Protest of a new generation
Viscerally real moments explored through historic day’s events
Those who came of age politically in the 1990s when anti-globalization slogans and lumberjack shirts were all the rage, need generation-defining books and Sunil Yapa’s debut novel should be among them.
The book is set during the World Trade Organization protests in Seattle on Nov. 30, 1999.
“Their faces, failed and flawed — they were the faces of a part of American life that was passing away, if not already gone, the belief that the world could be changed by marching in the streets,” wistfully observes Chief Bishop, the fictional Seattle police chief, as he sits on a cherry crane overlooking the demonstration.
The book unfolds during the course of a single afternoon and follows seven characters who were among the estimated 40,000 people to converge on Seattle’s streets.
We first meet Victor, the police chief’s long lost son who is trying, and failing, to sell marijuana to protesters. Then there is brutish cop Timothy Park, dis- dainful of the protesters who look like “a junkie army risen from their mothers’ pull out couches” and lusting after his colleague Ju.
The middle-class idealists in Gore Tex clothing jostle with anarchists and confront Charles the Sri Lankan delegate hoping trade deals will end the horrors of revolution and civil conflict.
Yapa’s characters don’t fall into easy categories of heroes and villains. The second half of the book takes place among the global elite at the conference where a largely unelected bureaucracy barters away education and labour rights.
The action builds slowly; the links between characters sharply sign-posted. Victor, who sleeps under a bridge most nights and hasn’t been in touch with his father for three years, keeps a toothbrush to clean a pristine pair of Nike sneakers “boxed for years — preserved in the clean antiseptic air of an anger so large and old and familiar he had no name for it.”
Yapa makes the WTO protests feel not so much like a blurry political event of a long-gone era, but a viscerally real mo- ment peopled with men and women with an array of motivations and concerns.
Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist is notable for another reason. It is on the first list of new imprint Lee Boudreaux, set up last year by Boudreaux who made a name for herself in the publishing industry by editing the first books of novelists Curtis Sittenfeld and Arthur Phillips, among others.