Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for her craft, the South Korean writer Han Kang was immediately faced with her sense of political responsibility. A writer is not an isolated being lost in the island of literature. She is a political being who lives in the midst of the world and writes of it.
We learn of Han’s unique and intense approach to the problem of violence in her novel, Human Acts, published in English translation by Deborah Smith in 2016. Smith writes in her introduction to Han’s novel about the demonstrations by students from Jeonnam University that took place in Gwangju in early 1980—called the Gwangju Uprising—against Korea’s 5th President, the army general and military dictator, Chun Doo-hwan’s repression of freedom expanding martial law. The state’s armed forces came down heavily against unarmed citizens and committed a massacre, reminiscent of China’s communist regime brutally suppressing the students’ movement at Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989. More recently, we had Bangladesh President Sheikh Hasina’s failed attempt to suppress by force a citizen’s uprising against the dictatorial and corrupt ways of her 15-year-old regime that forced her to flee the country on August 5 this year and ushered in a new political epoch in Bangladesh.
Smith writes that unlike the “superficially gipping tropes” of violence and heroism generally used to remember and commemorate the Gwangju Uprising, Han evokes something more haunting, close to a post-Gothic horror tale, focusing on the dead bodies, their names, and their pasts.
A bodyguard of the earlier military president, Park Chung-Hee, remarks in the novel, “The Cambodian government’s killed another two million of theirs. There’s nothing stopping us from doing the same”. The political acts of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, China’s Yang Shangkun, Li Peng, and Deng Xiaoping, South Korea’s Chun Doo-hwan, and Bangladesh’s Sheikh Hasina have altered the history of those countries forever, like Partition transformed modern Indian history and created a permanent wedge between past and present.
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Mass killings are serious moments where national claims to civility and morality come to a pause. These events portray the outrageous limits of politics, and what it can undermine for the sake of power. The costs are as incalculable as the dead bodies that pay the price.
Smith writes how Human Acts takes account of the “logistical” and “ontological” problem that confronts bodies that lie unclaimed. They become bodies without pasts, without names, no longer belonging to those who possessed them. A writer, who is interested in events that declare the end of humanity, is expected to have a serious involvement with humanity and human acts, both in defence of, and against the norms of, civilised life. No wonder Han is troubled by the current state of history and considers it irresponsible to celebrate her Nobel achievement.
Han’s 85-year-old father, the writer Han Seung-won, shared his daughter’s wish in a press conference in the South Jeolla Province. Han told her father, “With the war intensifying and people being carried out dead every day, how can we have a celebration or a press conference?”
Seung-won felt his daughter’s “perspective has shifted from being a writer living in Korea to a global (writer’s) consciousness.”
This is not an accurate assumption. Han’s works have references to world history. A writer is not “local” till she becomes “universal” after getting the Nobel Prize. Han was already an internationally known writer. Her Korean-ness is an intrinsic part of her universality, like any other writer’s. Our universality is rooted in a place, its language and its history. There is no universality that is removed from a certain location.
The war in Ukraine and Gaza clearly disturbs Han, like it does the rest of us. Deaths somewhere impact the minds of people who are alive elsewhere. The world is no world if a massacre of people taking place somewhere in the world does not impact our conscience. If we claim to belong to a human world we cannot abandon our responsibilities for it, however weak and small and distant our voices may be.
For Han, it is a time of mourning, not a time to celebrate a personal achievement. She felt, as a writer she had a sense of moral responsibility when there was mass human suffering. Time is too tainted with fresh reports of death of people and children pouring in every day from Gaza.
When Han learnt her father’s wish to hold a special banquet to celebrate her achievement, she told him, “Please don’t celebrate while witnessing these tragic events (referring to the two wars). The Swedish Academy didn’t give me this award for us to enjoy, but to stay more clear-headed”.
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Seung-won could not hold his sentiments and went ahead with a press conference, but limited it to sharing his daughter’s views in public. In a globalised world, we are all global witnesses to the ravages of war. War is our limit-condition. It conditions how we think, and even though it does not have a direct bearing on our lives, we cannot shrug off our mental responsibility.
While speaking on his daughter’s reluctance to celebrate her literary honour, Seung-won added an interesting detail: “Initially, she agreed, saying she would ‘give it a try,’ but changed her mind overnight.”
Han was initially agreeable to the idea. But when she gave it a thought, she changed her mind. The idea fell short of the initial consideration. Han acknowledged her discomfort with the idea and turned it down. She upheld a human act of rectitude in the face of human barbarity.
Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee is the author of Nehru and the Spirit of India.
