Contemporary Asia in the World. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. xiii, 252 pp. US$40.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-231-17134-2.
Speech acts (as John Langshaw Austin and others would understand them) have become a key component of engagement with North Korea in recent years. Speech acts focused on witness, testimony, and advocacy, which address Pyongyang’s perceived violation of the rules of the contemporary normative and hegemonic consensus surrounding human rights and critiquing North Korea’s acutely different political and economic systems in particular, have driven institutional agendas in the United Nations and elsewhere through the recent Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea led by the Honourable Michael Kirby. The realm of popular media and consciousness has also been marked and dominated by the translation of speech acts by North Koreans who are no longer living in North Korea (variously known as defectors, refugees, or migrants depending on one’s political and philosophical predilections) into a peculiar strain of literary production, the defector memoir. Mostly co-productions and acts of co-authorship, works such as those by Shin Dong-hyuk, Park Yeon-mi, Hwang Jang-yop, and Jang Jin-sung have captured the imagination of the wider world with their vivid, acerbic, brutal, and occasionally lysergic testimonial. Their narratives, similarly to those of North Korea, are subject to intense debate when it comes to matters of veracity and reliability. While it is not the intention of this review to contribute to that debate, it is the contention of its author that generally textual and literary co-productions are determinedly focused on acts of speech which are de-territorialized and de-temporalized from their original context in North Korea. Instead of being rooted in the lived experiences of North Korean famine, desperation, and escape, they become more abstracted moments of politics: speech acts focused on the acts of others and on future acts of regime change and unification.
On the other hand, Sandra Fahy’s fascinating work Marching Through Suffering: Loss and Survival in North Korea, while perhaps sourcing its evidential base from the same ex-patriated, diasporic community of North Koreans as the aforementioned more conventional works of advocacy and international agitation, achieves something of much depth and empirical utility to the scholar in its navigation of these narratives of difficulty and distress. Instead of an embedded concern for those acts (of speech or otherwise) which condemn, de-stabilize, or deconstruct North Korea in the midst of its period of crisis, Fahy, with an anthropologist’s ear, seeks out those speech acts which North Koreans themselves used to negotiate, explain, construct, and experience that period.
Fahy’s book is structurally a journey through its contributors’ own experiences of North Korea’s great famine period of 1992–1997 and journeys to their temporal and geographic presents, as North Koreans who no longer live in North Korea. Fahy adopts her contributors’ own temporal marking and linguistic categorization of their passage to the outside world. Hence what the wider world knows as a famine, and North Korean institutional narratives present as a second arduous march, is conceived of by Fahy’s interviewees as “The Busy Years.” The reader then follows their emotional journey from ideological cohesion to disintegration, near death and finally a break with the nation of their birth.
Utilizing the analytic tools of anthropology and ethnography, Fahy explores the linguistic transformations and strategies present in her interviewees’ past lives, as well as the often neglected temporal difference in the famine experience for North Koreans, dependant on their regional positionality. The busy years apparently began earlier in the late 1980s for those in the periphery , not arriving in Pyongyang’s heart of North Korean bureaucracy until the mid-1990s. In keeping with Alex De Waal’s theoretical frameworks focused on famine, Fahy unveils a deeply uneasy, mediated netherworld of familial and community discourse in which people do not die of starvation or experience famine, but freeze to death or encounter acute and severe pain.
In a clear marked difference from what must constitute a media and popular narrative of not just North Korea’s difficult period, but any moment of famine and acute, life-threatening deprivation experienced by a national or regional population, Fahy builds a picture derived from her interviewees’ accounts and their linguistic and conceptual stratagems of a people possessed of a distinct and determined agency. Faced with extraordinary and at times incomprehensible challenges, North Koreans, in spite of a collapse in conventional morality, social mores, and behaviours, are determined to survive. Her interviewees describe seeing old men steal food from the hands of small children, orphaned and abandoned children left to unsuccessfully fend for themselves and die in public, and families depending on precarious and illegal private vegetable plots in the mountains for food. Yet North Koreans deploy these new forms of private and public language to both cope emotionally and navigate the complex web of political and social expectation, they utilize hidden and subtle uses of humour, and, most prominently, they become adept at engaging with the practices and praxis of market economics, both in semi-public spaces and through acts of determined subterfuge.
Ultimately Fahy’s fine book holds an empathic and emotional ear to its subjects’ stories, narrating both their external and internal travels with an assertive yet subtle sensitivity. Fahy’s subjects are not the North Koreans of public and media nightmare—sallow, disempowered shadows of humanity—but active agents of their own, albeit occasionally unknown or unknowable destiny. Even at their moment of breaking with North Korean territory and sovereignty in the act of becoming that most transgressive of political beings, the North Korean who no longer lives in North Korea, Fahy’s subjects make powerful, rational decisions to bridge and survive existential challenges. This reviewer has rarely read a work which does such empirical and narrative justice to a much maligned and misunderstood people, allowing the reader to encounter their march through, encounter with, and survival from a truly disastrous moment of history in valuable new ways.
Robert Winstanley-Chesters
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom
pp. 681-683