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BOOK REVIEW: YA DYSTOPIA

Submission and surveillance in Suzanne Collins’ dystopia
Why The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is a prequel done right
Twelve years ago, Suzanne Collins introduced us to The Hunger Games (Scholastic Press), a dystopian world where children fight to their televised deaths in a brutal annual competition. The story is set in the fictional sovereign state of Panem, comprising of a federal district at the Capitol and 13 outlying districts. Collins’ prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (2020) takes us deeper into this widely popular post-apocalyptic world, emphasising how much media and political control shape our decisions as a society, and how political and surveillance systems become more complex over time.
Ballad begins with the 10th Hunger Games, 64 years before Katniss Everdeen volunteers as a tribute in The Hunger Games . The Games are now minimalist: they feature two children (tributes) from each of the 12 impoverished districts, who are thrown untrained into an arena with weapons and forced to fight to their deaths. This early arena isn’t the as magnificent as the wild forest of The Hunger Games or the eerie clock-shaped landscape of Catching Fire (2009). It is a broken down, bombed out stadium. The tributes have no tracking devices and the cameras haven’t yet begun to follow them around all the time. Under the guise of inspiring unity, 24 students from the Academy—a high school for the Capitol’s elite—are selected as mentors for the tributes. Among these students is 18-year-old Snow, who will become Panem’s president and the main villain of Collins’ original trilogy.
Collins isn’t interested in making Snow a protagonist to root for, however. His degeneration happens subtly, gradually. Snow struggles with his beliefs and actions, but repeatedly finds a way to justify himself. The text —as separate from its narrator—does not.
Unlike in the trilogy, here Collins makes us voyeurs. We watch the Games via camera, as young Snow does, desensitised to the suffering of the tributes. This brings us closer to understanding a protagonist who is snooty and ambitious to a fault. Decades later, at the 74th Hunger Games, Katniss will marvel at the high-speed train that brings her to the Capitol and the medicine that saves her life in the arena—inventions that the Capitol hoards while district residents die of starvation. Snow’s government will tap their phones, monitor their houses, and use technology as a means to taunt the oppressed.
To witness this transition—from Snow’s simpler sinister days to his rule of stifling exploitation—is to understand just how much Collins’ fiction is true to our times.
Across the books, Collins confronts us with our uncomfortable similarities with the people of the Capitol, who profit from exploiting the poor and use popular media to distract citizens from the consequences of their lifestyle. This consumption of exploitation is a valid criticism of our entertainment industry which monetises trauma, and gladly puts ratings and sensationalism over honest accountability, increasingly blurring the lines between the shocking and the entertaining.
Meanwhile, we continue to use online platforms such as Google and Facebook which infamously collect our personal information and sell them to advertisers. For authoritarian and democratic governments alike, the potential for abuse presented by advanced online surveillance is staggering. Activists and journalists who might otherwise hold them to account are forced to self-censor, while dissidents and members of marginalised communities think twice before discussing their struggles or political opinions openly.
As we live and breathe through such times, willingly following the surveillance status quo, Collins’ dystopian world does not seem too far-fetched. As a prequel, Ballad helps raise questions about the horrors that we are willing to accept and justify to ourselves, and reminds us that many nations are still suffering at the boot heels of governments like President Snow’s.
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Shababa Iqbal is trainee editorial assistant, Star Youth and Arts & Entertainment, The Daily Star.
DESIGN: Kazi Akib Bin Asad
Shababa Iqbal