“Can North Koreans Be Heard At All?”

Examining the reception of The North Korean Literature through cross-reading two appraised book about North Korea.

The Accusation: Forbidden Stories From Inside North Korea
by Bandi 

Winner of a PEN Translates Award
A World Literature Today Notable Translation of 2017
The Globe and Mail Best Books of the Year 2017
Longlisted for the Aspen Words Literary Prize

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea by Barbara Demick

BBC Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction of 2010

National Book Award Finalist of 2010

National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist of 2010

Introduction

In 2017, a fiction from North Korea “The Accusation” has been introduced to English-speaking readers and is made available for other languages. Written under the pseudonym Bandi, the book has been mostly known for its heroic travel through the rest of the world for the fact that only available North Korean literature so far either confirmed and published by State or written by the North Korean dissident writers. In an afterword, the writer Kim Seong-dong lays out the journey of Bandi’s seven-hundred-and-fifty-page manuscript. According to Kim, Bandi is a member of the official North Korean writer’s league and writes in “Chosôn munhak”, the DPRK's most important literary journal, and wrote these stories between 1989 and 1995. It is a collection of seven short stories that illuminate the day-to-day lives and conditions of those people who live under the rule of Kim Il-Sung.

In story after story, Bandi writes about the people of North Korea who run afoul of the state and lose their last political illusions. They then get jailed, escape, die, or go mad, but the real culmination of each story occurs in that instant of revelation when they realize that, despite everything they have always been told, the state is malign. Personally, I find it delightful to read it for the writer’s satirical approach to deal with weighty and politically loaded issues. However, “The Accusation” as for my start point happened to be serving only to introduce me whole range of discussions on the North Korean State regime and its ideological apparatus of State-sanctioned literature. The thesis of this paper does not derive from “The Accusation” and its stories itself but the way it is framed as a work of literature and the unease that I have encountered on my way out to read on North Korean Literature which is mostly categorized as being solely propaganda literature and having a singular voice which is the voice of Kim Trio. As a result, the work of literature from North Korea has been read and interpreted and its reading is almost always confined as the praise of North Korean Socialism and its State. It is true that there is a fundamental aspect of ideology in North Korean Literature by means of the Juche Principle which is established by Kim Il-sung whose personal cult also known being a guerilla, a protector, a warrior against imperialist Japan and the USA, the founder of the DPRK, The Dear Leader, Dear Ruler. From so on, Juche has been or -at least it is alleged to be- the fundamental guiding so-called philosophy and regulator behind the North Korean ideology, politics, governance, economy, daily life, military, but most importantly for the aim of this paper, behind the literary products.

In DPRK it is irrefutable that writers play a prominent role in retaining the state ideology and power. One of the emblems of The Worker’s Party of Korea, the founding and the ruling party, on its flag, has a pen that represents the intellectuals along with a hammer (workers) and a sickle(peasants). There is a large corpus on North Korean Literature and its history in relation to State ideology and how the state ideology has shaped the narrative and the topics of works of arts.  For instance, Kwon Yongmin’s “Literature of North Korea” and Tatiana Gabroussenko’s “From Developmentalist to Conservationist Criticism’ have been two of the resources that layout North Korean Literature as a state apparatus, and its political implications is embodied in literary productions. Be that as it may, a note on North Korean Literature from the Words Without Borders deserves attention for the purpose of this paper. In the “Axis Of Evil: Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and Other Enemy Nations” twenty-one works of fiction and poetry from seven countries with acknowledged oppressive regimes are translated into English. The editor of the book notes that “In the case of North Korea, our initial expectation of finding “samizdat” literature turned out to be naïve; all that we could find was in fact propaganda literature. In North Korea, it seems there are not only things that must not be said, but every work must, in the end, praise the Great Leader or it never sees the light of day.” This particular note very well sums up what lays behind my unease that is triggered by reading about The Accusation and gradually in reading about the North Korean Literature. Although writers of North Korea were certainly expected to write with a voice that celebrates the nation, claiming that there is nothing there except the voice of state would be an oversimplification of North Korean Literature, a claim that which is itself initially constituted by another ideology.

My second vantage point is Nothing to Envy retells the accounts of six North Korean dissidents by Barbara Demick. For over six years Demick collected and recorded the lives of six North Korean dissident citizens over fifteen years of their life span, a chaotic period that saw the death of Kim Il-sung, the rise to power of his son Kim Jong-il, and a devastating famine that killed one-fifth of the population. Demick’s account of daily life in North Korea is just as dark as Bandi’s The Accusation although her accounts of six dissidents also reflect the everyday form of struggle and resistance of North Koreans. Demick depicts what it means to be living under one of the most repressive totalitarian regimes in the world and how the North Korean regime stabilizes and maintains its power by state censorship and self-censorship. It is a journalistic work of literature and a work of testimonial. Its importance for this paper comes from the discussions on North Korea dissident literature, and the ways in which memoirs are manufactured to condemn the North Korean Regime, and are thus turned into a site of intelligence by which these literary accounts are used to extract information about the North Korea behind its closed doors as the “second culture” of North Korea as opposed to the state-sanctioned culture. This, in fact, alters our reading of North Korean dissident literature by mobilizing the readers against the brutal regime of the North Korean State, making us into tools for mobilization in order to end the state abuse over its people, put an end to the suffering of people. Therefore, from this perspective, the second culture of North Korea is framed by the agony and brutal consequences of state policy in the ways in which it meets with the outside world.  As one of the results of it, these North Korean accounts are instrumentalized for justifying international sanctions and interventional policies against the human rights abuse and oppression of the North Korean Regime. Thus, our interpretation falls into the danger of becoming a call for “democratizing North Korea from outside” (Hong, 19)

It is a double edge sword to write about North Korea since it is a politically over-burdened history. As far as I am concerned, this kind of position on North Korean people – a position is essentially given by the counter-world- falls into the danger of manufacturing another kind of mythical national identity, a mass of people who live in a different world have a different kind of mind than us outsiders as if we the rest of the people of all nations believed in the same truths, same world, and same ideology. Our reading of North Korean Literature is contaminated by two distinct ideologies and its language into the gap created by the western imagination’s binary logic.  These politically conditioned perspectives contribute to decoding the North Korean identity in the outsider’s mind as mass, singular, obedient, loyal, weak, oppressed, illogical, alien, other, silenced, a group of people who are waiting to be saved, a story of survival that invokes an old-time heroic savior, a Westerner.

Official Culture vs Second Culture

Since it is not the aim of this paper to interrogate the ideological implementation of DPRK I will only briefly touch on the issues regarding the DRPK’s political motivation in relation to literature. However, I believe it is important to understand literature in North Korea and its evaluation throughout the years of nation establishment.  It is important, first of all, to convince readers that North Korean literature is beyond being static but shows changes in time and in content. Secondly, it is important to take into account the official literature in the ways in which it is framed as censored, sanctioned, ideologically conditioned, thus, leaving no space for artistic and individual creativity, in relation to Bandi’s reception at overseas readership circle as a piece of literature that is penetrated sanctions and suppression of North Korean writer’s league, thus, state. Last but not least, it is important to understand dissident literature as the Second Culture of North Korea, a category that is strongly shaped by anti-communist sentiments, International Human Acts discourse, and publications of defectors accounts. The question is whether The Accusation belongs to this second culture or not, and how this notion of the second culture falls into the danger of becoming an imperialist interpretation of North Korean literature and identity, producing a national identity counter-myth.

In “ The Narrative of South Korea in North Korean Propaganda” Gabroussenko (2011) argues against the common belief in stability and consistency of North Korean Texts. The North Korean state propaganda is really not frozen in time, its ideological function is not only a glorification of the Kims, and as a consequence of this, its literature has been always receptive to current events in and outside of North Korea. For instance, she argues how South Korean representation is changed in fiction in tandem with the political agenda of North Korea. To establish the dawn of North Korean literature, we should look at the conditions that produced it. In 1945, after 35 years, Japan’s Imperial sovereignty over Korea came to an end after WW2. Korea was divided between the two distinct ideological power figures of its time, the South was administered by the United States and the North was administered by the Soviet Union. During the first years of this division, as Yongmin (2003) argues, literature gained a prominent role in constructing the socialist culture in North Korea by prevailing power of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) as well as an important amount of South Korean intellectuals such as Yi Kiyo ̆ng,  Han So ̆rya, An Hamgwang, Song Yo ̆ng, Pak Seyo ̆ng , and Yi Tonggyu who passed across to North, believing the ideology of socialist state and production of socialist realist art (498). From this point on, the North Korean State ideology and North Korean intellectual class has been strictly framed in the same context, associated with each other, and fixated as one of the propaganda apparatus of the North Korean Regime in the Western imagination. The strict relation between State and the North Korean Literature has been clear for both sides of the world, moreover, DPRK has been explicit in their point of view in the role of intellectuals and writers plays in contributing the socialism by means of artistic productions. Meanwhile, Yongmin points out the narrative of socialist realism and socialist nation in the early works of literature from this period, Gabroussenko contributes to this by tracking the anti-south Korean rhetoric in North Korean ideology and the works of arts and draws attention to the production of a narrative of hell that represents the South Korean Regime and heaven that represents the DPRK. In 1946, writers were assembled under the organization of The North Korean Federation of Literature and Art in order to promote the ideology of socialism in collaboration with the North Korean State Regime.

After the years of turmoil from 1950 until the 1953 Korean War, Myers (2010) in The Cleanest Race emphasis a shift in the North Korean domestic propaganda. As for the international propaganda, Meyer explains the North Korean Regime’s attitude more or the less retained its alliance with the Soviet Union however, within the domestic sphere, propaganda growingly focused on the purity of Koreanness (42).  This accompanied by the establishment of the well-known North Korean ideology of Juche which itself has been a topic for great controversies for Korean Scholars and International Affairs. The ideology of Juche as it is pointed out earlier, established by Kim Il Sung after the Korean War within Marxist-Leninist discourse yet with distinct modifications in regards to North Korean ideology of nationality and Kim Il-Sung idea of an anti-colonial and revolutionary socialist regime. The ideology of Juche is explained in the official web site the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea as it is followed:

“Establishing Juche means adopting the attitude of a master towards the revolution and construction of one's country. It means maintaining an independent and creative standpoint in finding solutions to the problems which arise in the revolution and construction.(…)

The Korean people value the independence of the country and nation and, under the pressure of imperialists and dominionists, have thoroughly implemented the principle of independence, self-reliance and self-defense, defending the country's sovereignty and dignity firmly.

It is an invariable policy of the Government of the Republic, guided by the Juche idea, to treasure the Juche character and national character and maintains and realize them. The Government of the Republic always adheres to the principle of Juche, the principle of national independence, and thus is carrying out the socialist cause of Juche.”  (retrieved from: http://www.korea-dpr.com/juche_ideology.html )

The ideology of Juche is not relevant for this paper except its establishment on its ideology also has been the main principle of the state-approved act of artistic creation and the works of arts. Kim Il-Sun, himself has been known for his writing such as On Juche Literature, On the Art of the Cinema, On the Art of Opera, On the Art of Drama, On the Art of Music, On Fine Art, On the Art of Dance, On Acrobatics and others, in which he explains his profound and unique ideas and theories on art and literature, including the theory on the Juche-oriented idea of the literary and artistic works, and the idea of contributing to socialism by means literary and artistic creation. Introducing the Juche ideology empowered the stranglehold on literature and artistic creation and firmly fixated it with the idea of social transformation through the guiding principles of Juche which Meyer argues is not but a pseudo-doctrine that enables the regime to justify oppressive policies that the state implements. (47) He argues that North Korea’s guiding ideology, Juche, is essentially reminiscent of Imperial Japan’s racialism and nationalism with distinct Korean characters. While Meyer criticizes the current discussions on the ideology of Juche for not acknowledging its incoherence, emptiness, and dullness for perhaps many good reasons, however, what we know today about North Korean’s Literature and Arts springs from the Juche ideology that has been translated into other languages or the artworks of dissident North Koreans. As far as the outside world is acknowledged there are themes that writers are not allowed to touch otherwise they will not be published in North Korea. Furthermore, all of the writings have to pass the State examination first so that the state will acknowledge and prove that it has not formed any potential danger to retain and preserve the power of the state under the ideology of Juche. The state-authorized writers obtain the membership of the Chosun Writer’s League who become eligible to contribute to national consciousness in favor of North Korean State power. From this point of view, North Korean Literature is marked by and stigmatized as being a site of propaganda that the state firmly and closely regulates and reiterates its power through various forms of censorship. Bandi is alleged to be one of the members of the Chosun Writer’s League Central Committee as far as its editors can confirm. Thus, its heroic attempt in writing these forbidden stories from inside North Korea, is in no way can fall into North Korean Literature as far as Juche ideology concerns by means of its anti-communist and anti-Kim regime sentiments. For instance, “The city of Specters” is one of the most striking and dramatic stories in the collection that explicitly condemning the posters of Marx and Kim Il-Sung as monstrous. A young mother looks after a sickly son who is terrified of a huge portrait of Marx which refers to the ideology of socialism as that hangs in the city square just outside the family’s apartment. The boy’s father is a supervisor in the propaganda department, so “having a tantrum at the sight of Marx’s portrait had serious implication” that explicitly suggests the totalitarian mindset of the State.  As the National Day celebrations approach, the mother is exploited with the demands of her high-status job and neglects the child's unsurmountable horror in seeing the revolutionary leaders. And then it is too late: for the crime of “neglecting to educate their son in the proper revolutionary principles,” the family is banished from Pyongyang. “Fear swelled inside her—fear, something which had to be instilled in you from birth if you were to survive life in this country,” Bandi writes (59).

The Accusations, undeniably, has famed for its disobedience to the North Korean Regime, one of the most repressive and totalitarian regimes in all around the world, for its courage to write against Kim’s policy which is endorsed by the ideological myth “motherly-care” that the child race, in other words, North Koreans need for their survival, against socialist dream and its courage to write about the shattering dreams, corruption in the state agencies, about the famine that is killed many millions of people. Perhaps, it has been the samizdat that the other world was waiting and searching for so long from the intellectuals of North Korea in a sort of dull expectation. In story after story characters simmer with resentment and the narrative woven with the sense of despair that its protagonists are, for the most part, hopeful strivers struggling to keep their lives and beliefs from shattering in the face of mounting evidence that their government has betrayed them. The kind of portrayal The Accusation suggests on no wonder excites the outside world for its depiction of the deluded masses who as the story unfolds come to realize its suffering, vulnerability, weakness, disillusionment, and slides away from the cult of Kim, who is, in turn, were exposed to various forms of political violence, displacement, and trauma that is implemented or triggered by the State agencies or State policies. It depicts a kind of North Korean identity that foreigners expected to see in the state-sanctioned literature but only could read on the accounts of North Korean dissidents.

North Korean defectors have been a crucial source of information in regard to the “crimes against humanity” that the North Korean Regime is held responsible for. In his article “Hope by itself is not enough: the soft power of the North Korean Defectors”, Gauthier (2015) argues the role of these accounts in attracting international attention on the totalitarian, abusive, anti-humanitarian policies of DRPK as well as its role in shaping the public perception in an English publication. He explains how testimonies of North Korean defectors help to shape the international policies against the North Korean Regime such in the case of 2014 when the United Nations’ Humanitarian Council gathers the information from the dissidents and records the human right violations that are perpetrated by the Kims’ policies and, furthermore, calls the attention of International Criminal Court and international humanitarian rights organization to publicly condemn the State. (106) With the prevailing number of dissidents cross the borders of DRPK, the records of the lifelong darkness, hunger, isolation, oppression, loyalty, dream, separation, despair, disappointment memoirs are made available to English-speaking readers.  One of the examples of this literature is, as it is pointed out in the introduction, Los Angeles Times’ journalist Barbara Demick’s account of six North Korean dissidents.

In “Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea “Demick locates her investigation at the city of Chongjin, one of the largest cities in North but also far enough from Pyongyang, the capital, where the Worker’s Party of Korea and its various economic, political and military headquarters resides. Having interviewed dissidents who are from Chongjin, Demick aims to track and confirm the testimonials as a journalist part of her identity requires while hoping to ease State surveillance and restrictions on the materials that she could possibly dig out. The city, today, is the capital of North Hamyong province that extends as far as the Tumen River and was an important port for the steel and iron industry during Japan’s invasions. It was also, as Demick conscientiously depicts, one of the cities that the famine of the mid-1990s hit viciously hard.

She starts with a depiction of North Korea that is captured by satellite photographs in which there is nothing to see but its darkness as opposing the brightness of South Korea which although I appreciate how captivating it is, also very much conditioned by the binary structure of Western thought system. Demick once reiterates the image of North Korea’s darkness and remoteness that connotes with its cruelness as how almost always North Korea is imagined and promoted in the Western world. Indeed she is an astonishing journalist and writer, she devotes seven years to the interviews to show to the world what she has witnessed in this mayhem: ‘ this black hole, in this bleak, dark country where millions have died of starvation, there is also love. ” (7) The book through the six narratives of North Korean dissidents uncovers the every-day life in North Korea, extension and effect of the state propaganda in the lives, minds, and psychology of ordinary people, as well as, it unfolds the North Korean State class and blood-line based segregation ideology, the level of oppression and how ordinary North Koreans manage to survive in this black hole. For instance, the account of Mi-Ran lays out the social, cultural, and class stratification based on the ideological division of the population after the Korean War as a part of Kim Il Sung’s reconstruction policies such as “Understanding People Project” as the daughter of a calm and quiet man who has South Korean roots and worked as lower-class labor in North Korea, all in the same story (26). For the first time in her life Mi-Ran is appealed by a boy named Jun-Sang, a member of an elite Japanese descendent, whose account is also involved in the book, she also finds out the reasons lie behind her and her siblings’ unfair failures in official exams. Her father was eighteen years old when The Korean War was broken and joined the South Korean Army, not because of political motivations but simply because he was not given any other choice. After captured by Chinese troops in 1953, he is eventually released following the armistice but never actually was sent back home along with thousands of others. “The only mobility within the class system was downward. Even if you were in the core class – reserved for relatives of the ruling family and party cadres- you could get demoted for bad behavior, but once in the hostile class, you remained there for life. Whatever your original stain, it was permanent and immutable. (…) The North Korean called these people beulsun- ‘ tainted blood’ or impure” Demicks narrates from the sight of Mi-Ran. Mi-Ran recalls her brother’s escape from home after facing with father’s past and how traumatic it was for them to learn their father was in fact one of the Evil’s puppet according to The History of Kim Il-Sung and The DPRK. The notion of purity and its ideological impetus in fostering The Kims’ cult and his ideology of national identity based on racial superiority plays a crucial role to understand the kind of trauma Mi-Ran and her siblings carry and why it meant the end of a world that they have known but at the same time beginning of another.

Myer (2010) starts his examination of North Korea by asking “how do North Korean see themselves and the world around them?” and tracks the myths and propaganda texts that laid the foundations for Kim’s cult, the foundation of the DPRK (Democratic People’s Republic of Korea), and the idea of national identity and purity in North Korea. Meyer points out the mischaracterization of the North Korean regime as a “hard-line communist” and “ Stalinist” by most of the foreign thinkers, both conservatives and some of the pro left in the US, and pins down the essential ideology of the North Korean Regime and national identity in relation to the history of Imperial Japan and its foundational claim on racial superiority. It is worth quoting here the official myth of the North Korean Race that is extracted by Myer from the North Korean official encyclopedia Choson taebaekkwa sajon : 

Thousands years ago, on a beautiful peninsula in the center of East Asia, there emerged one of mankind’s first distinct races,the Korean race. (…) Koreans were thus the first Asians to achieve nationhood, a crucial first stage of civilization. The Koreans were always one people with the same blood, language, culture and lofty morals. Alas, foreign aggressors, resentful of Korea’s autonomy and greedy for its natural richness, refused to leave the peace-loving people alone. Only by repeatedly driving back invading forces – from Chinese tribes to Japanese samurai to American war ships- was the Korean race able to preserve its unique integrity up to the present day

 From the start North Koreans were marked by a strong sense of virtue and justice, and their exemplary manners earned the country renown as “ The Land of Politeness in the East”. No less famous were their clothes, which are as white as the snow-capped peaks of Mount Paektu. Kind-hearted and well-featured, Koreans lived in harmonious villages, respecting the people above them and loving those beneath them. (75)

North Koreans are told they born virtuous and morally superior and as pure as the whiteness of untouched snow can connote in one’s mind.  Thus, we come to an idea of a natural-born perennially child and, pure, virtuous race yet with its distinct North Korean traits of a race that is weak and fragile, and a race that is in need of a heroic protector, maternal care in the face of exterior danger, that is to say, all foreigners. Myer successfully unfolds the Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-ill’s personality cult that springs from this idea of vulnerable, naïve, and pure identity coding. The former, known as The Great Leader, to Meyer is the symbol of motherly care yet also the symbol of revolution and purity, the latter, known as The Dear Leader, to Meyer is the symbol of father-general, of the homeland, of perfect Koreanness (124).  Here, as it is clear, it is acknowledged by the State history that there is no innate difference between South and North as they are all one-blood line. What differs is some of those were viciously taken apart from their compatriots by malign imperialist forces and their puppet government and forced to live in poverty and in disgrace to their own race. The unique and superior mono-ethnicity was attacked by foreign touch to wide them off, they could not yet they achieved to pollute some of those who once belonged to Mother Land dictated domestic propaganda. Therefore, there was no reason for Mi-Ran and her siblings not to forgive their father but also there was no way to erase this stain in their records which was already hunting them in school, in their relationships, at home and at work. Then she decides that there is no place for her in North Korea and starts planning her way out without telling him, at the time the guy who makes her heart warm.  After an upstanding retelling of six defector’s lives and laying out political, social circumstances that took place at that time Demick briefly notes how these defectors have adapted themselves to their new life, to the outside world, and what they have achieved so far. According to that, Mi-Ran pursued her master’s degree in South Korea, got married and has children. She frequently visits her family members in Canada and she assists to newly arrived North Korean dissidents. Mi-Ran is one of the defectors who acquired wealth and happiness by crossing the borders; she sets a new life. However, memory is pitiless as Demick reflects quite prior to Mi-Ran’s success story, she was still ‘ the same person who had occupied the lowest rung of North Korean society, the poor, the female progeny of tainted blood. She had been shaped by a thorough indoctrination and then suffered the pain of betrayal (…) She had learned to eat her lunch, down to the last kernel of corn or grain of rice, without pausing to grieve for the children she taught who would soon die of starvation, She was wracked with guilt. Guilt and shame are the common denominators among North Korean defectors; many hate themselves for what they had to do in order to survive.” (271)

The same ineffaceable mark of a hunting past and its burden is also carried along in the story of Bandi “Record of a Defection” in which a devoted wife disguises her starvation and covers up the sexual harassment she has exposed by a high-ranking Party member. It is a heartbreaking story of displacement and the horrific consequences of a totalitarian state policy, but a remarkable narrative that deserves praise. “Sangki, it’s me, Il-cheol. I’m sitting down now to write this record of my defection. You remember Choi Seo-hae-s Record of an Escape, which he wrote back in 1920. But now it’s 1990, more than fifty years since our land was liberated from the Japanese colonizers- and unlike Choi, I am escaping from my own country. Sounds absurd, doesn’t it?” (1) Il-cheol writes to his friend, maybe leaving another mark behind him, about his past and current life that haunts, marks, and torments him and his family in every part of their life that they had no choice but to flee from home. The reason behind all of this, he explains, is the disgrace of his traitor father, who cursed his bloodline forever only because of a tiny piece of land. Moreover, now its curse spreads over his wife, whose only fault was to thrust their party member neighbor so that he might help his husband in his career against the odds and, in turn, sexually, physically, and emotionally exploited. The other countless victims of his father’s crime were his eight-year-old nephew, who has no memory of his grandfather. The story is woven with the state’s oppressive regime policies on farming, education, ranking of its population, as well as with its corruption and omnipresence. Il-cheol’s state of mind, as well as his career, is caught up by these old marks when he finds his wife’s contraceptives; from there on, the fragile world that he hides in shatters, and all the old scars come to the surface. As Il-cheol writes to his friend, the reader turns into a witness of the regime’s cruelty by means of reading it. At the same time because of the first person told conversions between his wife and him and him and his friend, Il-cheol’s interior monologues, and the extracted part of his wife’s diary is part of his letter, the person of whom Il-cheol speak become unclear whether reader reads as his friend reading the letter or we, readers are become his friend by reading his letter is unanswered. Unless Il-cheol interrupts his narrative and shouts his friend’s name “Shangki!’ as if clarifying to whom he speaks to.

Conclusion

Reading “The Accusation” and “Nothing to Envy” in comparison to each other could be another possible path to follow with this paper since the time phrase in both book the authors take in hand overlaps with each other at the very significant moments of North Korea, such as “culminated a decade of ongoing crisis: the collapse of communism in Europe, economic difficulties resulting from the loss of the nation's erstwhile trading partners, the death of Kim Il Sung, natural disasters, and, not least, devastating food shortages all contributed to a collective national sense of undergoing a "forced march" (kanghaenggun).” (Epstein, 2003) However, it is not my intention to make a close reading of these stories and compare how these moments occur and are reflected in the narrative, nor it is the reason for my unease that I carried along with this research project.

In 2011, Demick attended at the Oslo Freedom Forum as a representative of North Korea and delivered a speech to address the lack of any North Korean presence at the meeting. It is not clarified in this speech the reason for this absence since at the time of 2011 considerable number of North Korean defectors were in fact known, and some even came to the public with the emergence of North Korean Dissident Literature. Whether the reason behind this absence is the fear of the North Korean Regime and the fear of its far-reaching capabilities or the fact that even though defectors are utilized as soft power against the hard-line communist state in the Western world, some of them might simply want to live without taking all the political attention on themselves. Another possible reading that comes to mind is the post-colonial one in which the act of giving a voice to the silenced is always taken by the dominant, white, capitalist agency. In this speech, Demick naively utters, “North Korea is a country that thrives on a big lie. A lie that it is a great country.” It cannot be refuted that DRPK’s propaganda from its emergence was constructed on the idea of greatness, the greatness of the Dear Leader, the greatness of North Koreannes, and the greatness of North Korea. Yet, it is far from being the only nation that prospers on a lie, or a myth, or the customs and the beliefs of its people. Nations in their formation are established around the idea of territory with its own distinct cultural, national, political, and economic identity, in seeking recognition and power in the international arena. We seem to easily forget that, however, North Korea as a nation emerges and strengthens by these fictitious national discourses, also every other nation has invented its fictitious national norms. Not to go back too far, let’s look at the successor of the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump’s campaign slogan “Make America Great Again”. Or we can look back at the 1980s successor Ronald Reagan's “Let’s Make America Great Again.”

In her remarkable article “Manufacturing Dissidence: Arts and Letters of North Korea’s Second Culture”, Christine Hong examines how the accounts of dissident literature are mobilized as a weapon for invasion politics and for propaganda against the North Korean Regime under the pretense of human rights activism.  As it is appropriate with the context that Demick delivers her speech Hong argues that the contemporary human right discourse “with its fixation on and prioritization of “pain and suffering” in the present, human rights as a seemingly antipolitical, moral discourse evacuates historical context; indeed, it implies the excess, obscenity, and apologistic nature of a temporal frame beyond the most immediate” (749). Although Demick draws fairly reliable accounts in her book, in this short speech where she talks to human rights activists and representatives from all around the world she does not mention the love she is witnessed there as she says in her book but what is not there; the electricity, the internet, food, the truth, even the bible, she says, is banned. By these, she calls attention to the emergency of an act not necessarily a militaristic one, of course, but an act indeed that will end the suffering of these people. Here, North Koreans as a subject of rescue are framed one more time; their absence is taken by the language of others, of what is not theirs, by international publishers, editors, and journalists. Under such conditions, Hong asks the most immediate question, “Can North Koreans be heard at all?” (744).

Neither in both case reader have a real chance to hear, to engage with the person who is the source of these writings. Bandi’s mysterious heroic character has to stay in the shadows for safety issues as far as his publisher concerns, and in Nothing to Envy, the six defectors’ account is retold by Demick; thus their voice is rendered twice by Demick’s account of their story and through translation.  This is why Hong argues the necessity of seeing them “as framed modes of literary expressions” for how they are framed by serious political conditions and promoted as a ‘second culture’ of North Korea as the proof of tens of years-long Kim’s and DRPK’s torturous and oppressive regime that the world and justice have longed for (747). In both accounts, North Korea is depicted in poverty, corruption, decay, despair, and horror and its people in which, in fact, more or the less are the truth thus, their literary criticism inevitably is dominated by the political concerns of which these both literature of the second culture provides proof and unfolds the mysterious facet of North Korea behind its mysterious closedness. Therefore, I argue that one needs to read against to grain in the reading of North Korean Literature whether it is the official and second culture of North Korea, in order to conduct a literary analysis rather than a political analysis of the North Korean Regime and moreover to avoid from the reiteration of the North Korean national identity as a weak, suppressed, alienated, ideological entities.