(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
We look at the books This is not goodbye (2014) and Living and dead (2021). Both published in Norwegian by Pax Forlag and translated from Korean by Jarne Byhre and Vivian Eveline Øverås respectively.
She is not unknown, not even in our part of the world, Han kang, with several Norwegian releases. And since she was awarded the prestigious international The Booker Prize in 2016, one should not be surprised that her versatile and extensive output, although she is barely 54 years young, and her heavy, literary family background also make Nobel Prize in literature to something within reach. Then she is also this year's winner.
Han Kang's books are captivatingly easy-to-read prose. Perhaps because the translations are fluid and light, as if the text has not been translated. And that is an achievement. But it still requires the intense concentration with which poetic prose must be met. The condensed expressions. The changes in perspective that constantly shift the focus in time and space. Anything of importance that is not said must be read slowly – like a Jon Fosse? Nevertheless, you do not lose your grip as a reader, repeats reviewer after reviewer.
The violence is strong
An example is grotesque vold – as a description of Gaza in 2024 – to the most tender, finest depictions of thoughts and interpersonal relationships, such as when the mother who has lost her son in the massacre recalls: "[Mum,] why are we walking here in the dark, come and we'll go away there, where it blooms.”
The violence is strong, especially when it is not described: “[B]lood and work oozed from the wounds; at last you could see the bone shining white in there. Then they soaked a cotton ball in alcohol and pressed it into the wound."
“Is violence universal? Is it coded into our genes?” asks Han (surname is Han). Because it's not just the violence in Gwangju Living and dead is about, and she asks: "[T]he same story everywhere – on Jeju, in Kwantung and Nanjing, in Bosnia and in the so-called 'new world' on the American continent – violence so uniform that one would think it was coded into our genes.”
Han Kang does not turn away from death or the dead. And she sees too the perpetrators, sees them as alive, with their own history. And want to reach them too. Put them on. Talk to them. “Where are they now, those who killed me, those who killed her? Even if they were still alive, they too must have a soul; if I put all my will and focus, maybe I could touch them?”
Her authorship gives us in these two books a South Korea anno 1948 and 1980, but also the world between 1930 and 1945, and the world of today. A South Korea as far from today's media's K-pop, Winter Olympics and Hyundai as you can get. But also a timeless world: Because one cannot read Han in 2024 without seeing the contours of the Nazi corpse piles, the hungry in Warsaw, and our own time's murders in Gaza and Ukraine – or in Yemen. This is how her writing becomes timeless. A literary retinal image related to Vanessa Bairds Go Down with Me which is on display this year at the Munch Museum. Come down with me, Han says, and we will come.
The violence permeates
I Living and dead she moves to 1980. The assaults that happened in her hometown of Gwangju on May 18, 1980, are an open wound in South Korea's history and in Han's own life. She was ten years old, and they cut wounds that will never heal, but which precisely a writer can make manageable for himself and for the many. Make life possible to live.
If you go to Gwangju's old cemetery, you enter by stepping heavily – or spitting, as many do silently – on the stone bearing the name of the dictator who, on May 18, 1980, necessarily with the blessing of White House adviser Brzezinski, mowed down hundreds of students who had had enough of 30 years of the dictatorship's abuse. They mainly demonstrated peacefully for democracy in the country. 18 May is the official day of remembrance in present-day South Korea. Han Kang takes the day into world literature.
"Scattered across the bedrock were white remains of bones that could be from sharks and or whales, broken boats, shiny iron bars and planks wrapped in white sails."
Violence pervades Han's writing. Or rather: processing the violence. The self i This is not goodbye begins immediately by breaking down the distinction between nature, man, spirit, body. As with Asbjørnsen and Moe, trees take the form of people, and people take the form of trees and forests and mountains. Trees "of different heights, like people of different ages", she writes. In this way, the narrator also gets the necessary distance from the recent history, a creative breathing space that means that you and her dare to look at it anew. Dare to bring it up, what your parents' generation has tried to forget. No random opening, that is, since Han keeps coming back to the history of man, and her own country: "We should be like plants" is a sentence from the poet Yi Sang, which Han has told means a lot to her.
The Jeju Massacres
I have visited this universe, Gwangju and Jeju many times. The memorial groves, graves and statues that dot the peninsula of South Korea and that few tourists talk about. Yes, the Koreans themselves do not like to talk about it to others. It is said that there are at least 200 such where Koreans commemorate abuses by their own dictators, who were supported by the Japanese and Americans. I've seen a dozen of them. I have been allowed to lead commemorative processions about the massacre of stubborn 'communists' by their own leaders and foreign imperial powers without the right to life. You don't forget that.
30 were caught and stowed into barges, transported out to sea and drowned with open bottom valves.
This is not goodbye uncovers the trauma that Han Kang unearths on the island Jeju, where the Americans recently established a controversial, giant naval base in their military build-up against China. Controversial because the Jeju people hold the area sacred, and because back in the 1950s they refused to submit to the Americans and their installed dictators. Now they are back. Here it is the unsaid that screams the loudest with Han. As 'communists', the people of Jeju, 10 percent of them, or 30, were captured, stowed into barges, transported out to sea and drowned with open bottom valves. The book becomes a fist against those who want to forget the genocide on the island. Is it a dream she is portraying, or...
"Scattered across the bedrock were white bone remains that could be from sharks and or whales, broken boats, shiny iron bars and planks wrapped in white sails […]. What has happened? I thought as I felt a pressure in my throat that would not be released.
Planks or people in body bags? There is much that has not been redeemed in , �r-Korea. Here, Han becomes the spokeswoman for the grotesque that the story contains. As in Gwangju, the Jeju massacres have not yet been fully investigated. Since the henchmen of the past are still stirring in the state apparatus and intelligence services. He becomes controversial because she dares. Great literature must dry. That's why you won't be done with Han Kang easily.
