Unlike defectors’ memoirs exposing the cruel reality in North Korea, a collection of short stories
written by an author still living in the North is drawing attention for its vivid literary depiction of the
little-known everyday circumstances of the lives of its population. Translated and published in many
foreign languages, “The Accusation” by Bandi offers a rare glimpse of North Korean creative writing.
In the eyes of the West, North Korean literature is not much more
than a tool to praise and idolize the three generations of the Kim
dynasty’s dictatorship. In fact, official North Korean literature
is indeed based on the governing ideology of the supreme leader
who sets out guidelines for the country’s writers in his annual New
Year’s address.
Praise of the Regime and Criticism of Society
However, it is wrong to think that North Korean literature is singularly
about saccharine flattery of the regime. The poet Choi Jinyi,
who defected to South Korea in 1998, wants to disabuse people
of this common misconception; there certainly is more than meets
the eye. She used to engage in literary activities as a member of
the Poetry Subcommittee in the Central Committee of the [North]
Korean Writers’ Union. She said, “Many people in the South tend
to believe that North Korean authors only write works praising the
regime. On the surface, there seem to be many literary works glorifying
the regime; that’s because the North is an authoritarian
society. But in fact, those who write such works are regarded as
extreme sycophants, ignorant of the most basic concepts of literature.”
When they are with trusted writer friends, at times even members
of the union complain about the regime in a roundabout way,
Choi said. One day, a writer who had written many poems eulogizing
the regime’s founder, Kim Il-sung, and his son, Kim Jong-il,
was criticized disapprovingly by his writer friends. They said, “Why
are you writing so many poems in praise of the Kims, while often
speaking ill of them in private?” He replied evasively, “I thought of
my God, not the Kims, when I wrote the poems. So what?” It is said
that the late leader Kim Jong-il once turned down a poem presented
by the writers’ union after reading it, saying, “This gives me
goosebumps.”
North Korean writers pay attention to various issues such as
love in everyday life, choice of careers, divorce, the gap between
urban and rural areas, or generational diversity. They are cautiously
allowed to make critical comments on society, provided they maintain
the intrinsic autonomy of literature and the socialist system.
Nam Dae-hyon’s “An Ode to Youth” (1987) and Paek Namryong’s
“Friend” (1988) had no ideological undertones, so they were
published in South Korea in the late 1990s. “An Ode to Youth” deals
with the prevailing ethos of love, focusing on the worthy lives of
young intellectuals, scientists, and engineers. “Friend,” a novel on
divorce that had become a bestseller in the North, drew overseas
readers’ attention after it was translated and published in French in
2011. The book was the first North Korean literary work ever to be
published in Europe. “Hwang Jin-yi” by Hong Sok-jung, a historical
North Korean novel published in the South in 2004, made a sensation
in Pyongyang in 2002. Hong is a grandson of Hong Myong-hui
(1888–1968; pen name Byokcho), the author of “Im Kkokjong,” a
historical saga highly acclaimed and widely read in both Koreas.
The Pseudonymous Author Bandi
Dissident literature is taboo in the North. Anyone who writes a
literary work explicitly criticizing the regime faces the certainty of
incarceration in a political prison camp.
Under these circumstances, a work by a pseudonymous author
who is known to be living in the North has recently attracted wide
attention in many countries, including South Korea. “The Accusation:
Forbidden Stories from Inside North Korea” is a collection of
short stories by a North Korean author who uses the name Bandi
(Firefly) as his pseudonym. His fame grew after he was dubbed “the
North Korean Solzhenitsyn” by a French author. Bandi is a pseudonym
the author gave himself, vowing to shed light on the reality in
his destitute country, “just as a firefly shines only in a world of darkness.”
Bandi is in a situation very similar to the fate faced by Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008), the 1970 Nobel laureate in literature, in
the former Soviet Union. Just as Solzhenitsyn did, Bandi opposes
the political system of his own country and smuggled out his
manuscripts to the outside world because it is impossible for him
to publish his works in his home country. It was only after two of
Solzhenitsyn’s
novels “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” and
“The Gulag Archipelago” exposed atrocities of the Stalinist dictatorship
that the literature of the Soviet Union began attracting widespread
international attention. In the same vein, it was only after
Bandi’s “The Accusation” was published that dissident literature in
North Korea began entering the spotlight in the outside world.
The seven short stories in this collection truthfully depict the
harsh lives of people from various walks of life, groaning under the
North Korean political system. Each story has a different theme and
plot, but all are written under a single umbrella theme: the indictment
of the rule of Kim Il-sung.
The first story, “Record of a Defection,” is an epistolary-style
story about a man who grows suspicious of his wife who secretly
takes birth control pills. He writes letters to his friend telling him of
his frustration about the hereditary “caste system” and his decision
to flee the country. “City of Specters” is a story about a family that
was expelled from Pyongyang to a distant province “on blasphemy
charges.” They had drawn the curtains shut at the window of their
apartment because their three-year-old child had a seizure whenever
he saw the portraits of Karl Marx and Kim Il-sung outside the
window across the street. “So Close, Yet So Far” is a heartrending
story about a son who fails to see his old mother at her deathbed.
Although he manages to sneak into a train without a ticket, he is
soon caught in a security check. In North Korea, nobody can travel
anywhere without a travel pass.
The last story is “The Red Mushroom.” Calling the Workers’
Party headquarters a “poisonous red mushroom,” a journalist calls
for the overthrow of the Kim regime, crying out, “Pluck up that poisonous
mushroom from this land — no, from the Earth forever!” In
a thematic sequence from the first story to the last, all seven stories
in the collection reflect the tortuous progression of the author’s
rebellion against the brutal regime — from passive resistance by
defection to calling for the overthrow of the Workers’ Party, the cradle
of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
‘North Korea’s Solzhenitsyn’
The manuscripts of these stories were smuggled into South
Korea in 2013, in painstaking secrecy worthy of an espionage operation.
A female relative of Bandi’s fled the North and arrived in
Seoul. Several months later, she told Do Hee-yoon, secretary general
of the Citizens’ Coalition for Human Rights of Abductees and
North Korean Refugees, about the manuscripts. By sending a letter
to Bandi through a Chinese friend visiting the North, Do asked
him to deliver his manuscripts. After reading the letter, Bandi
took out the manuscripts from a secret hiding place where he had
stored them. To dodge luggage inspections, he hid them among
the regime’s propaganda materials such as “The Selected Works of
Kim Il-sung” and other such literature.
The coarse manuscript paper was in such a poor state that
it looked as if it was from the 1960s or 70s. The yellowed paper
showed the author must have pressed hard with a pencil when
writing the stories a long time ago. The author himself had named
the collection “The Accusation.” He had also created the pseudonym
Bandi for himself. According to Do Hee-yoon, Bandi is a man
born in 1950, who still lives in the North and is a member of the
Korean Writers’ Union. There is speculation, though, that Do is hiding
Bandi’s real identity to protect him. After many twists and turns,
the stories were published in Seoul in May 2014.
In South Korea, few people paid attention to Bandi’s work. They
merely took interest in the fact that the author was not a defector
but still lived in the North and in how the manuscripts were smuggled
out. Some people even suspected that the author was a fictitious
person. Hence, the genuine worth and literary value of the
work remained unappreciated.
In contrast to such a cold response in South Korea, foreign readers
and critics began showing keen interest in the work when its
French edition was published in 2016. Pierre Rigoulot, a French
historian and North Korea human rights activist and the director
of the Institute of Social History in Paris, called Bandi the “North
Korean Solzhenitsyn.” In his foreword for the French edition of “The
Accusation,” Rigoulot wrote, “It’s a small firefly, but its hope is big.”
The book received substantial mass media coverage in France, by
dailies like Le Figaro and Libération, radio stations France Inter,
France Info and RFI, and magazines like Marianne. “I’ve translated
many Korean novels into French. But I’ve never felt more intellectually
ecstatic than while translating the stories by Bandi. The plots
are splendid,” said Lim Yeong-hee, translator of the French version.
“A collection of short stories written under a pseudonym and smuggled out of North Korea is on its
way to becoming an international literary sensation,” Britain’s The Guardian has reported. “Dissident
tales from pseudonymous author Bandi, still living in the country, are very rare fiction to emerge from
the secretive dictatorship.”
Publishers and human
rights activists
from various countries
participate in
a reading event of
“The Accusation” at
the Bridge of Freedom
near Imjingak
Pavilion south of the
demilitarized zone
in Paju, Gyeonggi
Province on March
30, 2017.
“The Accusation” has been translated into 19 languages and was
published almost simultaneously in 21 countries, including Britain,
Canada, Italy, Japan, Germany, Sweden, and the United States, in
March of this year, as well as, most recently, in Portugal. Its English
translation was done by Deborah Smith, a British translator who
shared the Man Booker International Prize for Fiction in 2016 with
Korean author Han Kang for her translation of Han’s novel “The
Vegetarian.” Smith’s translation of “The Accusation” was among
the 10 PEN Translates Autumn 2016 winners chosen by the English
PEN. In New York, Korean-Americans organized a campaign to
nominate Bandi for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
“A collection of short stories written under a pseudonym and
smuggled out of North Korea is on its way to becoming an international
literary sensation,” Britain’s The Guardian has reported with
effusive praise. “Dissident tales from pseudonymous author Bandi,
still living in the country, are very rare fiction to emerge from the
secretive dictatorship.”
The Millions, an online literary magazine, picked “The Accusation”
as one of the most anticipated books of 2017. Publishers
Weekly, an American book review magazine, commented, “Bandi
gives a rare glimpse of life in the ‘truly fathomless darkness’ of
North Korea.” American online bookstore Amazon said, “‘The Accusation’ is a vivid depiction of life in a closed-off one-party state, and
also a hopeful testament to the humanity and rich internal life that
persists even in such inhumane conditions.”
“[This] isn’t just a book with a good story behind it: it’s a collection
of perfectly crafted novellas that, like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s
work [from the former Soviet Union], speak with authority and truthto-
power directness,” Hannah Westland, of Serpent’s Tail, the British
publisher of “The Accusation,” said to The Guardian. “Bandi’s
absurdist approach to satire is reminiscent of Ionesco’s ‘Rhinoceros,’
and his biting wit . . . reminds you of that other great Russian literary
dissident, Mikhail Bulgakov.”
“Bandi is much different from contemporary South Korean writers
from a technical point of view. We can’t simply determine his
skill level, given that the official goal of North Korean literature is to
show the greatness of the Kim family. But we should focus on his
spirit of barehanded resistance to the regime,” said Kim Jong-hoi, a
professor of Korean literature at Kyung Hee University in Seoul.
Amid the high acclaim abroad, the Korean version of “The Accusation”
has been republished by another publishing house three
years after its debut in South Korea. With its new cover, the new
edition focuses on the literary value of the book by remaining as
faithful to the original manuscripts as possible. Dasan Books, the
publisher of the new edition, said, “Readers will find the new edition
very different from its previous edition of three years ago. We
believe this one has good marketability.”
It is worth noting that many literary works by North Korean
defectors have also received more attention overseas than in South
Korea. In 2012, poet Jang Jin-sung won the Rex Warner Literary
Prize from Oxford University for his poetry collection “I Am Selling
My Daughter for 100 Won,” which truthfully reveals the miserable
lives of the North Korean people. “Dear Leader,” his collection of
essays published in 2014, ranked 10th among the top selling books
in Britain that year. Kim Yu-gyong signed a publishing contract with
French publisher Editions Philippe Picquier for her novel, “Ingan
Modokso” (Camp for Defiling Human Beings), whose original edition
came out in 2016. She used to write stories in Pyongyang as a
member of the Korean Writers’ Union. She escaped from the country
in 2000.
Response by South Koreans
By comparison, South Korean readers are less responsive to
North Korean literature than foreign readers, probably because
they are less curious about society and life in the North. Many South
Koreans hardly feel freshly informed and touched by North Korean
literature that depicts the tragic reality of everyday life in the North,
because they live in a standoff within spitting distance of North
Korea across the demilitarized zone. On the radio, on TV, and in
newspapers, they listen to, watch, and read about the lives of their
erstwhile compatriots every day.
While Americans and Europeans take nuclear threats from the
North or the possibility of war on the Korean peninsula very seriously,
South Koreans have become somewhat jaded and benumbed
by continual threats and crises. Consequently, many South Koreans
tend to look at North Korean literature primarily from an ideological
point of view, rather than appreciate the authors’ literary depiction
of their real-life experiences.