a circumcision ritual. She then later seeks vengeance against her father by openly rebelling against patriarchal “rules” that only men can become sorcerers. Both fantasies reverse stereotypes about male and female roles, by placing the male lovers of these aggressive heroines in supporting and nurturing roles. In The Hunger Games, Peeta quietly rebels against the violence he is expected to perform in the games telling Katniss: “I don’t want them to change me in there. Turn me into some kind of monster that I’m not.” Similarly Mwita cautions Onyesonwu about idealizing the Okeke as purely good and the Nuru as purely evil. Worrying about the corrupting nature of violence, he throws his gun away before they approach the Nuru capital and tells Onyesonwu and their travelling companion Luyu, “I hate killing. I’d rather die than keep doing it.” In both novels, it is the balanced partnership between a man and a woman that keeps either from going mad with power.
Perhaps the attraction of these dystopian novels is that they allow us to envision an alternate ending to conflicts that seem endless. In both fictional worlds, the protagonists “cut off the snake’s head,” and bring some relief to the suffering of ordinary people, yet any “happily ever afters” are fragile, ambiguous things. The people displaced by war and the land they inhabit are left scarred and haunted long after a tenuous peace has been proclaimed.
These novels serve more as warnings than as escapes. We should pay attention.