Mind Picker: Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist

Care too much and the world will kill you cold.

Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist is a sprawling and ambitious work by first-time novelist Sunil Yapa that attempts to shine a light on the protests that got out of control at the 1999 WTO conference – known thereafter as the Battle in Seattle – through the shifting points-of-view of seven participants. After the first couple of chapters I thought, “This is totally my type of book, with interesting language and a variety of perspectives on a real historical event”, but by the end, I was sighing, “Why does this need to be so overwritten? When will it show an actually opposing viewpoint?” So, the short review is: This is another novel by an American MFA that uses all the latest literary tricks to reinforce a particular liberal worldview; your enjoyment will likely be tied to how closely this particular liberal worldview mirrors your own. To the longer review...

The seven main characters are: Victor, a nineteen-year-old drifter who gets caught up in the protests when he unsuccessfully tries to sell weed to the demonstrators; John Henry, a former reverend and leader of the organised, committedly non-violent protesters who successfully block every intersection between Seattle's convention centre and the Sheraton, where most of the delegates are staying; King, a gorgeous young activist (and John Henry's lover) who, while 100% dedicated to the cause, is afraid of being arrested in case she needs to pay for past crimes; Park, a head-cracking robocop who, it turns out, got his facial scars rescuing children from the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing; Julia, a head-cracking robocop who was born in Guatemala (and therefore knows what bad cops are and knows she's not one of them) and was an LA cop during the Rodney King riots (and therefore laments how it's the cops themselves who create the chaos); Bishop, Seattle's police chief and Victor's estranged father who struggles between feelings of rage against those who would dare to bottleneck his streets and a heart-breaking love for those same people, causing him to apologise even as he's cracking heads; and Dr. Wickramsinghe, the trade minister from Sri Lanka who is so determined to make the meetings at the convention centre that he braves the raging streets.

Victor is pretty much the nexus of the story as he bridges the divide between the protesters who he begins to identify with (without ever overtly acknowledging that they are just like his community-gardening, soup-kitchening, free-spiriting-artist dead mother?) and the law-and-order world of his (adoptive) Dad. And yet, I have no idea what motivates this kid: after his Mom died, he started smoking weed and reading her socially conscious books until Dad caught him and put an end to that. At 16, so smart he could have started college early, Victor decided instead to travel the world, and even though Bishop was scared to death to allow his brown-skinned stepson to open himself up to the hate the world had in store for him, he waved him off. Victor spent three years in mostly Third World countries – participating in a demonstration by underpaid lettuce pickers and making friends with a group of protesters on the Peru-Bolivia border – without ever thinking of himself as a political person. Even in Seattle, he just happens to be passing through; this is a kid who has apparently seen sweatshops but defiantly wears the shiny white Air Jordans he broke into his Dad's house to retrieve. I ended the book having no clue where he was coming from or where he was going.

And I don't understand what motivates Bishop: I don't know why he made a bonfire of his dead wife's books; I don't know why he told his 16-year-old son (whom we're told he adores as though he was his own blood) to just leave if he's leaving (because he fears the world will gobble him up??); I don't understand why he, himself, the chief of police, would be on the ground assaulting peaceful demonstrators. The following are Bishop's thoughts:

Well the days of community policing were over. The world was a bottleful of sparkling darkness and cops the ones charged with keeping the cork in while the rich shook and shook.

Where did the rich come into it? As the only two other front-line cops shown, Park and Julia are nearly interchangeable; they might have different sympathies, but when danger approaches, they both revert to their training and its automatic use of violence. The hints at sexual tension between them adds nothing to the story and the fact that one was present for the Oklahoma City bombing (and therefore sees everyone as a potential terrorist) and the other was present for the Rodney King riots (and therefore understands how quickly things can get out of control) simply means that these are not typical cops; a strange choice for an author who is trying to give multiple points-of-view.

John Henry is a fine, if shallowly drawn, character; I 100% believe that he wanted a peaceful protest and he can't be expected to have controlled the 40-50 000 people who showed up that day. But I was totally unsympathetic to King and her concerns for her own freedom: at a minimum, she should have been expected to face the music for burning down a ski resort in Vail, if that was the worst thing she had ever done, but when it's revealed what she was really afraid of being arrested for, I could not understand why Yapa wrote her this way; this is not a good person and I resisted any attempt to make me feel sympathetic to her.

On the other hand, I thought that the parts from Dr. Wickramsinghe's perspective were really well done. As a proud Sri Lankan, his thoughts give a good introduction to the recent history of that country (a history that involves unshackling itself from British imperialism, a long civil war and a yearning for modernisation) and his five year quest for the 140 signatures that would gain his country entry into the WTO (and the free trade agreements that he hopes will raise his people out of poverty) is nearly completed; his sense of urgency to get to the conference shows that clearing the streets of protesters is about more than just clearing the streets. When Wickramsinghe is mistaken for a demonstrator (would Park and Julia really have roughed up and arrested this quiet-spoken man in the business suit as he attempts to identify himself as a delegate?) and thrown into a temporary holding cell with actual activists, this led to what I thought was the best scene in the book. When they realise they have the attention of a delegate, the activists explain to Wickramsinghe how Third World countries such as his own are being exploited by the United States and its corporations through the WTO, as if he were an illiterate yokel who couldn't see the forest for the trees. And while Wickramsinghe smiled inwardly at the implied privilege and condescension these youth were unwittingly revealing, he also had to acknowledge being impressed by their education and passion about world affairs. This was a lovely moment of nuanced understanding, within disagreement, between the two sides. And while Wickramsinghe is eventually freed without having been persuaded by the activists, what he later learns from the Director-General of the WTO has a nicely ironic feeling of being predicted by those same privileged and condescending youth.

Before The Battle in Seattle, “globalisation” wasn't really on anyone's radar, and while I understand the motivations of some of the protesters like John Henry (to bring to light the shady backroom dealings that are affecting all of us without our knowledge; they may not be evil machinations, but we do deserve to know about them), they weren't all John Henrys in real life. Nothing is mentioned in this book of the Black Bloc and their pre-planned attacks on Seattle businesses or the mistaken reports of people using Molotov cocktails against the police that drove the crackdown; the typical activist here is an old woman who refuses to unlink her arms from other protesters, even when getting pepper-sprayed directly in the eyes; not relenting until a cop applies pepper-spray directly to a Q-tip and runs it under her eyelids (and while cops did use this tactic against other protest groups, I can't find evidence that it happened in Seattle). So, globalisation is bad and primitivism is good (better to break your back in the fields than a garment factory); cops are bad and activists are justified in their use of any means necessary, so what if a few hundred windows get broken?; and if we're very lucky, we'll be pushed to the brink where we can recognise the universal love that underpins all human relationships. Something like that?

I really found this to be a messy book, and like I said initially, over-written in that recent MFA manner; and, hey, obfuscation does not equal profundity you MFA programmes! The only character whose thoughts didn't veer off into murky word-salads was Dr. Wickramsinghe, and whether or not that was because the author is himself half Sri Lankan (and therefore most sympathetic to this mindset?), it's likely no coincidence that I most enjoyed his passages. I can totally see the point of this book, and while I don't need to agree with an author's politics to enjoy his writing, I just didn't find this to be successful. NPR agrees with me and The Washington Post does not; The New York Times seems to come up in the middle. It'll probably win the Pulitzer.