Han Kang’s “Human Acts” and the literature of witness
I picked up Han Kang’s 2016 book Human Acts this week, partly because she had just won the Nobel Prize in Literature. But I was not prepared for the power of her writing. It’s super hard to read. I considered putting it down at about every ten pages. I don’t mean hard, as in difficult writing. It is simply the painful, horrendous, detail in her description of military terror against civilians.
She is capturing the reality of friends and neighbors who were cut down during the democracy protests in Gwangju Korea in 1980. Unlike Elena Poniatowska’s classic Massacre in Mexico, a deep testimonial about the police killings in the Tlatelolco square in 1968, Han uses the novel form to delve deeply, unblinkingly, into the actual reality of the killing of around 2,000 civilians, through beating, bayonetting, and shooting. We see up close the violated bodies, their wounds and the putrid smell. The students attempting to line up corpses and identify them. The soldiers taking truckloads of dead people to a mass burial pit. And then the reality that the military is coming back to kill more. The feeling of the adults and children barricaded in a community center, awaiting their deaths. Further, she describes the torture, perpetuated according to the elaborate grisly imagination of military monsters, of those who were imprisoned for years after the massacre.
If it is hard to read the previous paragraph, it is much more difficult to read Human Acts. But her writing demands that we not look away, dares us, challenges us to stick with it. What the hell, you tell yourself. These people experienced this. The least I can do is to pay attention.
Han Kang has accomplished something truly important. She takes us beneath the body counts and data points to the real cost of human cruelty. And I could not help thinking about the genocide in Gaza — the slaughter of upwards of 42,000 people, many of them children. This has been accomplished by bombs from the air but also point-blank shooting on the ground. Don’t look away, Han Kang shouts at us. This is in your world right now. Own it. Do something about it.
While she does not subscribe to the simplistic claim that humans are violent by nature, the horrors she has witnessed at Gwangju leads her to ask: “Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves this single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, damaged, slaughtered — is this the essential fate of humankind, one that history has confirmed as inevitable?” p. 139
Who knows the answer? Certainly in our lifetimes the horror has shown up pretty regularly. As W. H. Auden wrote in the 1940’s,
But ideas can be true although men die,
And we can watch a thousand faces
Made active by one lie:
And maps can really point to places
Where life is evil now:
Nanking. Dachau.
And we well know the wanton murder committed by US troops in Vietnam (and in US wars since then). In fact, the soldiers who slaughtered civilians in Gwangju had also seen action in Vietnam, where the ROK (Republic of Korea) troops were guilty of many massacres as infamous as My Lai. “Some of those who came to slaughter us did so with the memory of those previous times,” Han’s character says. We know about the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia. Indeed the Korean martial law commanders who led the massacre in Gwangju invoked the slaughter in Vietnam and Cambodia as inspiration.
And entire societies live with the afterlife of the outbursts of violence. The novel follows survivors of the Gwangju massacre and the ongoing burden of trauma that they carry. Human Acts leaves little reason to doubt the truth of Han’s assertion that “There is no way back to the world before the torture. No way back to the world before the massacre.”
You feel compelled to read this novel, to absorb it. And to remember so many other shameful moments. The killing of thousands of Koreans at the Palgakjeong Pavilion in 1919 by Japanese colonial occupation forces; the rape of Nanking so deeply documented by Iris Chang; the destruction of the entire Otomi population of Tecoac by Hernán Cortes’ forces in 1518; the slaughter of 300 Lakota by the US Army at Wounded Knee in 1890; the Chicago white riot against Black people in 1919; the Tulsa Black Wall Street massacre in 1921.
We sometimes say that a person doing vicious, terrible things is acting like an animal. This is in fact a slander against non-human animals. In reality, animals do not systematically torture and slaughter each other. Hence, these terrors are “human acts,” things humans do. So is the term “humanism” really worthy of its implication of decent and ethical principles?
Han Kang has done something important, something that literature gestures to but seldom accomplishes in such granular detail. She demands that we recognize what humans do and calls us to take responsibility to make it otherwise. As Chicago Black poet Gwendolyn Brooks says:
Does man love art?
Man visits art but cringes.
Art hurts.
Art urges voyages.
Human Acts is indeed art, engaged and challenging art.
