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WORK TITLE: The Accusation
WORK NOTES: trans by Deborah Smith
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1950
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY: Korea (Democratic)
NATIONALITY: Korean
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandi_(writer) * https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/feb/12/short-story-collection-smuggled-out-of-north-korea-global-interest-bandi
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1950, China.
ADDRESS
CAREER MEMBER:
Korean Writers’ Alliance.
WRITINGS
The Accusation has also been published in Finnish.
SIDELIGHTS
Bandi is the pseudonym of a writer living in the Democratic Peoples’ Republic of Korea, or North Korea. The name comes from the Korean for “firefly.” According to the writer’s biography, which may have been altered somewhat to protect the writer from North Korea’s oppressive regime, Bandi’s parents fled to China during the Korean War. Bandi was born and grew up in China until his family finally moved back to North Korea. Bandi, who is a prominent state writer, had some of his personal writings published in North Korea in the 1970s.
In The Accusation: Forbidden Stories from Inside North Korea, Bandi presents short stories that stem from the author’s disillusionment with North Korea. Because many of the stories in The Accusation are critical of North Korea and would be deemed dissident literature by the state, the stories, which were written from 1989 to 1995, were never published. “The accusations [in the stories] are clear-eyed and resounding: the system is corrupt, ailing or broken; … hardship, fear and hunger are everyday realities; proclamations about egalitarianism merely disguise the ‘knife of dictatorship,'” wrote Brett Josef Grubisic in Maclean’s.
When a friend of Bandi’s defected to China, an opportunity arose for the manuscripts’ publication after Bandi’s friend followed up on a promise to help get the stories published. This was done via an intermediary who smuggled the manuscript out of the country, leading to its publication in South Korea and its eventual translation into English and other languages. Commenting on how the stories depict North Korea, Deborah Smith, who translated The Accusation, noted in an interview for the Foyles Bookstore Web site: “There’s a broad range of characters and settings—from remote mountain huts to the capital, Pyongyang, from a high-ranking intelligence officer to the disgraced son of a traitor. They’re very much depictions of ordinary lives, of struggles and hardships but also of great, albeit quiet, acts of love.”
The Accusation is made up of seven stories that primarily focus on everyday North Koreans but include the ominous background presence of strict government oversight. Punishments by the state are a common theme in the stories, such as in the story titled “City of Specters,” in which a family is exiled from the city to the country for not teaching their two-year-old son to respect North Korea’s revolutionary ideology. Another story, titled “On Stage,” features a young actor whose improvisational sketches land him and his father, who holds a government position, in precarious positions because the improvisations are deemed disrespectful to the death of the Great Leader, Kim Il-sung.
“It’s a quiet privilege to be given access to the voiceless by listening to such vivid and uncompromised storytelling,” wrote Megan Walsh in the New Statesman, also noting: “The stories are expertly translated by Deborah Smith.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor remarked: “Bandi … describes, with numbing gravity, how awful life inside a totalitarian state really is.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, February 15, 2017, Terry Hong, review of The Accusation: Forbidden Stories from Inside North Korea, p. 27.
Kirkus Reviews, January 15, 2017, review of The Accusation.
Maclean’s, April, 2017, Brett Josef Grubisic, “Dystopias and Arty Dogs: Fiction from North Korea, a Second U.S. Civil War, a Space Spider and Art-World Frenzy,” p. 68.
New Statesman, March 10, 2017, Megan Walsh, “Life in the Hermit Kingdom,” p. 49.
ONLINE
Foyles Bookstore Web site, http://www.foyles.co.uk/ (October 30, 2017), author profile and “Questions & Answers,” interview with translator of The Accusation.
Words without Borders, https://www.wordswithoutborders.org/ (October 30, 2017), John W.W. Zeiser, review of The Accusation.*
Bandi (writer)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Bandi
Born
1950 (age 66–67)
China
Pen name
Bandi
Occupation
Writer
Language
Korean
Nationality
North Korean
Genre
Short story
Literary movement
Dissidence
Bandi (Korean for "Firefly"; born 1950) is the pseudonym used by a North Korean writer.
Bandi was born in 1950 in China to Korean parents who had moved there fleeing the Korean War. Bandi grew up in China before the family moved back to North Korea. In the 1970s, Bandi managed to publish some of his early writing in North Korean publications.[1]
After the death of Kim Il-sung in 1994 and the hardship that followed, Bandi lost several people close to him to famine and defections. These developments made Bandi disillusioned with the North Korean system and he started to write dissident literature.[1] The opportunity to publish his dissident writing presented itself when Bandi's friend from Hamhung defected to China. Although the friend could not risk taking the manuscripts with her, she promised that she would find a way to bring them abroad. Several months later, a man previously unknown to Bandi came to see him and passed him a note from the friend, asking Bandi to give the man his manuscripts,[2] 743 slips of paper.[3] With the help of this messenger, Bandi's work made its way to South Korea, where it was published.[4]
In North Korea, Bandi is a member of the country's Korean Writers' Alliance (ko) and writes for its publications.[1] Bandi still lives in North Korea.[5] Although he has expressed willingness to defect, he could not do so because he has family in the country.[2]
Contents [hide]
1
The Accusation
2
See also
3
References
3.1
Works cited
4
External links
The Accusation[edit]
Bandi's short story collection, The Accusation, was smuggled out of the country by a relative and published in Seoul in May 2014.[5] South Korean publishers seek to keep Bandi's identity a secret. To protect his identity, they have deliberately added biographical misinformation into his stories and altered names of people and places. All international publishers agree that behind the pseudonym "Bandi", there is a real author living in North Korea.[6] If this is true, The Accusation is the first North Korean literary work by an author that still lives in North Korea that has been published outside the country.[7] To Hui-un, the leader of a North Korean defectors' NGO, compares him to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who smuggled his manuscripts out of the Soviet Union.[4] However, US journalist Barbara Demick, who has reported on the country for many years, said, "I find it hard to believe that this was written by somebody in North Korea".[8]
The Accusation, comprising seven stories set in the 1990s around the time of death of Kim Il-sung, is set for publication in English and in many other languages beginning in 2017; rights have been secured by Grove Press in the USA and by Serpent's Tail in the UK and Commonwealth.[5][9][10][11][12] Rights of the work have been sold to 20 countries.[3] The work has been a bestseller in France and South Korea.[7] The Accusation was published in Finnish by Schildts & Söderströms (fi).[13]
Bandi, a name derived from the Korean for “firefly,” is a pseudonym for a writer who is still living in his homeland of North Korea. The Accusation is his only published book to date.
About The Author
Bandi is the Korean word for firefly. It is the pseudonym of an anonymous dissident writer still living in North Korea. In 1989, Bandi began to write a series of stories about life under Kim Il-sung's totalitarian regime. The Accusation provides a unique and shocking window on this most secretive of countries. Bandi's profound, deeply moving, vividly characterised stories tell of ordinary men and women facing the terrible absurdity of daily life in North Korea: a factory supervisor caught between loyalty to an old friend and loyalty to the Party; a woman struggling to feed her husband through the great famine; the staunch Party man whose actor son reveals to him the absurd theatre of their reality; the mother raising her child in a world where the all-pervasive propaganda is the very stuff of childhood nightmare. The Accusation is a heartbreaking portrayal of the realities of life in North Korea. It is also a reminder that humanity can sustain hope even in the most desperate of circumstances - and that the courage of free thought has a power far beyond those seek to suppress it.
Bandi's translator is Deborah Smith, whose other translations from Korean include two novels by Han Kang, The Vegetarian and Human Acts, and two by Bae Suah, A Greater Music and Recitation. In 2015 Deborah completed a PhD at SOAS on contemporary Korean literature and founded Tilted Axis Press. In 2016 she won the Arts Foundation Award for Literary Translation. She tweets as @londonkoreanist.
Below, exclusively for Foyles, we talked to Deborah about the characteristics of North Korean fiction, and the urgent, oral quality of Bandi's writing, how and why she became a translator of Korean literature and why she is feeling encouraged by the current state of ficiton in translation in the UK.
Questions & Answers
What do we know about Bandi?
Well, ‘Bandi’ is a pseudonym - it means ‘firefly’. According to the book’s afterword, he is a member of North Korea’s state-authorised Writers’ League, and wrote these stories - which must be very different from the official work he’s able to produce - in secret. They were smuggled out of the country, but he himself has remained behind, so I imagine other details of his biography must have been changed to protect his identity.
Can you describe for our readers what picture The Accusation paints of life in North Korea?
Firstly, the stories were mainly written in the early 1990s, so the picture they paint is of life in North Korea more than two decades ago now. There’s a broad range of characters and settings - from remote mountain huts to the capital, Pyongyang, from a high-ranking intelligence officer to the disgraced son of a traitor. They’re very much depictions of ordinary lives, of struggles and hardships but also of great, albeit quiet, acts of love.
What do we know about the state of literature – and access to foreign literature, if any - within North Korea?
I’m afraid I’m no expert on this; The Accusation itself is the sum total of my engagement with North Korean literature. It’s generally classed as socialist realism, though that’s probably about as helpful as most designations are. Barbara Demick writes that the few foreign books which are available are reserved for the elite, but that Gone With The Wind is quite popular.
As a working writer in North Korea, Bandi has been published under conditions of censorship and state control – and the breadth of literature available in the country is similarly constrained. How do these issues affect the style of Bandi’s illicit fiction writing?
Bandi’s writing has a lot of the features which translator-scholars like Stephen Epstein, Bryan Myers and Shirley Lee have identified as characteristic of North Korean fiction: epiphanic moments, purgative violence, strong female characters. I want to follow their lead and engage with North Korean writing on its own terms, not dismiss it as incapable of having any artistic value, while recognising that it’s nonsensical to assess Bandi’s work without taking his circumstances into account. His writing has an urgent, oral quality, with a frequent use of direct address, and tends towards what we would consider melodrama and sentimentality. Reading work from unfamiliar literary traditions prompts us to re-examine our ideas of what literature can and should be - that’s why I love translations. Melodrama can be 'a way of examining the social basis of certain emotions by exaggerating them' (Rachel Ingalls). It’s also by no means alien to South Korea, as anyone who has even seen their TV dramas can attest.
What, if any, are the linguistic differences between the Korean of the North and the South?
There are quite divergent dialects within both North and South Korea, so that also applies between the two countries. The South uses a lot of foreign loanwords, particularly from American English, so words like computer, elevator, ice cream are simply transliterated into hangul. In the North, they’ve tried to keep the language purer, which means thinking up inventive coinages like 'ice peach flower' for ice cream. Isn’t that lovely?
How did you get involved in translating The Accusation?
I knew the book’s agents, Barbara Zitwer and Joseph Lee, as they also represent Han Kang; they recommended me to Peter Blackstock at Grove when they sold US rights to him.
In our interview between yourself and Han Kang you talked about the discursive, conversational method the two of you developed in translating The Vegetarian. What was it like translating an author you (presumably) couldn’t communicate with?
Actually not that strange, and certainly not unusual among translators (though the author is more often dead than incognito). I definitely feel that the time I’ve been able to spend with Han Kang and Bae Suah, the two authors I mainly translate, is both a personal and a professional blessing. But for me the author’s voice and intention are all there on the page, so I never discuss a translation while I’m working on it.
And what is it like translating a culture you (presumably) can’t visit or engage with?
Again, this isn’t unknown in translation, though the impediment would usually be temporal: I’ve visited Gwangju, for example, but not Gwangju in 1980, as it appears in Han Kang’s Human Acts. What was useful was for me in the case of The Accusation was that a lot of Korean culture is shared across the border. In particular, the stories with a rural setting felt quite timeless, with environments and practices I could recognise from mid-20th century South Korean fiction.
How and why did you become a translator of Korean literature?
I was drawn to literary translation quite consciously because it seemed to combine the two things I was most passionate about, reading and writing, as well as providing the perfect excuse to finally learn a language other than English. As for which language, Korean seemed a good bet – barely anything available in English, which was exciting for me as a reader and, I hoped, would be useful professionally. I began teaching myself the language in 2010, the same year I started a Korean Studies MA at SOAS, and started translating in 2012.
You won the Man Booker International 2016 with author Han Kang for The Vegetarian. How has this affected your life and work?
It’s been simultaneously overwhelming and exhilarating. The biggest change has been being invited to so many international literary festivals and universities - I’ve visited Paris, Venice, the US, India, all for the first time, and met so many brilliant people working in translation, world literature, publishing and bookselling. I feel I have a responsibility both to make the best use I can of the platform I’ve been given and to make sure it extends to as many other translators as possible. I don’t think I’ve actually taken on any new translation contracts since the prize.
What is the state of fiction in translation in the UK at the moment, and how has that changed in recent years?
Translation is definitely having a moment. Over the last few years there’s been a sudden flourishing of small presses taking artistic risks, which is often synonymous with publishing translations. Market research shows that translation punches above its weight in terms of sales, and while the tiny percentage is nothing to shout about in itself, it does mean that only the very best gets through, making ‘translation’ a byword for originality and excellence. Now, the bigger publishers are also waking up to the fact that translation sells. Several of the biggest-name contemporary authors, the ones who can boast a cult following, are ones we read in translation: Han Kang, Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgaard.
And when we talk about translation, we also have to talk about translators. The fact that the MBI exists, in its new guise rewarding author and translator equally, is thanks to the generation before me fighting long and hard for our craft to be given the credit it deserves. It’s becoming the norm for translators to be properly credited by publishers and reviewers, given royalties and paid a slightly more than subsistence rate.
You set up the publisher Tilted Axis Press in 2015 with ‘a mission to shake up contemporary international literature’, focusing on Asian writing in translation. Can you tell us more about this project?
The aim for the press was a mixture of things: to publish cult, contemporary Asian writing, mainly by women. To publish it properly, in a way that makes it clear that this is art, not anthropology. To spotlight the importance of translation in making cultures less dully homogenous. And to improve access to the UK publishing industry, i.e. no exploitative unpaid internships.
So far, our list includes Bengali, Korean, Indonesian, Uzbek and Japanese. Next month, we publish the UK’s first ever translation of Thai fiction, which is both a) insane, b) the reason we exist. We recently relocated to Sheffield, becoming a part of the Northern Fiction Alliance - breaking publishing out of the London bubble with fellow translation heroes And Other Stories and Comma Press.
What’s next for you?
I have new translations of Han Kang and Bae Suah coming out in November ’17 and January ’18 respectively, and I aim to continue translating their work for as long as they keep writing. I’m also finding more time for teaching and mentoring - I’ll be leading the Korean group at the BCLT Summer School again this year, mentoring an emerging Korean translator through Writers Centre Norwich, and taking up a translator’s residency at the University of Iowa.
Dystopias and arty dogs: fiction from North Korea, a second U.S. Civil War, a space spider and art-world frenzy
Brett Josef Grubisic
130.3 (Apr. 2017): p68.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Rogers Publishing Ltd.
http://www2.macleans.ca/
THE ACCUSATION
Bandi, translated by Deborah Smith
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Outraged defiance is built into The Accusation, right down to its fascinating origin story. In the late 1980s, Bandi, the pseudonym of a prominent state writer in North Korea--where authors receive guidance on suitable topics from the Propaganda and Agitation Department, which also passes their work through a cadre of censors--began composing fiction in secret. It denounced the trickle-down of the tyrannical leadership and disastrous economic policies of then-president Kim Il-sung. Bandi's manuscript, consisting of seven stories on 750 handwritten sheets, was eventually smuggled into China between pages of The Selected Works of Kim II Sung.
The accusations Bandi levels at his homeland are clear-eyed and resounding: the system is corrupt, ailing or broken; for ordinary workers, hardship, fear and hunger are everyday realities; proclamations about egalitarianism merely disguise the "knife of dictatorship." At best, North Korea's "straitened circumstances" are depicted as producing absurd bureaucratic hurdles and Orwellian thinking that might be darkly funny if they weren't also real. At worst, individuals, couples and families are used as public examples of "deviance from party ideology" or sacrificed in the name of the state-defined greater good.
Though government officials circulate as dreaded background figures in the bulk of the stories, Bandi tends to focus on workers--at mines, farms and factories--and their losing attempts to either get ahead or sidestep regulations. In "City of Specters," a family is exiled to the countryside for neglecting to educate their son about "proper revolutionary principles." The child is two years old. After a heroic but unsuccessful attempt to obtain a travel permit to visit his sick mother, the protagonist of "So Near, Yet so Far" uses forged papers. Once caught, he's muzzled for 22 days, serving as a beast of burden. From accounts of "dereliction of duty" to the aftermath of being identified as a "single dissonant chord" among the citizenry, the stories document the abuses of a government that routinely damages the people it pretends to fawn over and protect.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Grubisic, Brett Josef. "Dystopias and arty dogs: fiction from North Korea, a second U.S. Civil War, a space spider and art-world frenzy." Maclean's, Apr. 2017, p. 68. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA484725800&it=r&asid=fe5032d7fb2efead8294a88fc2a59028. Accessed 23 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A484725800
Life in the Hermit Kingdom
Megan Walsh
146.5357 (Mar. 10, 2017): p49.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 New Statesman, Ltd.
http://www.newstatesman.com/
The Accusation: Forbidden Stories from Inside North Korea
Bandi. Translated by Deborah Smith
Serpent's Tail, 256pp. 12.99 [pounds sterling]
The Accusation, a collection of courageous and confounding short stories, is an unprecedented work of fiction by an author known only by the pseudonym Bandi. The manuscript, smuggled across North Korea's borders by a relative, is the first piece of non-Juche literature (Juche ideas extol the country's leader) to be published by a writer still living inside the Hermit Kingdom since the peninsula divided in 1945.
The stories are expertly translated by Deborah Smith, who brought Han Kang's Man Booker International Prize-winning novel, The Vegetarian, to English-speaking readers. Each has at its heart an accusation, enabling the book to highlight masterfully the ways in which everyone--from an ageing party official to a two-year-old baby--is debased by the fear of committing an unavoidable or unforeseeable crime.
What happens to the parents whose baby is scared of posters of the Great Leader, or to the boy who is caught holding hands with a girl while picking flowers for display during the endless period of mourning for Kim Il-sung? How about the man who accidentally "murders" rice seedlings intended for collective farming, or the son who travels without a permit to visit his dying mother? "What crime have I committed?" he wonders to himself. "Am I a thief or a murderer?" These questions are private thoughts that can never be vocalised and the unpredictability of each "offence" is so unnerving, the punishment so severe, that Bandi's craftsmanship often lies in his ability to eke out the details, as if this were some dystopian detective drama. The volatility of each scenario makes the outcome feel at once unthinkable and horrendously predictable.
Even though his work shows similarities of both quality and content to stories by authors as various as Gorky, Solzhenitsyn and Chen Ruoxi, or even Chinese contemporaries such as Yan Lianke, it is humbling to realise--given the continued blackout on any non-state-approved literature in North Korea--that Bandi has found his voice alone. And it is clear from his plaintive preface how little he knows of the way the outside world views North Korea: he fears that we, too, must be blinded by its propaganda.
We are used to poking fun from the outside at the state's unintentionally hilarious news stories, from Kim Jong-il being "the best golfer in the world" to North Korean scientists confirming the existence of unicorns and inventing waterproof liquid. At the same time, the testimonies of those who escape--from high-ranking officials to political prisoners--leave us in no doubt that the human rights abuses under this totalitarian regime have no equal in the modern world. Only last month, we witnessed the bizarre assassination of the estranged half-brother of Kim Jong-un, apparently attacked at Kuala Lumpur Airport by two women, one of them dressed in pink tights and a top emblazoned with "LOL", who say they thought it was a prank for a reality-TV show.
This chilling coexistence of comedy and tragedy is exploited beautifully by Bandi in "On Stage", which centres around a young actor who has been investigated for improvising two sketches, "It Hurts, Hahaha" and "It Tickles, Boohoo". His father, a government official responsible for assessing the "sincerity" of people's grief during mourning for the Great Leader, is mortified: first by his son's transgression and later by his own complicity in a world where expressions of sadness and joy are intentionally inverted. In "Pandemonium", the only way to understand this warped reality is to make up monstrous fairy tales. As an old lady asks, "Where in the world might you find ... such a den of evil magic, where cries of pain and sadness were wrenched from the mouths of its people and distorted into laughter?"
The Accusation spans the period 1989 to 1995, covering the final years of the reign of Kim Il-sung, whose birthday is still celebrated as the "Day of the Sun". As a lone representative for ordinary people living in what he calls "fathomless darkness", Bandi (the name means "firefly") offers a much more vulnerable form of illumination. Indeed, knowing that he is still living in North Korea adds another layer of discomfort; the book you hold in your hands carries huge risks for him and his family.
It's a quiet privilege to be given access to the voiceless by listening to such vivid and uncompromised storytelling. And yet, emerging from Bandi's "fictional" world, where news that doesn't suit a government's biases has no value, and the leader fixates on how many people attend the celebrations for National Day, this collection of stories seems both a flickering light in North Korea's darkness and an unintentional reminder that it is getting darker here, too.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Walsh, Megan. "Life in the Hermit Kingdom." New Statesman, 10 Mar. 2017, p. 49. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA491423332&it=r&asid=6779f48be1a2857dff4c4010742be191. Accessed 23 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491423332
The Accusation
Terry Hong
113.12 (Feb. 15, 2017): p27.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
* The Accusation. By Bandi. Tr. by Deborah Smith. Mar. 2017. 256p. Grove, $25 (9780802126207).
Initially published in South Korea in 2014, The Accusation continues to make international history as the first literary work smuggled out of repressive North Korea, now headed for shelves around the world. Bandi--whose pseudonym is derived from firefly, an obvious nod to the insect's small light amid vast darkness--shockingly remains a prominent North Korean writer. None of his native readers, however, will ever have access to these seven illuminating stories that reveal desperate lives enduring terrifying day-to-day challenges. Written between 1989 and 1995, they share a common, reverberating theme: that survival--already threatened by starvation, betrayal, brutality--can hinge on details as absurdly trivial as a crate of rice seedlings, the timing of closed curtains, the placement of an elm tree, a travel pass. British translator Smith (whose rendering of Han Kang's The Vegetarian won 2016's Man Booker International Prize) expertly delivers Bandi's subversive prose with nuanced grace. The afterword further explicates the manuscript's remarkable journey out, with an additional note from the South Korean activist who enabled the precarious north-south crossing. As Bandi's characters both fear and sling accusations, the title takes on piercing gravitas for readers: knowingly turning a blind eye to such inhumanity is not an option. --Terry Hong
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hong, Terry. "The Accusation." Booklist, 15 Feb. 2017, p. 27. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA485442487&it=r&asid=34f25f97e746c9e61a4a0fe06089c993. Accessed 23 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A485442487
Bandi: THE ACCUSATION
(Jan. 15, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Bandi THE ACCUSATION Grove (Adult Fiction) $25.00 3, 17 ISBN: 978-0-8021-2620-7
Fugitive fiction--literally--from inside North Korea, devastatingly critical of the Kim dynasty and its workers' paradise.What do you do when your baby cries at a solemn gathering? You excuse yourself and leave the room--unless you're standing before a huge portrait of your beloved leader alongside beloved runner-up Karl Marx, in which case you pray that the baby in question does not bring down suspicion on your head as an enemy of the state, a saboteur, and that the tears do not unleash mythological monsters, to say nothing of "hundreds of figures hovering at [the] windows, peering out like rabbits from their burrows, eyes narrowed in accusation." A squalling infant might be one thing, a drawn curtain another, a bird cage another still: in claustrophobic North Korea, everything has significance, and though ordinary communication comes barking down from loudspeakers, it's the silences and pauses that carry more than their share of the weight. In these seven stories, Bandi--the name means "firefly" in Korean--describes, with numbing gravity, how awful life inside a totalitarian state really is. "What do you think, Comrade Hong," says one bureaucrat, thinking his way through a worker's crime of holding hands with a "factory girl." "Can this be classed a general incident, or is it a political matter?" There is a streak of satire in these stories, but mostly they are grimly realistic. Bandi is rumored to be a writer within the government, and certainly the author has access to the broad sweep of North Korean society, from industrial workers and farmers to midlevel political functionaries; all are equally oppressed by an all-encompassing system that crushes ordinary emotion and replaces it with piety. Laments one young cadre, "Oh, when would Min-hyuk's uncle be allowed to join the Party and see his true worth discovered?" Of more journalistic and sociological than literary interest, without the inventiveness of recent writing south of the 38th parallel--but still an important document of witness.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Bandi: THE ACCUSATION." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA477242435&it=r&asid=65a976bdf802aade3d48aca97171cc4d. Accessed 23 Sept. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A477242435
from the March 2017 issue
“The Accusation” by Bandi
Reviewed by John W. W. Zeiser
Translated from the Korean by Deborah Smith
Grove Press, 2017
As the Anglo-speaking world dances with authoritarianism, it feels apropos, if not a bit foreboding, that Bandi’s collection of short stories, The Accusation, should have its English debut. “Bandi” is the pseudonym of a North Korean author and member of Chosun Central League Writers’ Committee. His committee takes its cues from the Worker’s Party Department of Propaganda and Agitation, a highly significant state organ.
But The Accusation, which consists of seven short stories, is propaganda of a different nature; one highly critical of the North Korean regime, and particularly that of its first leader Kim Il-sung’s final years, marked by the deprivation and misery caused by the Soviet Union’s collapse. In Bandi’s stories hunger, for example, is everywhere, as evident as is the watchful eye of the State. The Accusation is a stark and often despair-inducing collection, but one we should read with great urgency at this moment, both as a document of what is and what could be and as a way to continue gaining better understanding of the complexities of North Korean society, which remains elusive to the West.
The Accusation’s arrival in South Korea and now in English is cause for celebration. Bandi’s is not the first piece of literature written by a North Korean dissident. Several successful memoirs and collections of poetry have emerged from DPRK defectors in the South, and no doubt these works had their seeds in the North. However, as far as can be told, Bandi’s stories represent the first written by someone who remains in the country, presumably still writing both for the State and for himself (for all we know Bandi is a woman, as it is unclear which parts of his biography are fabricated to protect his identity). How they were smuggled out of the North—a story unto itself, full of the kind of fortune that confirms the truth really is stranger than fiction—is included as an afterward.
The stories are most valuable as representations of the inner struggles of ordinary North Koreans. They are varied, and translator Deborah Smith renders them in an almost cheerful, matter-of-fact tone; characters are given wit and bitter humor. Their lives are at once relatable and comprised of experiences that, for the moment, remain a great distance from the lived experiences of many people who will pick up this book.
At their core they elucidate the logic required of people who are constantly monitored, not just by the State, directly, but by their fellow citizens A passage from the first story, “A Story of a Defection” exhibits the pervasive scrutiny:
I answered unthinkingly, too busy wondering how she could possibly have seen us. Thinking back now, she must have heard the gossip from the woman at No. 4, come to me to verify it, then reported it to the residents’ police. All of which could mean only one thing: Our apartment was under daily observation.
The portion of the North Korean population formally or informally connected to the surveillance apparatus is unparalleled. There is no such thing as idle gossip, and Bandi’s characters are well aware.
One’s connection, however tenuous, to a subversive or reactionary element can be devastating within the social caste system of the DPRK. In the case of Ko Inshik in the final story, “The Red Mushroom”, his brother-in-law was discovered to not have been killed during the Korean War, but ended up in the South, where Inshik’s reputation "became tarred with the brush of those who ‘falsified their history,’ and was sent down from Pyongyang in order to ‘have the proper revolutionary ideals instilled in him’ in N Town.”
In “Record of a Defection” the narrator’s family has been relegated to what is known as the wavering class “because my father was a murderer—albeit only an accidental one, and one whose sole victim was a crate of rice seedlings."
The parents in “The Stage”, the collection's most artful and viscerally affecting story, become agents of the State against their son, Kyeong-hun. Already viewed as a subversive element, “more canny than he’s letting on”, Kyeong-hun is observed holding a woman’s hand and drinking alcohol during the period of mourning for the Dear Leader. But the sins of the son are the whole family's and it is Kyeong-hun’s father who is forced to debase himself before his Bowibu Director and sell out his son with crocodile tears.
"Of course it’s political. Such behavior would be disgraceful at any time, but now! Now, when the inestimable loss of our Great Leader…" As though on cue, tears ran down Yeong-pyo’s cheeks, sallow and sunken due to a long-standing liver complaint. Even Yeong-pyo himself found it difficult to comprehend. How could the small cup of sadness sitting inside him produce a whole pitcher’s worth of tears?
Where the collection falters, if only a bit, is its overreliance on a single narrative structure. Bandi works heavily from flashback to tell his stories. The flashback typically takes up the middle third of each story, often outlining the dedication and perseverance of a Party worker who ends up disillusioned and disgusted, often battling feelings of impotence.
This may be just the style he is comfortable with (no one faults a hip hop artist for never writing a metal song), or perhaps it is a form common or popular in North Korean fiction, there is no way to tell. Fortunately, this rigid structure often breaks out into evocative, lyric passages, such as this quiet moment between old family friends:
...the smoke from Yeong-il’s cigarette quietly unspooled into the freezing air, and a space gradually formed between the two men...
or this description of the weather:
When the wind pauses to gather its breath, its absence amplified the sound of the rain, which poured down the roof in a plaintive whoosh.
The Accusation represents a milestone for those living outside the DPRK, but also in a sense for those living within its borders. To our great detriment, we in the West reduce and caricature North Korea, wanting to believe it simply a country of brainwashed peons serving a Confucian Big Brother. But, even if the narratives tend to be simple, Bandi refuses simplicity for his characters. Instead he gifts them forceful and vivid voices. The characters are stuck inside a terrible bind and it imbues their daily lives with a complexity and self-awareness that is as heartbreaking as it must be psychologically torturous, a bind I hope sincerely we ourselves can avoid in the years to come.