Perhaps because we only have these slivers of their lives they seem too stereotypical, nothing makes them stand out from the seething crowd. Unfortunately, the other characters do not possess this complexity or contradiction: whether it is the police chief burning his son's books because the boy was smoking a bong while reading them, or the female protester making 'zines and then making love on them, staining her body with ink from the words. That they felt they had the power to do something about it.' He thinks at one point: 'And this is what made it so American – not that they felt compassion for mistreated workers three continents away, workers they had never seen or known, whose world they could not begin to understand, not that they felt guilty about their privilege, no not that either, but that they felt the need to do something about it. It is this last character who makes some of the most prescient observations – the outsider seeing the most clearly. We have the story of the police chief and his son – a young man who cares too much about the disadvantaged (according to his father) and is still grieving his mother's death the romantic relationship between two protesters who disagree on the use of violence a male and female police officer who agree on the use of violence but have different methods and the Sri Lankan delegate who is baffled by the entire day. Yapa hints at this but never fully explores, possibly because there are so many intertwining stories.

Is it from fear? Passion? Necessity? The novelist has the capability to show each character's humanity and where and how that person's view has diverged: how one person has chosen one extreme and one another. This is all portrayed in the novel, but what is most fascinating is how fundamentally decent people on both sides – protesters and police – can resort to violence and why. The WTO protests are remembered for how ill-prepared the Seattle police were (they were overwhelmed by the sheer number of protesters) and for how strategic the protesters were in shutting down the meetings by blocking streets and intersections and preventing delegates from getting through. If that sounds like many perspectives it is, and while each is distinctive none are explored beyond the surface.Īction is at the centre of Your Heart: tear gas 'falling like little pills', blood spraying, and fists clenching, dragging, colliding. Your Heart Is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, by Sunil Yapa.ĭebut American novelist Sunil Yapa examines the protest from the perspective of seven characters on that day: the estranged son of the police chief, the police chief, a finance minister from Sri Lanka who is part of the WTO talks, two protesters and two police officers.

Your heart is a muscle book