As for Korean writers, we were waiting for Hwang Sok-yong, the wonderful narrator of old garden (Zulma, 2005). Or even the poet Ko Un, often considered worthy of the Nobel Prize. The Nobel jurors turned this year to South Korea, but preferred to award a woman, the novelist and poet Han Kang, who at the age of 53 became the first winner of this prize in her country. In doing so, the Swedish Academy distinguishes a powerful work characterized in its words by “a double exposure of pain, a correspondence between mental torment and physical torment closely linked to Eastern thought.”
In 2023, we meet Han Kang on the occasion of the French premiere of his novel. impossible goodbyes (Grasset). We had discovered a fine and precise novelist, like her books, whose poetry voluntarily immerses itself in the fantastic, but complex enough to hide, under its praise of dreams and imagination, an implacable description of human cruelty. The torment, the pain and the indelible traces of male violence were present in the interview, from the first sentences.
“I have always been curious about human nature since I was a child, she trusted us. Maybe because she hurt me. You know, it’s like when you have a sore on your body and you can’t stop touching it, scratching it, or just thinking about it. »
It must be said that barbarism entered Han Kang’s life from the beginning. Daughter of the writer Han Seung-won, little Kang was born in Gwangju, in the south of the country, on November 27, 1970. She was 9 years old when her family moved to Seoul, where she later studied literature at Yonsei University. This measure took place exactly four months before the so-called Gwangju Uprising (May 1980), a peaceful mobilization led by the student and trade union movement for democracy, in protest against the ruling military junta. This revolt provoked a response from the army of such ferocity that it remains synonymous today with terror and bloodshed.
Bodies cut with bayonets
The massacre, which also forms the backdrop of the old gardenHan Kang tells it in The one who returns (The Feathered Serpent, 2016). The little girl discovered these facts at the age of 12 when she found a book hidden in her house. The photos of mutilated faces, bodies with bayonets and her bloody hometown left an indelible mark on her. “Since then I have always tried, she saidto confront this contradictory force that pushes beings sometimes to throw themselves onto the train tracks to save a child, sometimes to murder thousands of their fellow human beings. No matter what book I write, this violence comes to light. »
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