Reconstructing North Korean Gulag Memories beyond Words

As a counterbalance of words, artists who survive atrocities are using visual representations to inform the world of their traumatic experience. Art, in the form of paintings and film, enables artists to capture and retell a story or event in a much more powerful, emotive way than words. In this case, images can serve as a “voice” for the oppressed. Any form of art can play a critical role in the reconstruction of the

knowledge of important historical events by voicing the otherwise voiceless.

Ideally, artists are able to transform the unspeakable emotions into the visual

11 Besides depicting the South Korean government’s efforts to help the North Korean defectors, Harden also spends a chapter (Chapter 22 “South Koreans Are not so Interested”) to denote the indifference of South Korean society toward the defectors.

testimony, such as paintings, animations, and photos, to communicate the truth about the experiences of a local individual to the global community. Thus, overcoming the barricade of different languages, visual testimony in all forms become an essential way for the outsider to have a grasp on the inner reality of the witness, and it often becomes a therapeutic means for the witness to vent their frustration and stress amidst external degradation. With relatively less education of writing in their motherland, North Korean defectors often turn to drawings, a most primitive yet direct method, to confront their own unspeakable trauma and also to reconstruct the unprecedented experiences. These visual texts are easily accessible since it penetrates not only the barrier of the language, but also the barriers of educational, social, and to some extent, cultural backgrounds. Traumatic testimonies presented in the visual artistic forms are an important compensation for the words. Words and visual arts altogether provide an even more rounded representation of the atrocious event.

A. Drawings

Aside from the authenticity of the memories, Escape from Camp 14 also brings forth the difficulty of representing violence. As Frederick Hoffman points out, although the literature of violence attempts to find a proper way “to record fact independently of structural subterfuges”, “violence tends to destroy structures, to isolate experiences, to force them away from containing forms” (qtd. Young 16). That is to say, Harden’s representation of violent events, including Shin’s gulag memories, is somehow insufficient, because violence tends to destroy structures, and the written language as a form of structure is no exception. In short, the representation of

violence falls outside factual representation (Young 16). The words simply cannot fully contain the violence. Accordingly, to solve the difficulties of representing Shin’s

violent past, Escape from Camp 14 includes six of Shin’s drawings as its appendix.

Shin’s need to depict his Gulag experiences in drawing comes to him in a rather compulsive way. In his early days in Hanawon, Shin’s mental health deteriorates so fast that Hanawon’s medical staff has no choice but to transfer him to the psychiatric ward of a nearby hospital (Harden 166). The counselor there suggests Shin to turn his therapeutic diary into the memoir and offers him the opportunities to learn other languages as a part of his PTSD treatment and a positive distraction. Notably, Shin quickly declines the chance to learn other languages but he is more than willing to acquire some basic drawing skills. In a sense, the drawing becomes Shin’s “new

language,” a more natural and comfortable instrument for Shin to convey his thoughts.

Shin’s drawings play an important role to reconstruct the lost scenes. His drawings are crude and comic-like, but altogether they represent the lost scenes of Shin’s memory, and amplify the cruelty and absurdity of North Korean forced labor camp.

Fig.3-8. Drawings From Escape to the Outside World by Shin Dong-Hyuk portraying Shin’s Gulag memories, published by Database Center for North Korean Human Rights

From figure 3 to 8, the readers see the undernourished children wearing ragged clothes under the threat of guards with a pistol, and scavenging for food and “eating rats, insects and undigested kernels of corn they found in cow dung”; readers also are presented with the violent scenes of Shin’s mother being hanged and his brother being shot for planning to escape, and Shin being tortured in the interrogation room and later being cut off a finger as the punishment of dropping a sewing machine. In particular, the North Korean guards of the camp all feature a tall and menacing posture in Shin’s depiction. Their towering figures embody Shin’s childhood fear.

These drawings are worth more than a thousand words, and solidify what overflows the words – the inexpressible shock and horror. Shin describes these lost emption through his own version of “new language.” Drawing as a new vehicle for Shin allows him to freely record and convey his Gulag experience with the world, despite the language barricades and Shin’s shyness with people.

In Shin’s drawings, the moments of trauma are frozen. Trauma may be

unspeakable, but it is still possible to be communicated “viscerally and emotionally through the alternative cognitive structures of the visual” (Hirsch 1211). That is to say, though the trauma cannot be reconstructed in a rational way, it can still be transferred to the viewer through the artistic elements, such as the color scheme and brushwork,

which reflect the strong feelings of the artist. Furthermore, in her article “Collateral Damage,” Marianne Hirsch states that “ [the] attention to the visual detail singles out the untranslatable power of visuality and its alternative, nonverbal, structures of meaning” (1211). In a widely translated book, Shin’s drawings, which are his firsthand reconstruction of the gulag memories and will not be altered by the

translation, become the most direct and precise representation of his memories. In this sense, Harden’s words are even turned into the “supplement” when juxtaposed with the drawings. In Charlotte Delbo's term of “sense memory,” the memories are restored in human’s five senses and these memories are indestructible (qtd. Bennett 25). Shin’s drawings can be seen as an output of his physical imprints of the gulag memories.

Therefore, even if Shin cannot fully express himself in language and Harden cannot capture every detail of Shin’s experiences, Shin still can present his memories in the drawings. Shin’s eye functions as “a mute witness through which events register as eidetic memory images imprinted with sensation” (Bennett 84).