“With the Mines closed…”: The Hunger Games and the Mines as a Symbol of Oppression
Yesterday was the Miner’s Gala in Durham.
So it seems as good a day as any to start musing on the mines and their use as a symbol in Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games.
Katniss Everdeen’s father was a miner and he died in the mines. Gale Hawthorne was a miner who also died in the mines and the two met when receiving Medals of Valor for being the eldest children of the deceased coal miners. Coal mining defines District 12, it is used throughout the series as shorthand for its oppression at the hands of the Capitol. Most of the characters there are miners or children of miners. The black market is located in an old coal warehouse.
And this is all despite the futuristic setting and the fantastical technology of the Capitol. The mining of District 12 looks and feels exactly like it did in the past. This is black lung and rickety, stomach-churning elevators. It’s unending seam collapses and claustrophobic tunnels.
The coal, of course, is also itself a symbol. Cinna makes for Katniss a garment that is at first but a dull black and then appears to be on fire when first she appears before the Capitol and it gives name to the second book of the series, Catching Fire. It is the fire of rebellion that Katniss ignites in the Districts.
And they are very powerful symbols within the books. Katniss, the Girl On Fire, captured my imagination.
But they partly did so because of how much the mines mean to me.
I know that that District 12 and its mines are based not on North East England, but of Appalachia and I know their history of coal mining isn’t identical to our own. They didn’t have a generation defining strike, after all, and didn’t have their mines closed in the same way. Their mining industry hobbles on despite closures from lack of profitability[1].
So perhaps I am reading against the grain of the story, it is a parable for America and about America. I should be writing about how it taps into certain archetypes about the nobility of small town, blue-collar poverty and contrasts it to the decadence and superficiality of the cities. It’s the same dynamic at play in Miley Cyrus[2], in Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing, in the fairy tale reimagings of Once Upon a Time.
And there’s a lot to say about The Hunger Games and its vision of a dystopian America. It taps into a lot of the fears and prejudices of current America and given who did and didn’t make the cut for being part of the book’s American parable, it can also be quite probelmatic. I wrote a fairly detailed deconstruction of the first book (and just the first book) on my abandoned book blog a few years ago. I looked at its politics and its world building and compared it to Koushun Takami’s Battle Royale, which has a very similar premised but incredibly different politcal allegory: Part One, Pedantic Nitpicks, Part Two, Part Three.
But all that just isn’t what I think of every time I open the book. The passage I linger on is always, always this one:
A few hundred others return becasue, whatever has happened, this is our home. With the mines closed, they plow the ashes into the earth and plant food. Machines from the Capitol break ground for a new factory where we will make medicines. Although no one seeds it, the Meadow turns green again.
Suzanne Collins, Mockingjay
The mines are a powerful image and Collins employs it deftly throughout the books, but she is disinterested in the mines as mines. They are a symbol of many things, but it is never about the labour and the plight of the workers. The rebel against the big city, they fight but this is not a story, allegorically or otherwise, about real miners.
And I know that’s not the point of the books, of course. They aren’t a three book anti-mining diatribe. They’re a story of action and rebellion, just imagine if Arthur Scargill had a daughter who shot Margaret Thatcher with a bow!
Still, I find the closing down of the mines hard to swallow as part of an idyllically happy ending. It’s an almost inconsequential detail in the face the mass grave that becomes the Meadow and Katniss’ nightmares and the quiet resolution to the love triangle that has dogged the series. And yet, I find myself, a seeming stranger to these parts, muttering darkly to myself that one must never forget.
The closing of the mines left a scar in the North East. The effects of it are still with us three decades later. The miners resoundingly lost that struggle. And they were much not fighting for the mines to be closed. Those mines, horrific as they were, still define this place. The answer to bad working conditions is better working conditions. There is a pride about the mines that runs deep and so much more I just don’t have the words articulate there, but it something that has moved me time and again. It has shaped the art that pours out from this place.
The Hunger Games shut down its mines almost as an afterthought. It’s simply the author’s shorthand for saying that the oppression of this region is no more and that they are now free.
Sorry, but no. Bollocks to that.
[1] I’ve always found it fascinating that Jennifer Lawrence pretty much played Katniss once before The Hunger Games in Winter’s Bone, where abandoned by her father, she looks after her younger siblings and her mentally ill mother with her wilderness survival skills.
[2] Especially in the Hannah Montana movie, where she becomes too spoilt by the high life and needs to return to her hometown in Tennessee for a “detox” of her alter ego.
