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State Violence and Human Resilience: Han Kang
$165
Han Kang recently made history by becoming the first Korean and first Asian woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize in Literature.
As a writer, Han Kang is preoccupied with questions of violence. How and why are humans so violent to one another? And what does it mean to belong to the human species amidst this violence?
Her preoccupation with these questions is especially evident in her books, We Do Not Part and Human Acts which deal with the Jeju Massacre and the Gwangju Uprising respectively. Recipient of the French prize, Prix Médicis étranger, We Do Not Part is her latest book to be available in English, while Human Acts was originally published in 2014, and has been awarded the Manhae Prize for Literature and the Premio Malaparte.
The Jeju Massacre stretched from 1947 to 1954, during which US-backed military forces killed over 30,000 people, allegedly to root out communist agitators. Exploring the story through the lens of a relationship between friends and between a mother and daughter, Han masterfully explores grief and healing, both historical and personal.
The Gwangju Uprising took place in 1980 when military dictator Chun Doo-hwan declared martial law, leading to democratic protests led by students. With the support of the Jimmy Carter administration, Chun dispatched Special Forces to Gwangju, which opened fire on protesters, killing many and traumatizing not just Gwangju but the entire nation. In Human Acts Han Kang explores the events that took place in her hometown through the voices of various people, across time–a young boy who helps to keep track of the corpses, academics, and political prisoners.
Korean president Yoon Seok-yeols’ recent declaration of martial law and impeachment shows us with clarity that these events are not static events consigned to the distant historical past, but alive, reverberating into our present in dynamic ways. The pain of these events of state violence are not healed or dispersed, rather they lurk just below the surface, animating the politics of our today. Han Kang’s books implore us to not forget, to face the reality of the violence that the state has inflicted on its people, that humans have inflicted on humans.
Texts:
We Do Not Part
Human Acts
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Hannah Kim
Hannah Kim is a translator and interpreter based in Seoul, South Korea. She has a masters degree in Korean-English interpretation from Ewha Womans University as well as a masters degree in Korean Studies from Yonsei University. Her literary translation work can be found or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, The Georgia Review, and chogwa zine, among others, and she was selected as the 2024 Korean prose mentee by the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA). She has done interpreting and translation work for the Olympics, Seoul Cafe Show, Frieze Seoul, Amnesty International, the DMZ International Film Festival, and the Asian Contents & Film Market, among others. She has been leading Delves at Literary Arts since 2019.
