Human Acts–Pain, suffering, trauma and hope
Suddenly, this week, the world learned about the Korean novelist Han Kang. I’ve noticed a surge of posts from my Korean friends on Facebook. Their posts are in Korean, and when Facebook translates them, her name is rendered as “Han River.” There is excitement in these posts. One friend wrote that he used to read novels by Han Kang’s father, Han Sung-won, honoring a family of novelists. Credit and gratitude also go to Deborah Smith, who translated Han’s works, including Human Acts and The Vegetarian. I haven’t read the latter, but I do have a copy of Human Acts. The book was introduced to me by Ally Smith, who interned at my office a few years ago. Human Acts was my introduction to Han, thanks to Ally Smith and also, to Deborah Smith, whose translation brought these important writings and reflections to a global audience.
Today I saw a clip of Han speaking in English. She was talking about inhumanness in human beings and fragility of the human mind. She was questioning humanity or rather lack or absence of it. And such human acts without humanity causing irreparable pain, suffering and trauma to generations of fellow human beings. And I heard that Han refused to have a press conference on her being awarded this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature. I think she alluded to too much human suffering in the world and there is nothing special to “celebrate” about her award. After all, she wanted to speak to the hearts and minds of her readers about human suffering.
Reading Human Acts was so painful. I told my friend, Lee Jae-eui, who wrote Kwangju Diary about the book. He said, “the book, Human Acts, is a mirror image of Kwangju Diary.” Kwangju Diary is a factual or informational account of Kwangju Uprising and Human Acts explains human feelings–pain and trauma.
Why was Human Acts a difficult read for me? I have seen terrible images of young people and even children killed in Kwangju by South Korean paratroopers. They were difficult to look at. They reminded me of images of mutilated dead bodies of young people unceremoniously burned on pyres of flaming tyres in Sri Lanka, some 9 years after the Kwangju Uprising and the massacre. Sometimes they were limbs and body parts. They were burning and people were not only terrorized by these images, they were traumatized and dehumanized. We have not seen such cruelty in our lifetime. How can one human being do such an act to another human being? Suffering caused by such human beings is evident before your eyes and noses. The pain of young people’s bodies on pyres of tyres are transmitted to those who are seeing them, children, youth, mothers, fathers and older people. Human mind can not only remember images, it can also remember smells–stench of burning human flesh by the roadsides.
In Sri Lanka, this period of terror in the South of the country was not well known outside the country. There were terrible things happening in the North and the East due to prolonged civil war. And the world’s attention was about that civil war, not the southern insurrection of youth against a dictatorial regime who decided to use the worst methods to give a message to people–if you dare to challenge the government, this is what can happen to you! Result? Over 60,000 killings and bodies were made to disappear in the South of the country. How? In hidden mass graves, hundreds of pyres of tyres by the roadside and bloated bodies and body parts thrown into rivers that float days and days until they meet the ocean. Then too, ocean waves bring these bodies back to the shores. The police did not even want to come and take a record. I heard some priests in nearby churches close to such beaches organized the population to give such unidentified bodies a decent burial. As a result of this horror, there is a forever traumatized community of hundreds of thousands of people. While undergoing trauma, they also want to know the truth about what happened to their loved ones. Human acts caused those killings. Deliberate human acts! And, they were well planned human acts, coming down from top political leadership to the torturers and murderers who caused them in the bottom of the chain of inhumanity. A survivor of that terror period in 1989, a JVP leader, Anura Kumara Dissanayake, or AKD, was elected president of Sri Lanka on the 22nd September this year. There is a parallel to that in South Korea too. When the Kwangju Massacre happened, then opposition leader, Kim Dae Jung was arrested and put in prison. In 1996, he was elected president of South Korea. There is a kind of Kim Dae Jung moment right now in Sri Lanka with the election of AKD, who is spearheading much demanded “system change” to clean up politics and entrenched corruption which was built up gradually over 76+ years. What a task! Can the AKD and the NPP lead the way towards healing and reconciliation? Healing of the whole nation, regardless of ethnicity or religion. Reconciliation not just on racial lines, but also with horrendous psychological and traumatic minds and hearts, filled with pain and suffering.
Han wrote in Human Acts about the stench of decomposing bodies in the Provincial Hall building and later at the nearby gymnasium. Bloating and decomposing body of a teenage girl still in school uniform. People lighting candles, not just to honor the mutilated bodies of these youth, but also to combat the stench. It was this stench of decomposing dead bodies I smelled while reading Human Acts. It the same stench hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankans, throughout the country smelled over 30+ years. But for a mother or father, that stench does not exist–love overcomes it, like an invincible fragrant. They will still hug and weaken the decomposing dead body of their child. And the mothers and fathers of Kwangju wept not only in that hot spring of May 1980, many decades after that. I have stood by silently and helplessly by hundreds of such parents weeping by the graves of their children in Mangwoldon and 518 Memorial Cemetery. And those surviving family members still do. And there are others there is no place for them to weep like those at the cemeteries. Those are the parents who never saw their children’s bodies. Lee Jae Eui, for sure, is keen to find out what happened to those missing bodies. Where are they put to rest? And for hundreds of thousands of family members in Sri Lanka too, it is the same. They live and suffer in the vacuum created by their “disappeared” son or daughter. Or rather, made to disappear by human acts.
There are a few interviews of Han speaking in English on the Internet. She speaks slowly but clearly. You can see depth in her words. But, more importantly, you can see pain on her face. She smiles, but behind that smile, there is pain. It is as if she has internalized the pain and suffering of people she wrote about in her novels. It is as if she is living that pain. So, the words she managed to write, as the Nobel Committee said, “poetic expression” of human suffering, carries her pain she felt when listening to the pain of others due to human acts. So, why does one have to write about pain and suffering? Why has Han done it? Often people don’t want to hear about the pain others are going through. I heard some saying, “let us put that behind us and move on!” Is that possible at all? It is easy to say that, but doing it? How insensitive and impractical such statements, like “let us forget the past!” I know from experience that one can never forget the past. The past lives with you. So is the pain, trauma and suffering. They lives within you. But, people need ways to deal with such pain and trauma. And the way to do that is not pretending they don’t exist. But acknowledging their presence among our minds and hearts. And find ways to express them, share them, with the hope of empathy from others. Yes, empathy, not sympathy! Han’s writing is embedded with empathy. While it is difficult to read at times, she helps us identify the pains we have within. And knowing that pain exists is the first step to learn to deal with them with the hope of trying to overcome the grief and trauma.
My role in the mid and late 90s was to connect Kwangju to the rest of Asia. In fact, to connect the human suffering of Kwangju with the rest of Asia. But, in doing so, what some of us witnessed was the similar pain, suffering and trauma that are present among thousands of other mothers and fathers across Asia, from East Timor, to Aceh in Indonesia, to Thailand, to Nepal, to Kashmir, to Sri Lanka. Then some of us tried to do something we have never done in Asia. We brought parents and siblings of families of the disappeared (or made to disappear by the state) to Kwangju. The first such gathering was in 1988. I was there when a mother from Sri Lanka met a mother from Kwangju. The one from Sri Lanka was a tiny and frail looking woman in a saree. The mother from Kwangju was of similar age and height, but in a white Korean traditional dress, often dressed during a funeral. They looked at each other. Their eyes were filled with tears. They both have lost a son. The Sri Lankan mother doesn’t know what happened to her son. The Korean mother has found the dead body of her son. They did not speak a work of English. But tearfully, they embraced each other and started sobbing. They stroked their heads, consoling. There I witnessed the two mothers sharing their pain and finding some kind of solace. It was not complete healing. But it seems they both felt each others’ plain, without a word being spoken! Since then, many family members of the disappeared from Asia visited Kwangju around the 18th of May. They took part in a private family commemoration ceremony held on the 17th May as well as an official commemoration event, often attended by the President of the Prime Minister of South Korea, on the 18th May at the May 18th Memorial Cemetery. Those family members from Sri Lanka or East Timor, did not find answers to their questions by visiting Kwangju. But they found some hope for finding the truth as Kwangju family members fought hard to seek truth and justice after May 1980. They found some healing that people care about them, their pain, their suffering. People, although don’t speak their language, showed their empathy, while many fellow Sri Lankans have been rather indifferent to these family members.
Indifference and apathy towards human suffering is the worst. You can never justify human acts that have caused terrible human suffering. Religion, culture, caste, race, civil wars, collateral damage are no reasons or excuses for human suffering. They are just shields to be apathetic. And being apathetic is inhuman. What we need more is empathy, to feel the pain and suffering in others. I think Han’s writing is an effort towards cultivating that empathy. It is a painful effort.
Han’s writing also shows the incredible ability of one human being to cause indescribable pain and suffering to another. I think among all the creatures on earth, it is human beings that have caused more suffering to its kind than any other species. More intelligent we have become, we have also become more creative in inventing ways to cause suffering to others through “human” acts. But Han also tries to give the message that we do have the capacity to recognize and help others. And in fact, that is the only thing we could do. That is also a human act. And in fact that is the most important human act. In that sense, Kwangju is also a city of hope. That hope was created through the human acts of family members of victims of the Kwangju Massacre and Uprising. They transmitted that hope to many other family members from other Asian countries. Some family members visited Sri Lanka and met with the family members there. When family members of the disappeared erupted a monument for their loved ones in the year 2000 in Raddoluwa, Seeduwa, some family members from Kwangju supported that effort financially. There was transmission of solidarity and empathy through such human acts. So, humans are also capable of dealing with and possibly overcoming that pain and suffering.
13 October 2024
Rolle, Switzerland.