The rise of North Korea’s dissident culture

Totalitarian states have always understood the power of culture. Historically, they have required culture to serve the state. Also historically, once they lost control of culture, they also eventually lost control of everything else. In the 1930s, during the worst excesses of Stalinism, intellectuals, whether Soviet or western, seldom denounced the system. A decade or two later, however, one could already hear Soviet composers expressing disillusion, alienation, and loss — without words, of course — in the dark, mourning, and menacing notes of Prokofiev’s 6th Symphony and Shostakovich’s 11th.

By the 1970s, some of the Soviet Union’s leading cultural figures went into exile, including the writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, and poets Joseph Brodsky and Alexander Galich. From their exile, they advocated for political change in their homeland. Some of them lived to see it. Others dissented as they could from within, such as the writer and playwright Vaclav Havel. Documentaries have been made about Shostakovich’s struggles against the censors; that the authorities had made him a global celebrity during World War II may have saved his life.

Sun Mu’s parody art: Let us endure hardship with a smile!”

In North Korea, too, culture was made to serve the state, but today, culture is also challenging the state. For years, news reports have described the widespread proliferation of banned South Korean popular culture inside North Korea, even inside the barracks of the Korean Peoples’ Army. The state no longer trusts its own cultural works, either. This year, the state saw a terrifying reflection of itself in the feudal landlords of its revolutionary music and banned it. At most, however, this work represents an indirect challenge to the state.

That is changing, too. The paintings in this post are the works of “Sun Mu” (not his real name), a former propaganda artist in North Korea.

Among North Koreans in exile, a culture of dissent is forming among artists, poets, and writers. They are challenging the state directly, and on explicitly political terms.

Probably the leading such intellectual is Jang Jin-Sung, a former court poet in North Korea, now an author, activist, and founder of a dissident news site. Jang has become one of the most important political thinkers among North Korean dissidents in exile. Here is his poem, “The Executioner.”

Wherever people are gathered

there are gunshots to be heard.

Today, as the crowd looks on
a man is executed.

‘’You are not to feel any sympathy!
Even when he’s dead, we must kill him again!’’

The loudspeakers’ words are interrupted.
Bang! Bang!
The rest of the message is delivered.

Why is it that today
the crowd is silent?

His crime: to steal a bag of rice.
His sentence: ninety bullets in his heart.

His occupation: farmer.

Separately, the L.A. Times profiles North Korean refugee and author Lee Kay-yeon, who began to question the North Korean system because of the famine, and its failure to provide medical care for her sick mother. Unlike Jang, Lee was not a writer in North Korea.

In South Korea, she has found refuge in poetry. In May, she released her second collection under the title “Waiting for Mom.” The collection is now available only in Korean, but Lee says she is working on finding a publisher for an English version.

After arriving in Seoul at age 24, having never written anything except school assignments, Lee began to spend her evenings in the new and unfamiliar city jotting down her thoughts and experiences. When she showed her journals to friends, they said her writing sounded like poetry.

Like that of many Korean poets, Lee’s work is heavy on metaphors related to the natural world. Flowers are a strong motif, symbolizing untarnished beauty, as well as cycles of life and death. Rice, Korea’s staple food item, represents the difference between survival and starvation, warmth and cold, comfort and destitution.

Her verses contain sparse, vivid language about themes such as the division of families between South and North and longing for faraway loved ones. One poem of hers, titled “Birthday,” has one verse that reads, “Today is mom’s birthday … a morning breeze blows through my open door, but mom is nowhere to be seen.” [L.A. Times]

Any poetry is exceedingly difficult to translate without losing its rhymes, rhythms, allegories, and literary nuances. This strikes me as extraordinarily challenging in the case of Korean poetry. Still, the works of North Korean writers are gaining greater international recognition.

In 2012, a group of defector writers formed North Korean Writers in Exile and gained official recognition from PEN International, a body that promotes literature around the world, with many prominent writers as members.

Some defector-writers are making waves in the mainstream. In November, novelist Kim Jung-ae became the first defector to win the Korean Novelists Assn.’s best new writer award. Also last year, Jang Jin-sung, who was a poet laureate under former North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, released a widely read memoir, “Dear Leader: My Escape From North Korea,” about his close encounters with North Korea’s leadership and perilous escape to China.

The new wave of recognition comes a decade after one defector, Kang Chol-hwan, found a broad readership with his memoir, “The Aquariums of Pyongyang.” The book led to Kang’s garnering an invitation to the White House in 2005 to meet President George W. Bush.

The thought of an artist challenging North Korea’s system from within is still unthinkable, of course, but this does not mean that dissident art cannot have an impact on North Korean society. In the Soviet Union, banned works were reproduced by hand and passed around as samizdat. If South Korean culture can slip past North Korean censors and find an audience, the same will eventually be possible for the works of dissident North Korean artists, writers, and poets in exile.