On November 30, 1999,
officials from 125 countries convened in Seattle for the World Trade Organization
Ministerial Conference, several days of meetings intended as the launch of new
multilateral trade negotiations. Intent on thwarting their efforts were more
than 35,000 protesters—“masked anarchists” according to initial news reports—who
marched through the downtown area, condemning the free trade rules as harmful
to both the environment and animal welfare. Unrest quickly ensued. And the severely outnumbered
police force, at the behest of its chief, responded with callous and aggressive
tactics in an attempt to force the protesters to accede. Seattle police
officers fired rubber bullets and concussion bombs at the protesters, clouded
the streets with tear gas, and made arrests in the hundreds.
This is the tableau for
Sunil Yapa’s masterful debut novel, “Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist.”
The stark yellow cover features a mélange of blurbs from literary heavyweights,
and their bolded proclamations, as lofty as many of them are, only give a hint
at the fierce power of Yapa’s tale. He is indeed a “raw and rare talent.” The
novel is surely “acutely hopeful” and “forcefully alive” and “wrenching,
beautiful” and “visceral, horrifying, and often heroic.” You get the picture.
Yet, again, Yapa’s prose is so poetic, so deeply wrought, so rooted in honesty,
to attempt to sort through its many sterling qualities with just a few words of
praise is, I’m afraid, a losing proposition.
The winning title alone
makes Yapa’s debut worth a look. Closer inspection, happily, reveals an artist
with a full complement of brushes at hand—brushes with differing purposes and
specific textures. Setting is rendered with tender strokes. The failing of many
writers is including too many details that blur a reader’s visual acuity of the
story. When Yapa writes, “For five hours now the tear gas had been falling. The
streets swarmed with smoke…” he includes just enough detail to place you, dear
reader, there on the streets of Seattle during this harrowing event.
What of character?
Here Yapa provides several
close range camera angles. There is Victor, an intentionally homeless teenager
who happens upon the protest in hopes of selling as much weed as possible.
There is his estranged father, Bishop, who as police chief is charged with easing
the growing strife. There are two diehard protesters, King and John Henry,
struggling to uphold their nonviolent perspective. There are two very different
police officers, Ju and Park, with their boots firmly planted on the street, in
the thick of the mess. And there is Dr. Charles Wickramsinghe, a financial minister
from Sri Lanka, and a man determined enough to walk through a rain of rubber
bullets and clouds of deadly chemicals in order to change his country’s
economic fate. These characters are fully realized, with tangled histories and kaleidoscopic
perspectives. They are at turns impulsive. And violent. And compassionate. And
thoughtful. A gumbo of physiognomies that offers them no outlet other than a leaping
vault from the page.
The tension between the
police and the protesters is certainly the through line for this magnificent novel,
but Yapa layers in enough personal conflicts and shifting character arcs to further
season his delicious story. His ambitious novel also explores issues of race,
love, and, perhaps most importantly, enduring hope in our desperately wicked world.
When I pause to consider Black Lives
Matter and Occupy Wall Street
this late-90s tale of Seattle in turmoil seems particularly relevant with the timbre
of today. Upon further thought, perhaps this wonderful novel can be summed up
with just a few words. I believe Colum McCann has it right when he deems this “a
literary Molotov cocktail.”
