North Koreans in exile are the only North Koreans who right
now have any chance of having their voices heard; the May issue of the on-line
magazine Words Without Borders lets us listen to seven of them.
Guest-editor Shirley Lee, who also edits New Focus International,
a website offering analysis of news from North Korea, told me her aim: “I hope
to provide a record of the scattering of the first seeds of a non-state North
Korean literature, which allows North Korea's writers to reclaim their language
and literature from their politicians. It sounds a bit grand, but the emphasis
is on 'seeds'. I would like to think that we are witnessing the beginnings of a
new North Korean literature, that is written in something other than the
language of the regime.”
If North Koreans are to reclaim their language from their
politicians, they must be able to distinguish truth from lies. Lee has selected pieces that all deal,
in differing ways, with exiles’ struggles to understand that the dark fantasies
the regime spun them at home were precisely that: fantasies, and not
reality. Beneath this overarching
theme, three concerns recur: drugs, maternal love, and hunger.
Did you know North Korea has a large population of
junkies? Or that the regime, as a
(presumably?) unintended consequence of trying to raise foreign capital by
selling drugs abroad, has encouraged large numbers of its own people into
becoming pushers and users? If
these are new ideas to you, as they were to me, then read the only fictional
offering in the issue, After The Gunshot,
by Lee Ji Myung, translated by Shirley Lee, which is about drug smugglers on
the Sino-North Korean border, or A Blackened Land, a memoir by Kim Yeon-seul, translated by Sora
Kim-Russell. This is an account of the devastating effects of crystal meth
addiction. When the content is so distressingly compelling, it feels wrong to
comment, even positively, on the style, but, through the veil of translation,
this struck me as strong writing. Here Kim Yeon-seul describes her junkie husband
lighting-up: “When he rolled (crystal meth) up in the shiny aluminum
lining of a cigarette pack and touched the lighter to it, bluish gray smoke
would curl up from it, like a cobra dancing to a flute.” Isn’t
that an apt simile, beautifully ugly and sinister?
Meanwhile, The Poet Who Asked For Forgiveness, by Gwak Moon-an, translated by Shirley Lee, is a
factual account of how a poet is bullied, as a strategy for survival, into
writing a hymn praising The Party as Mother - a superhuman mother to be revered
over any mere biological mother.
All North Koreans are now required to learn this hymn by heart;
expressions of love between biological mothers and their children have become
subversive acts.
I Want to Call Her Mother Again by Park Gui-ok, translated by Sora Kim-Russell is
about stripping away the regime’s falsehood that a child’s real Mother is the
Party. It is a harrowing account
of a mother’s abandonment of her children in a potato field, so they can have a
chance of a better life, in South Korea. Park Gui-ok is for a long time filled
with resentment and hatred of her mother, but after thirteen years of freedom
she is able to understand that her mother was not to blame for her suffering: “All
at once, the hatred and ugliness I had harbored toward her turned to longing
and flooded my heart. How she must have suffered! How bad things must have been
for her to abandon her babies! When I think back on that potato field all those
years ago, the image of my mother removing all of her clothes, dressing me and
my younger sibling in them, and keeping nothing but a layer of tattered rags
for herself fills me with such pain. Now, as I picture her hands, blistered and
scratched from digging through the frozen earth in search of even a single
potato no bigger than a bean, the memory tears at my heart.”
And so to hunger. The Arduous March by Ji Hyun-ah, translated by Sora Kim-Russell, and A
Rice Story by Kim Sung-min, translated by
Shirley Lee, are both about the struggle to survive famine. A Rice
Story is billed as a poem, although in
English it reads more like brief and vivid prose. It was written during a campaign in South Korea urging
people to eat more rice as there was a glut of the stuff. Kim Sung-min compares
this situation with that over the border: “The greens that have been
dried for three days, the roots of trees gnawed and abandoned by beasts in the
mountains, and one small sack of barley—mixed together on the stove. Food
bartered for your sister’s chastity. Rub your stinging eyes, make sure the
smoke rises into the night. So what if I’m a father who’s let his children
starve? I’ve shaken hands with this enemy, life, just to stay alive, to stay
alive. Facing those who grip their spoons and wait by empty bowls, Seoul is
left with too much rice.”
Pillow, a poem by
Jang Jin-sung, translated by Shirley Lee, combines the two motifs of
motherhood, and hunger. It presents a mother lying to her son about the
contents of a sack, to motivate him to go to school:
The
ultimate act of motherhood
Was a
rice-pillow lie
For deceiving
her beloved son
The final pang
of hunger
Was a pillar of
faith giving way
For the ruin of
a young boy’s life
I urge you to read the rest of Pillow, and all the other pieces in the May issue of Words
Without Borders. Find them at http://wordswithoutborders.org New
Focus International is at http://newfocusintl.com/
