In one of the chapters of Han Kang’s Human Acts, a character, who had been jailed and tortured, asks: ‘Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion masking ourselves this single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, damaged, slaughtered—is this the essential fate of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable?’
The Gwangju democratic protests, a series of student-led demonstrations after the assassination of President Park Chung-hee and the subsequent state-capture of Chun Doo-hwan, were suppressed by the South Korean military in a violent massacre in 1980. Following his ascent to power, Chun promptly implemented martial law, arrested opposition leaders, banned political activities, and censored all forms of speech.
In Human Acts, Kang illustrates just how cruel and gruesome those Gwangju days were, and how easy it was to reduce human beings into a ‘lump of meat’. In the chapter “The Prisoner, 1990”, Kang’s character recollects: ‘Watering discharge and sticky pus, foul saliva, blood, tears and snot, piss and shit that soiled your pants. That was all that was left of me. No that was what I myself had been reduced to. I was nothing but the sum of those parts. The lump of rotting meat from which they oozed was the only “me” there was’.
Cruelty, as one witnesses in Kang’s narratives, is not limited to Korea under Park or Chun; it has its own history. ‘It happened in Gwangju just as it did on Jeju Island, in Kwantung and Nanjing, in Bosnia and all across the American continent when it was still known as the New World, with such uniform brutality it’s as though it is imprinted in our genetic code’.
The story itself begins with a fifteen-year-old boy, Dong-ho, who had witnessed the death of his friend during the Gwangju protests, and has been searching for the body of his friend. His friend’s sister, too, is missing and may likely have been killed. The boy works in the hospital, where bodies arrive and are then identified by their families for the proper funeral.
Dong-ho’s chapter is told in a second-person narrative, the ‘you’ haunt you all the more, even as you read word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraphs by paragraphs, as if to escape, where the ‘you’ escapes and refers to YOU—the reader, or you—the character. Either way, the second-person narration haunts throughout, even as a ghostly voice tells you what you thought, felt, and imagined when the horrors were committed in front of your eyes, on you, and when you read those horrors, as you do in this book.
The chapter after “The Boy. 1980” is the first-person narrative “The Boy’s Friend. 1980,” which shifts to the perspective of his friend’s ghost, who now contemplates what really happened and how he really died. That tense horror, which the second-person narrative had initially evoked, is now transitioned into the first-person narrative. Other chapters, too, are a mix of second-person and first-person narratives, skipping in time. The reporter who had received seven slaps. The prisoner who had been reduced to a lump of meat. The factory girl, who had been called Red Bitch, and repeatedly tortured. The mother who cannot reconcile the death of her son, the boy, Dong-ho, even as years go by.
Han Kang’s novel, as her translator, Deborah Smith, writes in the introduction, ‘starts with bodies. Piled up, reeking, unclaimed, and thus unburied, they present both a logistical and an ontological dilemma.’
Despite the sleek stylistic prose laden in those 200-odd pages, Human Acts itself took me several days to read. After every chapter, I would pause, watch a movie, read something else, do some PhD work, and reset. The following day, I would read another chapter, and so on. It was not just reading, writing this review, too, took me several days. As with other books, whenever I completed them, I knew exactly what I had to say about them. But with Human Acts, I could not bring myself to sit down and write anything.
That is perhaps because Han Kang is no ordinary storyteller. In Human Acts, Kang does not just tell us how violence was meted out on ordinary people during the Gwangju uprising; she tears you up in pieces, questions your humanity, makes you vulnerable, takes a toll on your body and mind, and demoralises you. And that is the brilliance of an extraordinary writer.
Note: I was first introduced to Han Kang through his book The Vegetarian, which I have reviewed in this blog post. If you liked reading this, check it out as well. And importantly, read Han Kang.
Thanks, Haneol Mun, for the copy of Human Acts.