The Accusation: Forbidden Stories from North Korea, by Bandi
The Accusation is set in the rule of Kim Il-sung, grandfather of the present leader. Picture: Getty Images
Simon Caterson
The Australian
Imagine living in a society where the mere act of writing a short story critical of the government could lead to imprisonment, or worse.
The Accusation is the compelling, at times heartbreaking, collection of seven stories that purport to illustrate ordinary life in North Korea. The setting is the late 1980s and early 90s during the rule of Kim Il-sung, the grandfather of the present leader.
North Korea is a one-party state that has been ruled since 1948 by successive generations of a single family: a political system essentially Stalinist in nature though also operating as a kind of absolute monarchy.
According to notes included in this edition, the original handwritten manuscript of The Accusation was smuggled out of the country in 2013 at considerable risk to those involved. The book was published first in South Korea before being translated into English with funding from the international writers association, PEN.
Unlike other writings by North Koreans critical of the regime, The Accusation is presented not as the work of a defector but someone who, as far as is known outside North Korea, chose not to try to escape and may or may not continue to live there. We are told the pseudonym Bandi means “firefly”, which suggests the author’s intention is to shine a light from within.
In these sparely written stories, extracted from a manuscript that runs to 750 pages, are echoes of great dissident writers such as Alexander Solzhenitsyn and leading Western chroniclers of 20th-century totalitarianism such as George Orwell. Readers immediately will recognise the hopeless poverty and profound sense of unease and insecurity associated with living in a country where liberty is unknown, and all emotions and decisions as well as resources and effort are directed to support the regime.
Any perceived deviance from the expected obeisance to the ruler is dealt with harshly.
As in The Lives of Others, the Oscar-winning feature film set in East Germany during the last years of the Soviet era, The Accusation pays particular attention to the constant, almost unbearable stress that political oppression causes to people’s lives, distorting the most basic human relationships within families and among friends. Political oppression is nothing if not highly personal and intimate.
Persecution of individuals by the state, meanwhile, is arbitrary. Several of the characters in these stories find themselves placed suddenly in a Kafkaesque predicament, accused of anti-revolutionary activity without ever having the slightest intention of doing anything remotely political.
The air of oppression is inescapable, affecting senior government officials as well as peasants. The characters depicted represent a cross section of North Korean society. Not even privileged members of the regime can feel secure. This is a world in which people suffer from exhaustion yet have trouble sleeping at night.
In City of Specters, Gyeong-hee is manager of a marine products shop and a party cadre. His two-year-old son is spooked by the large outdoor portraits of Kim Il-sung and Karl Marx visible from their upscale apartment located in a part of the capital Pyongyang reserved for the ruling elite. By drawing the curtains to protect her sensitive child from nightmares provided by the giant images, his mother is suspected of deviance from party ideology. On the eve of the National Day celebrations, when paranoia is rife, she begins to share her son’s terror.
In So Near, Yet So Far, a mine worker, Myeong-chol, tries desperately to visit his critically ill mother in the village where he grew up. He is denied a travel permit since the Dear Leader happens to be passing through in the area. “As he stumbled out of Department Two, his legs barely able to hold him up, a wave of soundless sobs threatened to choke Myeong-chol. His eyes, which shone with the gentle innocence of a calf’s, brimmed with bitter tears.”
Myeong-chol is aware he must try to suppress his feelings, since “depending on the circumstances, he knew that even crying could be construed as an act of rebellion, for which, in this country, there was only one outcome — a swift and ruthless death”.
Yet he decides he must go to see his mother despite the likelihood he will be caught.
“His rational mind lost any interest in dignity or shame, seized by an instinct to avoid discovery in absolutely any way he could.”
There is a rawness about the prose that is as startling as it is unsettling. The characters’ sudden outbursts of rage and despair are mirrored in the author’s appeals to notions of justice and freedom. In common with Fyodor Dostoevsky, Bandi has the deepest sympathy for the unassuageable anguish of his or her characters.
The Accusation makes a lot of contemporary fiction seem tame and self-indulgent. This truly remarkable book comes from a writer writing at the risk of their own life. The result may well be the most important work of fiction published this year.
Simon Caterson is an author and critic.
The Accusation: Forbidden Stories from North Korea
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