Sunil Yapa’s Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist: Protest, Fiction and the Ethics of Care

Abstract

Sunil Yapa’s politically engaged first novel vindicates the massive pacific protests that occurred during five days in Seattle in November-December 1999. These protests were summoned against the World Trade Organization summit. The novel responds to the wish to inscribe in the history of fiction a crucial event which would inspire and inflect the later anti-globalization movement and protests, and which according to some has not yet received the attention it deserves by media or criticism. This article discusses Yapa’s work in the light of the Ethics of Care, and develops an exegesis, which, incorporating elements of Hardt and Negri’s ideas about the Multitude, understands the novel mainly as a reflection of the crucial preoccupation thathumans have for other human beings, and the innate wish to actively take care of the Other and improve his or her life conditions.