When 'Your Heart Is A Muscle,' Empathy Is A Revolutionary Act

Transcript

RENEE MONTAGNE, HOST:

I'm Renee Montagne with news of a writer who had to tell his story twice. Sunil Yapa wrote a 600-page novel, and then he lost it. His laptop was stolen. He summoned the will to write it all over again - shorter this time. This repeat performance turned into a newly published novel about reoccurring themes in American history. Here's our colleague Steve Inskeep.

STEVE INSKEEP, BYLINE: This book re-creates an event from the 1990s, the memory of which has almost washed away. It happened before 9/11.

SUNIL YAPA: Here's a moment that we forgot about or that got lost in the news cycle that I think was a very important moment in American history.

INSKEEP: Novelist Sunil Yapa is referring to the 1999 protests in Seattle. Thousands of demonstrators disrupted a meeting of the World Trade Organization. Badly outnumbered, police resorted to using tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets. Sunil Yapa's novel inspired by those events arrives just in time to see seem current. We are in a presidential campaign that's often focused on trade deals, big corporations and other features of globalization that people were protesting back then. And that is just the first resonance that Yapa found when he looked into the past.

YAPA: I came across a picture of a woman on the streets in the protest, and she has long, red hair. She's on her knees. She's clearly been hit by a baton. She has a wound on her forehead. And I just thought, wow, why is this woman here? What world are we living in that she's protesting for the rights of - I don't know - someone who makes shoes in Bangladesh or Sri Lanka, where my father's from. And what I wanted to do was sort of unpack the soundbite that we hear all too often - violent protesters clash with police.

INSKEEP: Why do that by building your novel around a character who is neither a cop nor a protester, but a young man who's really hoping to sell some drugs to some protesters?

YAPA: You're talking about Victor, who's a 19-year-old biracial son of the chief of police who's run away, traveled the world and now he's back in Seattle. And he has no interest in the politics. And he's really - you know, he's estranged from his father, he's lost his mother, and he's really looking for a family. And he's so desperate to belong somewhere that he's willing to join these protests without any training and put himself into the most vulnerable of positions, which was lockdown, which was one of the protest strategies. It's people in the center of an intersection in a circle, locked in chains and pipes, waiting for the cops to come to clear the streets. So he's so desperate to belong to a family, he's willing to put himself in that position. And that's a novelist's dream - if you find a character like that.

INSKEEP: How did you research these protests of what seems like long ago?

YAPA: Yeah, it's both a curse and a blessing to be writing about a recent historical event. It's a blessing in the sense that there was an amazing amount of resources. So starting with the University of Washington has an archive in the basement - diaries that people have sent in. There's boxes of VHS tapes from the day. One of my favorite resources - I went to the archives at the city hall in Seattle, and I found recordings of all five days of the police scanner traffic. So it's just - it's obviously very intimate - just the cops talking back to each other or talking to the command center. And very quickly, because they were so outnumbered, they start to sound very nervous and frankly scared. And I think the first time I heard one of their voices being scared - that was the first moment I thought here's a human moment. I can start to write some officers as real characters, as real humans.

INSKEEP: And did you - did you find yourself feeling like you were commenting on the present day when you got into the past because you're writing this over the last years when there's an increasing movement against overbearing police, for example?

YAPA: You know, I wasn't directly speaking to Ferguson or Baltimore or some of the other protests that we've seen in the U.S. I think if there's a connection, it's that when people feel cut off from decision-making and, in a democracy, aren't included in the decisions, they take to the streets. And what I see when I look at that is that it's a - it's a very desperate measure. It's almost an expression of grief - people feeling powerless, in a way.

INSKEEP: Can I get you to read a passage from this book from early on?

YAPA: I would love to.

INSKEEP: Page nine - and this is a description of Victor watching the protesters coming his way.

YAPA: Yes, sure. I love this one. (Reading) Here came the defenders of democracy, riding the ferry in from the islands, climbing down from the haze of an interstate bus, crossing the bridge in their Subarus, their aging Toyotas, their cheap American rolling junk. And Victor, bestowed with the unenviable gift of geography and sight, saw the merino wool scarves twisted at the neck, their T-shirts and flannels and fleeces, their backpacks and jeans. And he thought of the factories he had seen along the border in Mexico, the lines of women waiting for work to begin, the razor wire fences behind which the things of the world were made, the smoke curling into the sky like a pencil drawing of a drowned woman's hair. How do you protest this?

INSKEEP: That gets to what you were just saying about grief - doesn't it? - because you are describing people who are very unhappy about the state of things, but can't propose a direct solution to it.

YAPA: That's exactly right. And I guess I feel that way about this amorphous thing we call globalization or global capitalism. And there's some facts of the world that are a little uncomfortable. And I think there's a lot of people - and I really felt it writing about the protest - this sense of sadness about the way the world works, but a real sense of - what do I do about it? What else can I do but take to the streets?

INSKEEP: How does it affect your thoughts about globalization that you have a global story for yourself - a global family story?

YAPA: Well, I guess one of the important things for me is that my father's from Sri Lanka, but even more importantly, he was a consultant for the World Bank. So when I grew up, every summer, my dad would be in the Philippines. He - I remember him, you know, coming back from Bolivia. And these are in the days before the Internet, so we didn't have a lot of pictures of Bolivia. So he came back wearing a poncho with a cassette tape of pan flutes. And I thought, whoa, what is this mountain music? I must have been six years old. And I think that really instilled in me a real sense of the world as one place and the world as being an interconnected place. For me, if there's anything about the book when I reread it, it's the idea that caring about people in this country and outside of this country can be a radical act. We're - we live in an age where revolution - you don't need to pick up a rifle. Sometimes empathy is enough. Sometimes empathy is a revolutionary thing.

INSKEEP: Sunil Yapa, thank you very much.

YAPA: Steve, thanks so much. It was a pleasure.

INSKEEP: His novel is called "Your Heart Is A Muscle The Size Of A Fist." Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.