- The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1
- The Hunger Games Simulator
- The Hunger Games Catching Fire
- The Hunger Games Book
Katniss Everdeen wakes up on the day of the reaping, when the tributes are chosen who will take part in the Hunger Games. Her mother and little sister, Prim, sleep nearby. Her father died in a mine explosion years earlier. She goes hunting in the woods outside her district, District 12, with Gale, her best friend. That night, at the reaping ceremony, the mayor gives a speech describing how the governments of North America collapsed and the country of Panem rose up in their place. A war ensued between the Capitol and the districts. The Capitol won, and as a reminder of their defeat, the Capitol holds the Hunger Games every year. The mayor then introduces Haymitch Abernathy, District 12’s only living Hunger-Games winner, and he’s so drunk he ends up falling in his own vomit.
The 76th Hunger Games were never held, and the event was entirely abolished afterwards. Under the leadership of the new administration, Panem was transformed into a constitutional republic. Massive economic and political liberalization took place afterwards, and the districts are implied to have prospered. Panem is a sovereign nuclear state that was established sometime after a series of ecological disasters and a global conflict brought about the collapse of modern civilization. It is situated primarily in North America, consisting of a federal district, the Capitol, and thirteen outlying districts. For presumably the majority of its existence, Panem's government operated as an authoritarian. The Hunger Games Summary. T he Hunger Games is a young-adult dystopian novel by Suzanne Collins about children who must compete in gladiatorial games for food. Katniss Everdeen lives in the.
The district’s female tribute is chosen, and to Katniss’s horror, it’s Prim. Katniss volunteers immediately in Prim’s place. Then the male tribute is selected. It’s Peeta Mellark, and Katniss remembers how years earlier, while searching for food for her family in the garbage bins behind the town shops, Peeta gave her bread from his family’s bakery. Katniss credits him with saving her that day. Katniss and Peeta say goodbye to their friends and families and board a train for the Capitol. During the trip, she and Peeta convince Haymitch, their mentor in the Games and the person responsible for getting them gifts from sponsors, to take his duties seriously.
Once there, Katniss meets with her stylist, Cinna, who is designing her dress for the opening ceremony. At the ceremony, Katniss and Peeta wear simple black outfits lit with synthetic flames. The outfits are a huge hit with the audience and make Katniss and Peeta stand out among the tributes. The next day, Katniss and Peeta attend group training, and the tributes from rich districts who have trained for the Games their whole lives, called Career Tributes, show off their skills. Later, the tributes are interviewed by Caesar Flickerman, a television host. In his interview, Peeta reveals that he’s had a crush on Katniss for several years.
Finally the time comes. From a small underground room, Katniss is lifted into the arena and the Games officially begin. All the tributes are there, and in front of her is the Cornucopia, which houses an abundance of supplies. Rather than fight, she runs away as Haymitch advised. She hikes all day before making camp. After dark, someone starts a fire nearby, and it isn’t long before a pack of Career Tributes arrives and kills the person. To Katniss’s shock, Peeta is with them. The next day Katniss goes in search of water. She walks for hours and collapses from exhaustion, but ultimately she finds a stream. She’s woken in the night by a wall of fire moving in her direction, and as she runs away one of the numerous fireballs falling around her grazes her leg, injuring it.
That night, while she hides in a tree from the pack of Careers below, she notices a young girl named Rue from District 11 in a nearby tree. Rue points out a nest of tracker jackers, wasps engineered by the Capitol to be lethal, over Katniss’s head, and Katniss cuts the branch holding the nest, dropping it onto the Careers. Two of them die from the stings and the rest scatter. Katniss is stung a few times as well, but as she’s running away, she remembers one of the girls who died had a bow and arrows, the weapons she’s become proficient with from hunting. She runs back to retrieve them, and Peeta happens to arrive as she’s grabbing the bow. He yells at Katniss to run just as Cato, a very large and dangerous Career from District 2, shows up. Peeta stops him so Katniss can escape, and she passes out in a ditch shortly after.
Katniss encounters Rue again, and the two quickly form a bond. They are able to get food hunting and foraging, and Katniss realizes that the Careers would have difficulty surviving without the supplies at the Cornucopia, so she and Rue devise a plan. While Rue lights decoy fires, Katniss sneaks up to the Cornucopia. The supplies are in a pyramid away from the main camp, and after the Careers leave to investigate the fires, Katniss manages to blow up the supplies by cutting open a bag of apples with her arrows, which sets off the mines set to protect the pyramid. When Katniss doesn’t find Rue at their meeting spot, she goes looking for her and finds her just as another tribute stabs her with a spear. Katniss kills the other tribute, and when Rue dies, she covers her body in flowers.
Katniss is depressed all the next day, until an announcement is made that there has been a rule change: Now, two tributes from the same district can be declared winners. Katniss goes looking for Peeta, and it takes her a day but finally she finds him. He’s severely injured from his fight with Cato and can barely walk, but Katniss helps him to a cave where they’ll be hidden. Thinking Peeta may die, Katniss impulsively kisses him. A moment later she hears a noise outside and finds a pot of broth sent from Haymitch. She realizes that Haymitch will reward her for playing up the romance between her and Peeta. The next morning Katniss sees that Peeta’s leg is badly infected and he’ll die without treatment. Another announcement is made, this time saying each tribute will find an item they desperately need at the Cornucopia. Katniss knows that means medicine for Peeta’s leg, but Peeta thinks it’s too dangerous and doesn’t want Katniss to go. Using a sleep syrup sent from Haymitch, Katniss knocks him out.
At the Cornucopia, Katniss tries to run and grab the item marked for District 12, but she gets into a fight with a female tribute. The tribute is about to kill her when Thresh, the male tribute from District 11 who came to the Games with Rue, kills the girl instead. He spares Katniss because of the way she treated Rue, and Katniss makes it back to the cave. She injects Peeta with the medicine just before passing out. They stay there for a few days while it rains nonstop outside, and in this time the romance between Katniss and Peeta progresses. When the rain lets up, Peeta and Katniss need to find food. Katniss leaves Peeta in charge of foraging while she goes to hunt. She comes back hours later and finds a small pile of poisonous berries Peeta collected thinking they were safe. They discover the body of a tribute who Katniss nicknamed Foxface, and Katniss realizes she died from eating the berries. By this point Cato, who killed Thresh, is the only tribute left, and Katniss decides to keep some berries in case they can trick Cato the same way. Eventually the streams and ponds dry up, and they know the only source of water left is the lake near the Cornucopia. Without any other choice, they start walking to the lake.
By the lake, Cato comes suddenly barreling toward them. Unexpectedly, however, he runs straight by them. Katniss realizes there are strange creatures chasing him, and they all run to the Cornucopia and climb up. The creatures are mutant wolves engineered by the Capitol, and Katniss realizes they are actually the dead tributes, who have been turned into these monsters. Taking advantage of the situation, Cato attacks Peeta, but Katniss and Peeta manage to push him over the edge. The creatures overpower him, but because of the body armor he’s wearing he remains alive for hours, until Katniss shoots him out of pity. Just as Katniss and Peeta think they’ve won, another announcement is made that there can only be one winner again. Neither Katniss nor Peeta will kill the other, so Katniss takes out the poisonous berries. Just as she and Peeta pop them in their mouths, the announcer shouts for them to stop and declares them both winners.
They go back to the Training Center and Katniss is kept alone for days while she recuperates. When she is let out, Haymitch warns her that she’s in danger. The Capitol took her stunt with the berries as an act of defiance, so she has to convince everyone that she was desperate at the thought of losing Peeta and not being rebellious, or even her family could be at risk. In their final interview, she’s reunited with Peeta, who lost his leg and now has a prosthetic. After, when Haymitch tells her she did great, Peeta wonders what he means, and Katniss explains everything, including the romance strategy during the Games. Peeta is angry and hurt, but as they arrive back in District 12, they hold hands one more time to greet the crowd and cameras.
© Copyright (c) Daily Maverick , All Rights ReservedFirst published in the Daily Maverick 168 weekly newspaper.
This week I walked through the wards of the Rahima Moosa Mother and Children’s Hospital in Johannesburg, mute witness to the suffering of many of the children under care there. Sick babies, underweight neonates, physically contorted infants.
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1
It brought a flashback of doing the same walk exactly 20 years ago, at the invitation of dedicated public sector doctors who still work at that hospital. Then it was as witness to the suffering of infants dying of Aids, the wards filled with shrivelled little bodies, unable to give voice to their pain; their mothers too shamed by their HIV status to want to speak up.
That walk gave rise to a movement led by the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and the concerned doctors, then a Constitutional Court case and eventually the roll-out of a health programme that has saved millions of lives.
Today children with HIV are few and far between in the wards. Instead, many of the children in our hospitals are there with diseases directly or indirectly related to hunger and malnutrition. One of the doctors I spoke to said: “In the last few weeks we have seen some horrendous cases of severe acute malnutrition, like I haven’t seen in years.”
Same pain, same stigma, same outcomes (death), different silence.
Inexpressible scale of pain
This week, Maverick Citizen wrote and commissioned a series of articles about hunger to try to raise awareness of World Hunger Day. It was difficult for me to spend a week as a voyeur on an inexpressible scale of pain and human destruction. The journalistic question was not “How can we get the numbers?” We know them: more than 10 million hungry people. But how can we penetrate behind the statistics to convey to you, the well-fed reader, the scale and human dimensions of a tragedy we choose to overlook and are therefore complicit in?
As I write, millions of South Africa’s children are having their futures determined by the hunger they experience today and tomorrow. Their brains and digestive systems are being shaped by nutritional deprivation that, for many, will eventually manifest in poor school outcomes, non-communicable diseases and a life on the economic margins.
Their fate is being fixed, now, as you read.
This is no accident or act of God. It is a structural violence of the food system against the poor: the feigned munificence of a Pick n Pay, Checkers or Woolworths, the retail giants that feed us, the monied, hides a system of making excessive profits from the food system by setting prices that dramatically inflate essential food costs from farm gate to plate by exploiting the lack of regulation. Read Dr Tracy Ledger’s great book, An Empty Plate, for an explanation of how that happens.
Intrinsic violence
The fact that there is no use of police batons or rubber bullets doesn’t diminish its intrinsic violence. The fact that there’s no blood spilled, no gaping wounds, that the damage is all on the inside of the body and on the mind, does not diminish it either.
If we could turn ourselves inside out, if we could wear our hunger as bruises, we might understand the scale of what we are doing to one another.
Let’s be clear, the problem is the food system, not a shortage of food. This is not the belief of an angry anti-capitalist, but of Archbishop Desmond Tutu and well-informed people who work within the food system.
For example, Alan Browde, the pioneering CEO of SA Harvest, an NGO that collects and redistributes waste food, points out how 10 million tonnes of food goes to waste every year, “enough to feed 20 million people three meals a day for a year”. His organisation has just passed its five million meals mark, and has plans to expand and innovate its service. Its budget this year is for nine million meals but, says Browde, “you can’t solve the problem by buying more trucks (to distribute ‘waste’ food)”.
Despite their heroic efforts, Browde – and the many other organisations working in this space – agree that charity is not enough: he says the objective must be to “end hunger”. “How are we going to help the country ensure that Section 27 of the Constitution is fulfilled?” He thinks there should be a big TAC-like court case. So do I. In fact, I have long wondered why there is not a mass “right to food” movement in SA or hunger marches to food retailers taking place across the land.
Politicians’ failure
Let’s be clear, too, that our bleeding-heart politicians have failed to do the simplest things on food.
The Constitution says that everyone has a right to “sufficient food and water” and that children have an immediately realisable right to “basic nutrition”.
The Hunger Games Simulator
With this mandate, measures to regulate the price of essential foodstuffs are as necessary as measures to regulate the price of essential medicines. But none exist.
I understood this week how food and water are inextricably linked when I talked to Duncan Mosethle, a community dietician from Manguzi Hospital in a rural area of KZN. He told me that in many rural villages food gardens were not an option because the government is failing to pipe water to these communities. As a result, people resort to eating filling but fatty carbohydrates. As Browde says: “Many people are getting enough so-called food but [are] still starving.”
It is therefore a travesty that in the 25th year of the Constitution we haven’t even defined what is “sufficient” or “basic” – meaning we can’t measure the adequacy of interventions intended to alleviate hunger.
That’s very convenient for politicians and retail food barons who seem happy to live with pandemic hunger.
The worst thing is that we, the well-fed, have let this happen. We may think we are moral beings, but how objectively do we measure our morality? Is it by how you treat your friends and family, or by how you treat those you don’t know?
Is it by how you treat those who share the same house or by how you treat those who share the same Constitution and landscape as you; those who see the same sunset every night but associate it differentially with the prospect of a good supper and sleep, or another night of hunger-induced stomach aches?
Hunger is a litmus test of our morality, our Constitution and our governance systems. Where there is widespread hunger in a land with plenty it means the political and legal systems aren’t working. It’s time we fixed them, because aiding and abetting hunger condemns us all. DM168
The Hunger Games Catching Fire
This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper which is available for free to Pick n Pay Smart Shoppers at these Pick n Pay stores.