A Tribute to the May 18th Gwangju Citizens’ Uprising – The Sound of my Waves
Posted by GwangJu (at 2010/05/10 22:50)
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I recently had the pleasure of assisting in the preparation of a proposal to the UNESCO Memory of the World Register seeking formal recognition of the events that took place in Gwangju between May 18th and May 27th, 1980. As a resident of this city for nearly six years, I’d often heard stories of the brutal suppression of the student-led protests against the imposition of martial law by the ruling military regime. While I listened to these stories with interest and sympathy, the events described seemed so distant from my own experience of Korea as to seem incredible. It was only after reading the accounts and testimonies of survivors and witnesses that I began to put things in their proper perspective.
Without doubt the most moving of these accounts was that of journalist Kim Cheong-gun, who after struggling for an expression that adequately captured the events he was witnessing, settled on ‘human hunting’. According to Kim, ‘the violence against young women was particularly severe: the prettier the woman and the more care with which she was dressed, the worse it was for her.’ In his contribution to Reports on Kwangju by Special Correspondents, Kim asks: ‘How do we put into words a situation where a woman’s clothes are ripped to shreds, where those parts of her anatomy that distinguish her as a woman become the focus of attack?’
After reading such accounts, I found myself eager to explore the literary responses to what has proven to be a landmark event in the nation’s history. As such, I reached for a volume of poetry that had sat (unread) on my shelf for several years –The Sound of MyWaves by Ko Un. Anyone at all familiar with Korean poetry would not fail to recognize the name Ko Un. Not only has he been the nation’s leading poet for almost half-a-century, but his name is routinely mentioned in connection with the prestigious Nobel Prize for Literature. During his lifetime, Ko Un has often found himself at the forefront of the struggle for human rights. Unsurprisingly, therefore, his life and his writing were greatly affected by the Gwangju Citizens’ Uprising.
Although Ko Un’s early work was characterized by a pervasive nihilism, this changed following his imprisonment for his role in the events of May 1980. Ko was confined in a special section of a military prison, and for nearly two years lived under the threat of execution. During this time, he embraced a new understanding of life’s impermanence. While earlier in his career the transitory nature of existence had driven him to despair, he now realized that the value of one’s life originated from the fact that it was, by its very nature, impermanent.
In 1984, Ko Un published a collection of poems entitled Homeland Stars in which he tackled the events that occurred in Gwangju in the spring of 1980. He seemed to sense, even back then, that time would soon erode the memory of the tragedy that had seen so many of the city’s youth injured or killed. In a line from ‘Kumnam Street’ Ko states, ‘The fighting and the carnage were all forgotten, / neon signs soared flashing in the evening air’.
As the anniversary of the Gwangju Citizens’ Uprising approaches, the writings of Ko Un serve to illuminate the paradox of the enormous price paid to secure our basic human rights and the seemingly slight regard in which we hold them.
Elton LaClare
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