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  • Selma Dabbagh reports from the Palestine Festival of Literature: Part 2

    In this second PEN Atlas despatch from British Palestinian writer Selma Dabbagh, we are taken deeper into Gaza; into the streets, into darkness. 

    The combined effect of the bombing of the Gaza power plant in June 2006 by Israel and the land, air and sea blockade imposed on Gaza means that there is not enough electricity or fuel in Gaza. Eight hours of electricity a day from the grid is the norm. Those who can afford to do so, back up their supply with generators, which in turn need fuel to run, and almost all the petrol stations we see are roped off waiting for fuel. It only takes one person to generate a rumour that they might have a delivery on the way, for the petrol stations to become blocked up with queues of cars, tractors, motorbikes and pedestrians that stretch for miles and can last all day. ‘From the time I came to the Festival, until I left at night, they were there waiting; a long, long line,’ said one student volunteer from Deir El Balah refugee camp. ‘I could not even see my town as I approached it since everything was so dark. Only when the car’s headlights shone on it, did I realize we were at my house.’

    Light now also comes in the form of enemy surveillance. Ominous floodlights, spaced apart in the sea, shine inland enforcing the unilaterally imposed Israeli three-mile limit for fishermen at sea. At night, in Gaza city, men smoke shishas in cafes lit by candles stuck on tiled surfaces; small stacks of coals glow upon inhalation.

    Generators on pavements spread fumes into areas where people used to stroll in the evenings. Occasionally, these generators blow up. Badly made, ineptly used, in a country of chain smokers, they are hazardous. Because of the dangers, the mother of one Al Aqsa student refuses to have one in their apartment, ‘When the electricity is on, I use the internet, but I read books by candlelight,’ she says. Donkeys, camels, bicycles and horses are on the rise. Gaza, as the character Khalil says in Out of It, is being bombed back into the Middle Ages.

    On the first night in my hotel room, where a ghoul, in the guise of urine-saturated bedding, crouches shapeless in the cupboard (I lock him in), the power cuts out. Complete blackness: I can’t even see the edge of the bath. I think I hear the roar of a fighter plane above me.  Possibly it is a jet breaking the sound barrier, but that type of blackout distorts noise. My imagination, ever prone to swell uncontrollably with visions of possibilities, imagines a bombing. I remember the line from the Gaza Youth Manifesto for Change, ‘We are sick of being caught in this political struggle; sick of coal-dark nights with airplanes circling above our homes,’ and I, quite simply, don’t want to be there. I have the vulgar luxury of options and I feel self-conscious of this wealth in Gaza. It is rare to find someone there who has anything close to alternatives.

    ‘We are in a big prison. You know, sijun, prison. We. Are. In. A. Big. Prison.’ Everyone says this: students, boys at the Rafah crossing trying to get to Turkey for a couple of days, a short-story writer with a teething baby. ‘You don’t know how unusual that music concert at the Shawwa Centre was,’ they say, ‘Boys sitting next to girls on the floor, standing, dancing. That never happens. What does it feel like to be free?’ ask the students. ‘What’s it like?’

    One of the most talented (and modest) writers on the PalFest delegation, Tarik Hamdan, (‘He looks like the young Jean Genet,’ the novelist Youssef Rakha observes to me) reads poetry to a University class by the light of his mobile phone. At night, the city without electricity is a ghost town. During the day, its underutilized spaces – hotel lobbies, restaurants, cafes, shops – are populated by solitary men who appear to have been abandoned. There is a sense of unanticipated loss in these attendant figures, as though they have all been jilted and still reel internally with their heartache.

    People have taken to cheering as the lights go out, as if it’s a big joke, ‘Ha ha! It’s done it again!’      This happens on Thursday night when we pile upstairs into the fifth floor of our hotel after plain-clothes security from Hamas close down our closing ceremony. This is denied by Hamas Government officials later and multiple apologies are given both that night and the next morning. ‘Bullshit’, says a Palestinian writer, ‘That’s bullshit’. Whoever was behind the decision, someone obviously wanted a shot fired across our bow.

    We continue the curtailed event on the top floor of the hotel. ‘Let’s be constructive,’ says one young woman from Diwan Ghazza who obviously finds life too short to watch dust settle. ‘How do you recommend we set up this competition for bloggers?’ She asks this as we all still trying to find out what happened to the tiny girl whose phone was snatched, abruptly, vindictively, from her by ‘security’ as she sat in the audience while another girl read a poem of thanks to us from the stage. We had been gathered below ground level in the partially restored El Basha house, an attractive, rectangular pit of sandstone with arches and stairs that led down to it on the right hand-side of the stage. At the top of the stairs, armed men gathered, suited or shirted, legs apart with their phones held at arm’s length, scanning and photographing the protesting crowd with their phones. ‘You do this for Palestine?’ shouts Hamdan in a voice somehow bigger than him and the cage of my chest feels cleaved apart. Don’t tell me we’ve come to this. Is this what happens when authorities are empowered to crack down and disempowered from providing?

    From the moment of the rabid, random phone grab and the armed men shouting how it is forbidden to film security, the questions begin: ‘Where has she gone? Did they take her? Did she get her phone back? Why her? Was she filming the stage? Why did they say she was filming security? See how they spread fear? You see? It’s good that you saw this. This is what we live with every day. It is good you are here. If you weren’t, they would beat us all and destroy the building. I am sorry you saw this, we are not like this. The girl, a porcelain miniature figurine in skinny jeans and a pink headscarf, is finally tracked down, distraught, at home and persuaded to come back to the hotel for the poetry readings of Haddad and Hamdan, and the oud playing of Eskanderella. ‘It’s like a dream having you here,’ says a short-story writer, whose five-year old draws a picture for my five-year old in London, ‘and you’ll leave and we’ll be left to a nightmare, a horrible nightmare’.

    ‘We used to have one authority when the Israelis were here, one authority and one enemy, now with Fatah and Hamas, we have three authorities and this makes our lives hell.’

    And in the darkness, light.

    ‘I don’t want to talk to you anymore about these tunnels,’ says one of the many students who has been in the tunnel industry, working the pulleys at the top of the well like openings for $50 per day ($100 if you go down, but you could get gassed or otherwise killed down there, as a friend of his was), ‘or about drugs’. (I am trying to find out more about the craze for a highly addictive upper, Trimadol, that has taken off since the relative ‘opening’ of the border with Egypt.) ‘I want to talk to you about literature,’ he says, ‘She walks in beauty like the night. Who wrote this?’ ‘Byron,’ someone says. ‘Ah yes, Lord Byron. I love this,’ he says with the most amazing smile, as though he wrote the lines himself.

    About the Author

    Selma Dabbagh is a British Palestinian writer based in London. She is the author of the novel, Out of It, (Bloomsbury, 2011). Her short stories are mainly set in the contemporary Middle East. Recurring themes in her work are idealism (however futile), political engagement (or lack thereof) and the impact of social conformity on individuals.

    In 2004 and 2005 she was selected as a Finalist for the Fish International Short Story Prize and was English PEN’s nominee for International PEN’s David TK Wong Prize in 2005. Fish also nominated her for the Pushcart Prize in 2007.

    Her work has appeared in International PEN’s Context: The Middle East magazine, Qissat: Short Stories by Palestinian Women and NW15: An Anthology of New Writing. Her work has been praised by reviewers in The Independent, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Al Ahram Weekly, the Times and The Sunday Times.

    Some of her short stories, reviews of her work and interviews about her are available on her website.

    Selma is currently working on a second novel and a fiction feature film with the director Azza el Hassan.

    Additional Information

    Tarik Hamdan is a Palestinian poet and musician, born in 1982.  His first poetry book Once When I was a Sperm was published in 2010. His poems have been translated into English, Spanish and Korean. He is the Editor in Chief of Filstin Ashabab – a monthly arts and literature magazine for young artists and writers. He is active in diverse media and art projects in Palestine, and the Arab world.

    Amin Haddad is an Egyptian poet. He has published several collections of poetry. He is the founder of El-Share3 (the street) – a group of poets and musicians – which he both manages and participates in.

    Youssef Rakha was born in Cairo in 1976.  Reporter, copy editor and cultural editor at Al-Ahram Weekly, the Cairo-based English-language newspaper.  He has published seven books in Arabic and the eighth, his second novel, is forthcoming with Dar al Saqi in October, 2012

    You can read more about this year’s PalFest here. 

  • Selma Dabbagh reports from the Palestine Festival of Literature: Part 1

    This week the PEN Atlas hears from British Palestinian writer Selma Dabbagh. In the first despatch, Selma describes her journey into Palestine; the sights, sounds and people she encounters en route. 

    Up to two days before we leave we are not sure if we will get in, as permission has not been granted by the Egyptian authorities for their nationals to travel. There is mention, without any detail (steps and mud? possible collapse or attack?) of tunnels. A media campaign is launched, postponed by a day because of violence outside the Ministry of Defence in Cairo. But then, “Yay!”, communicates the jubilance Tweeted and Facebooked from Cairo and Gaza, we get the okay and we are off. Slowly off: seven hours to the border and four sitting at it (electrocutory sounding buzzers going off with semi-official shouters calling out names, a man in a white uniform yelling from a desk stranded at the side).

    An oud player from Cairo from the revolutionary band Eskandarella starts strumming softly from one of the moulded plastic seats, next to the wheelchair bound women and the waiting, smoking, pacing crowd that we have become; and the holding station of the Rafah border crossing is momentarily transformed. It is as if a network of vivid magical circuitry runs now throughout that large, unloved space: a communication of something deep and connective that we feel for a transient moment, until it stops. The oud player must put the instrument away. He is not to get through the border. He and one other Egyptian, a blogger, are to be returned to Arish because they do not have the papers to show that they are exempt from conscription. Fruitless negotiations: logic on our side, rules on theirs.

    We move on without those who are to follow the next day.

    The swinging coach lurches and it’s a ‘Welcome to Palestine’ sign and we all cheer even though we are not so dim that we don’t know there is a sad, ironic disappointment in this proclamation. But it is a sign that was fought for, a forbidden word that is now writ high. I, for one, was once harassed and sent back to Cairo after seven hours with Israeli security because they found a Palestinian flag the size of a Smartie in my bag, back in the days when that alone was a statutory offence.

    Officials await us at the border, fruit juice with bits in it, references to the struggles of Mandela, celebration of the fact that this is the first delegation of that size from the new Egypt, national PR and emotion. Hard seats and handshakes.

    And then, Gaza.

    By now it is dark: dark in a deep, soft way that makes the sky and the moon, full within it, appear like a felt collage. We pass an abandoned missile-struck building, grinning toothlessly out to sea, and then, it is a meditative journey up the coast, where much of the land is agricultural, or fallow, with breeze from the sea catching in rushes and billowing in the walls of greenhouses shaped like modernist oriental tents, made of a translucent fabric glowing from within. I feel as though we have snuck into a secret garden, a forbidden city.

    We must be driving through the least densely populated part of the most densely populated strip of land in the world, as it takes some time before we see signs of habitation, but they come with rows of shops: solitary boys manning large desks in furniture showrooms, motorbikes parked up against walls, tractors in fields, umbrellas on fruit stands and paintings of Mickey Mouse on nursery walls. ‘It’s like Egypt,’ says one of the Egyptian writers, which is as it should be, since the countries neighbour each other, the shops, cafes, children are the same. Marriages with bands beeping through the streets take place, women lift their skirts to paddle in the sea and men sit under trees seduced by the moon.

    The global porthole for viewing Gaza is the news media and it shows us a place that exists only in times of crisis: at the moment of a missile strike, at times of political unrest and violence, depicting inhabitants as victims of attacks, as though this is a population brought up to suffer, rather than people who are desperate to just get on and do stuff  like everyone else.

    And this, to my mind, is where the fiction writer comes in: to introduce lives, relationships, aspirations beyond and against political events, or even in the complete absence of political events, to introduce a different truth, to say, there were people here first, before the violence of the missile, of the gun battle, before men were taken away to prisons and never seen again. Feel who we were loving, what we were hoping for, look at what we were doing and building before all this came, while this came, despite the fact that these horrors came, intruded and tried to muck it all up.

     

    About the Author

    Selma Dabbagh is a British Palestinian writer based in London. She is the author of the novel, Out of It, (Bloomsbury, 2011). Her short stories are mainly set in the contemporary Middle East. Recurring themes in her work are idealism (however futile), political engagement (or lack thereof) and the impact of social conformity on individuals.

    In 2004 and 2005 she was selected as a Finalist for the Fish International Short Story Prize and was English PEN’s nominee for International PEN’s David TK Wong Prize in 2005. Fish also nominated her for the Pushcart Prize in 2007.

    Her work has appeared in International PEN’s Context: The Middle East magazine, Qissat: Short Stories by Palestinian Women and NW15: An Anthology of New Writing. Her work has been praised by reviewers in The Independent, The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement, Al Ahram Weekly, the Times and The Sunday Times.

    Some of her short stories, reviews of her work and interviews about her are available on her website.

    Selma is currently working on a second novel and a fiction feature film with the director Azza el Hassan.

  • Great Flemish Voices: Louis Paul Boon and Beyond

    In this week’s PEN Atlas despatch editor and translator Michele Hutchison introduces some of the greatest Flemish writers…

    Book lovers in the Netherlands and Flanders will not have been able to escape the centenary of Louis Paul Boon’s birth this year (1912-1979) though farther afield the writer has yet to become an obvious inclusion in the canon of twentieth century European literature where he could sit comfortably alongside Samuel Beckett, James Joyce or Céline. Here, the centenary is being celebrated in style with a whole series of literary events, massive press coverage, a website and an exhibition in Antwerp. Perhaps it will have some impact abroad.

    © Jo Boon, Erembodegem
    © Jo Boon, Erembodegem

    Louis Paul Boon is considered one of three great Flemish writers: the other two being Hugo Claus and Willem Elsschot. Born to a working class family in the factory town of Aalst, west of Brussels, Boon evolved into one of the leading modernist writers of the period. Pinnacles of literary achievement are the complex novels Chapel Road (1953) which I read in English when I first arrived in Holland, and its sequel Summer in Ter Muren (1956). His oeuvre is diverse and also includes historical adventure novels about medieval bandits, autobiographical works and a dated and somewhat questionable collection of annotated erotic photographs. 

    A hundred years after his birth, very little of Boon’s work has been translated into English but the Dalkey Archive Press are making some headway. Paul Vincent’s translation of their third Boon novel, an accessible title My Little War, was recently awarded the 2011 Vondel Prize. In other languages he has fared better with reissues or new translations a frequent occurrence; the most recent were in Turkey and Germany. Greet Ramael of the Flemish Literary Foundation tells me that foreign interest in his books remains lively. 

    Praised primarily for his social and political engagement but also for his innovative style, Louis Paul Boon broke free of the conventions of the novel, sampling text mediums, experimenting with form and voice. Belgian Dutch was an excellent conduit with its wide range of dialects and registers, a much more diverse form of the language than standard Dutch.

    The linguistic richness of Belgian Dutch is something which makes Flemish literature stand out today. Of course not all Flemish writers make use of it, some like Peter Terrin (The Guard, MacLehose Press) are pupils of Elsschot and prefer a classical pared-down style without dialect. Others, such as Dimitri Verhulst are clear proponents of Boon’s ‘volks Vlaams’ – working class Flemish. Verhulst is a fellow Aalstian and Boon’s influence can be seen across his oeuvre – from a tongue-in-cheek homage in a chapter of Problemski Hotel to the social critique in Godverdomse dagen op een godverdamse bol or the verve and setting of his most recently released novel in translation, The Misfortunates. His translator, David Colmer, agrees that the influence of Boon is visible in his work but also sees a crucial difference, ‘Verhulst aims to please his reader, to entertain.’

    Verhulst himself is quick to acknowledge his debt to Boon but the Belgian press has also picked up on Geertrui Daem and Joost Vandecasteele as possible heirs. Geertrui Daem was also born in Aalst and is a generation older than Verhulst so she has already amassed quite a body of work. I have only read her most recent novel, De bedlegerige (De Bezige Bij Antwerpen, 2011); set in 1957 in a working class community, the highly strung son of a domineering mother takes to his bed. Keenly observed and in places acutely funny, it is portrait of a time and place not only in its action but also in its language, a challenge for any translator.

    Boon was terrified of urban expansion and industrialisation, and these formed recurring themes in his work. Young writer and stand-up comedian Joost Vandecasteele has been pegged as a Boonian because of the social analysis inherent in his fiction. Aline Lapeire, editor at De Bezige Bij Antwerpen where his second novel Massa has just been published, says, ‘like Boon, he paints a picture of contemporary society and captures the zeitgeist in a unique individual style’. Massa has one foot in the real world and the other in a future technological dystopia; his debut Opnieuw en opnieuw en opnieuw was notable in its references to other narrative forms such as computer games and the graphic novel – like Boon he refers to the media around him.

    There was another side to Boon I learn at Flemish publishing house, Uitgeverij Vrijdag. Director Rudy Vanschoonbeek tells me that Boon was ‘a precursor of the current mediatised era where authors become popular through appearing on chat shows’. Working class hero turned 1960s socialite, Boon wrote the society column in newspaper De Vooruit and went on to host a TV quiz show. None of Vrijdag’s stable of authors are real Boonians in style, though I do hear an interesting anecdote in which Geertrui Daem’s experiences of being edited in the Netherlands are compared to those of Louis Paul Boon when he moved to Dutch house De Arbeiderspers with Chapel Road. Apparently the working class Flemish character of the writing was (partly) edited out, ‘or made more readable as is an editor’s task’ Vanschoonbeek hastily adds.

    Though there are some excellent Flemish publishing houses, many authors opt to be published by the more powerful Dutch houses who distribute across both territories. That Flemish writers sometimes claim their work is ‘censored’ by Dutch editors points to the tensions and differences between users of standard Dutch with its Calvinist genes and its flamboyant Catholic working class cousin. 

    About the author

    Michele Hutchison (Solihull, 1972) worked in publishing in the UK before moving to the Netherlands in 2004. She now works as an editor at a Dutch literary publishing house and as a freelance translator. Writers she has translated include Joris Luyendijk, Rob Riemen, Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer and Simone van der Vlugt. 

    Additional Information

    For more on Boon’s life visit LP Boon exhibition ‘Villa Isengrimus’ at the Letterenhuis in Antwerp (ends 4th
     November) 2012.

    Boon 2012 centenary website (in Dutch)  

    Dalkey Archive Press, LP Boon in translation

    The Flemish Literary Foundation 

    Dimitri Verhulst at Portobello Books 

    Peter Terrin at MacLehose Press

    Flemish publishing house Uitgeverij Vrijdag

    Joost Vandecasteele at De Bezige Bij Antwerpen

  • What We Don't Know About North Korea

    This week’s PEN Atlas despatch comes from Krys Lee, who takes a look at the literature from (and about)  North Korea that is available in English translation.North Korea has featured prominently in the news for many years, particularly in recent months with the death of its leader Kim Jong-Il on Dec 17, 2011. But it has been largely absent in fiction, at least in English. What is available in English is Adam Johnson’s much-praised and recently published novel The Orphan Master’s Son, James Church’s Inspector O novel A Corpse in the Koryo, and a few stories from my book Drifting House. Translated works, usually from South Korea, open up a few more  opportunities, including Jia: A Novel of North Korea by Hyejin Kim that reads much like a news report, as well as a more nuanced rendition of the country in Young-ha Kim’s Your Republic Is Calling You.I was able to have brunch with Young-ha in New Yorka few weeks ago. I’ve been reading his work for over eight years, both in Korean and in translation, so when he came to the Center for Fiction where I was reading and suggested that we meet, I quickly agreed. I wrote in English but have lived in Seoul, South Korea for over ten years, and Young-ha wrote in Korean but has been living in New York for the past two years as a writer in residence at ColumbiaUniversity. We are both part of a wave of transnational writers, and seemed to recognize this in each other. We talked about many things, but one of them was the sense of loneliness that Young-ha, as a seasoned writer, warned me of, that would inevitably mark my life as a writer. The constant travel and time spent away from home will change your life, he said. This observation is much in keeping with his book Your Republic Is Calling You.Though Your Republic Is Calling You is set in South Korea, it is the best novel about North Korea available in translation. The novel follows one day in the life of a North Korean spy named Ki-yong who has been slumbering at his job incognito for many years in Seoul, when he is suddenly called back to the homeland. Though it was marketed as a thriller in the English-language market and given a new glamorous, chilling title, the original book in South Korea was seen as literary novel with the title which would translate roughly as The Empire of Light. As a thriller, it is quiet at best. Not much happens in terms of action, and more time is spent on the ruminations of the main narrator as he makes the greatest decision of his life: Does he return toNorth Korea, with no idea of what awaits him, or does he stay in the South, with all its potential unknown repercussions? Either way, the reader becomes intimate with his neither here nor there status, and with the sense of being an outsider that has shaped Ki-yong’s life. Young-ha’s intimacy with the details of North Korean life as well as his deep understanding of Korean culture, help readers vividly feel and understand the troubled modern history of the Koreas.Yi Mun-yol’s An Appointment with My Brother is another seminal work in Korean that is being retranslated into English by noted translator and writer Heinz Fenkl. Two separated brothers, one from North Korea and one from the South, meet in China after their father has died. This meeting between separated brothers is a popular theme in Korean modern literature as it is emblematic of the relationship of the divided Koreas, but this trope is still powerful and fresh in Yi Mun-yol’s telling. Yi, one of Korea’s most eminent living writers, knows this particular story intimately. His father defected to North Korea after the Korean War, which caused incredible economic and psychological hardship to the family, all subjects that Yi explores in his fiction.The story of division has figured largely in the imagination of South Korean literature, but more recently North Koreaitself has taken center stage with the novel Rina by South Korean writer Kang Yong-Suk. The novel’s premise is promising, and it begins with great urgency as we follow North Korean refugees in China through the jungles of Southeast Asia as they seek safety in a third country. Despite the one-dimensional characters and a rather limited understanding of North Korea, Rina was successful in the domestic market, showing that the issues are ever present.More fiction about North Korea will continue to be published in South Korea and abroad, but what is available from North Koreans themselves is usually of little artistic merit, as all art forms strictly serve the government’s purposes. North Korean defectors have not yet made significant contributions to the world of letters, in part due to the vastly different education and literary systems of North Koreaas well as skewed demographics, as most defectors originate from the northern provinces where farming, mining and logging are concentrated. The most prominent cause, however, is the difficult climate awaiting them in South Korea, Japan, theU.S., and other “safe” third countries. Adaptation to a foreign culture and to capitalism, discrimination issues and the daily war of survival have made literature a luxury for most. I look forward to a future when more defectors write fiction and poetry the way they are making inroads into memoir, visual art and film.Young-ha Kim and I parted after two hours of food and conversation. In that time we spoke in Korean with a smattering of English, but when the English rose up it felt awkward and artificial, so we reverted back to Korean. This state of being between languages and between cultures takes on an entirely different meaning and import for the North Korean defector community of today, the only community of North Koreans that the international community can truly know, if we care to.

    About the author

    Krys Lee is the author of Drifting House recently published by Faber and Faber in the U.K. and Viking/Penguin in the U.S.. She was born in Seoul, South Korea, studied in the U.S. andEngland, and lives in Seoul. Her work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Narrative magazine, Granta (New Voices), California Quarterly, Asia Weekly, the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Huffington Post and Condé Nast Traveller,UK.www.krys.lee.comhttp://faber.co.uk/author/krys-lee/

    Additional Information

    Adam Johnson (1967): ‘The Orphan Master’s Son’, Doubleday, 2012.  American novelist and short story writerJames Church (pseudonym) ‘A Corpse in the Koryo’, St Martin’s Press, 2007. He is a former Western intelligence officer with decades of experience in Asia and an author of four detective novels featuring a North Korean policeman, Inspector O.Hyejin Kim:  ‘Jia – A Novel of North Korea’, Cleis Press, 2007 She has written for numerous publications including, Asia Times. ‘Jia’is her debut novel and was inspired by her encounters with North Korean refugees in northern China.Young-ha Kim (1968): ‘Your Republic is Calling You’, Mariner Books, 2010.  Novelist. His books are translated into many languages.Yu Mun Yol (1948):  ‘An Appointment with My Brother’, currently unavailable in English, is being retranslated by Heinz Fenkl for Azalea Journal. He is one of South Korea’s most admired novelists and his books are translated into many languages.Heinz Fenkl is a writer, editor and translator. His fiction includes ‘Memoirs of My Ghost Brother’, Anchor, US, 2007.Kang Yung-Suk; ‘Rina’, 2006, Munhakdongne Press. Kang is a respected short story writer and novelist. ‘Rina’ is her debut novel.

  • What We Don’t Know About North Korea

    This week’s PEN Atlas despatch comes from Krys Lee, who takes a look at the literature from (and about)  North Korea that is available in English translation.North Korea has featured prominently in the news for many years, particularly in recent months with the death of its leader Kim Jong-Il on Dec 17, 2011. But it has been largely absent in fiction, at least in English. What is available in English is Adam Johnson’s much-praised and recently published novel The Orphan Master’s Son, James Church’s Inspector O novel A Corpse in the Koryo, and a few stories from my book Drifting House. Translated works, usually from South Korea, open up a few more  opportunities, including Jia: A Novel of North Korea by Hyejin Kim that reads much like a news report, as well as a more nuanced rendition of the country in Young-ha Kim’s Your Republic Is Calling You.I was able to have brunch with Young-ha in New Yorka few weeks ago. I’ve been reading his work for over eight years, both in Korean and in translation, so when he came to the Center for Fiction where I was reading and suggested that we meet, I quickly agreed. I wrote in English but have lived in Seoul, South Korea for over ten years, and Young-ha wrote in Korean but has been living in New York for the past two years as a writer in residence at ColumbiaUniversity. We are both part of a wave of transnational writers, and seemed to recognize this in each other. We talked about many things, but one of them was the sense of loneliness that Young-ha, as a seasoned writer, warned me of, that would inevitably mark my life as a writer. The constant travel and time spent away from home will change your life, he said. This observation is much in keeping with his book Your Republic Is Calling You.Though Your Republic Is Calling You is set in South Korea, it is the best novel about North Korea available in translation. The novel follows one day in the life of a North Korean spy named Ki-yong who has been slumbering at his job incognito for many years in Seoul, when he is suddenly called back to the homeland. Though it was marketed as a thriller in the English-language market and given a new glamorous, chilling title, the original book in South Korea was seen as literary novel with the title which would translate roughly as The Empire of Light. As a thriller, it is quiet at best. Not much happens in terms of action, and more time is spent on the ruminations of the main narrator as he makes the greatest decision of his life: Does he return toNorth Korea, with no idea of what awaits him, or does he stay in the South, with all its potential unknown repercussions? Either way, the reader becomes intimate with his neither here nor there status, and with the sense of being an outsider that has shaped Ki-yong’s life. Young-ha’s intimacy with the details of North Korean life as well as his deep understanding of Korean culture, help readers vividly feel and understand the troubled modern history of the Koreas.Yi Mun-yol’s An Appointment with My Brother is another seminal work in Korean that is being retranslated into English by noted translator and writer Heinz Fenkl. Two separated brothers, one from North Korea and one from the South, meet in China after their father has died. This meeting between separated brothers is a popular theme in Korean modern literature as it is emblematic of the relationship of the divided Koreas, but this trope is still powerful and fresh in Yi Mun-yol’s telling. Yi, one of Korea’s most eminent living writers, knows this particular story intimately. His father defected to North Korea after the Korean War, which caused incredible economic and psychological hardship to the family, all subjects that Yi explores in his fiction.The story of division has figured largely in the imagination of South Korean literature, but more recently North Koreaitself has taken center stage with the novel Rina by South Korean writer Kang Yong-Suk. The novel’s premise is promising, and it begins with great urgency as we follow North Korean refugees in China through the jungles of Southeast Asia as they seek safety in a third country. Despite the one-dimensional characters and a rather limited understanding of North Korea, Rina was successful in the domestic market, showing that the issues are ever present.More fiction about North Korea will continue to be published in South Korea and abroad, but what is available from North Koreans themselves is usually of little artistic merit, as all art forms strictly serve the government’s purposes. North Korean defectors have not yet made significant contributions to the world of letters, in part due to the vastly different education and literary systems of North Koreaas well as skewed demographics, as most defectors originate from the northern provinces where farming, mining and logging are concentrated. The most prominent cause, however, is the difficult climate awaiting them in South Korea, Japan, theU.S., and other “safe” third countries. Adaptation to a foreign culture and to capitalism, discrimination issues and the daily war of survival have made literature a luxury for most. I look forward to a future when more defectors write fiction and poetry the way they are making inroads into memoir, visual art and film.Young-ha Kim and I parted after two hours of food and conversation. In that time we spoke in Korean with a smattering of English, but when the English rose up it felt awkward and artificial, so we reverted back to Korean. This state of being between languages and between cultures takes on an entirely different meaning and import for the North Korean defector community of today, the only community of North Koreans that the international community can truly know, if we care to.

    About the author

    Krys Lee is the author of Drifting House recently published by Faber and Faber in the U.K. and Viking/Penguin in the U.S.. She was born in Seoul, South Korea, studied in the U.S. andEngland, and lives in Seoul. Her work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Narrative magazine, Granta (New Voices), California Quarterly, Asia Weekly, the Guardian, the New Statesman, the Huffington Post and Condé Nast Traveller,UK.www.krys.lee.comhttp://faber.co.uk/author/krys-lee/

    Additional Information

    Adam Johnson (1967): ‘The Orphan Master’s Son’, Doubleday, 2012.  American novelist and short story writerJames Church (pseudonym) ‘A Corpse in the Koryo’, St Martin’s Press, 2007. He is a former Western intelligence officer with decades of experience in Asia and an author of four detective novels featuring a North Korean policeman, Inspector O.Hyejin Kim:  ‘Jia – A Novel of North Korea’, Cleis Press, 2007 She has written for numerous publications including, Asia Times. ‘Jia’is her debut novel and was inspired by her encounters with North Korean refugees in northern China.Young-ha Kim (1968): ‘Your Republic is Calling You’, Mariner Books, 2010.  Novelist. His books are translated into many languages.Yu Mun Yol (1948):  ‘An Appointment with My Brother’, currently unavailable in English, is being retranslated by Heinz Fenkl for Azalea Journal. He is one of South Korea’s most admired novelists and his books are translated into many languages.Heinz Fenkl is a writer, editor and translator. His fiction includes ‘Memoirs of My Ghost Brother’, Anchor, US, 2007.Kang Yung-Suk; ‘Rina’, 2006, Munhakdongne Press. Kang is a respected short story writer and novelist. ‘Rina’ is her debut novel.

  • Writing In A City That’s Collapsing

    English PEN Launches the PEN Atlas with this piece by Athens based writer Gazmend Kapllani.

    What does an author do in a city that is collapsing? Like all the other non-authors, he tries not to collapse. He hopes that the worst is over, and yet he fears that perhaps the worst is yet to come. He observes the falling snow and for a moment he thinks about the homeless who have filled the streets of Athens. To them, snow means death. Perhaps this makes a certain book come to mind – 

    A Sun for the Dying by Jean-Claude Izzo.

    If he uses the metro often, he’ll observe that since the economic crisis began, the number of people reading books on the train has increased. Unfortunately the number of beggars who move from one train to another with their hand outstretched, has increased even more. In any case, the metro is the only place in Athens where the crisis, with all of its hazardous force, has not yet been entirely felt. Every time I descend into the station, it’s as if I am in a shelter which protects me from the prevailing feeling of melancholy which persists above ground. The people waiting on the clean platforms have more relaxed expressions on their faces. It’s as if they’ve put on a temporary mask. Once you ascend to the surface, the mask falls.

    You walk along the streets of Athens, “collecting” various images – broken storefronts, glum faces, burnt buildings and homeless people who are like sad witnesses standing across from burned-out buildings. The ruined buildings are some of the most beautiful in Athens. They are victims of violence at the hands of “neo-barbarians” who are “children” of an “eternal present” – with no recollection, without a past and without a vision for the future besides their only slogan: “a burning city is a blossoming flower.”

    One of the buildings destroyed by fire is the Attikon cinema, one of the city’s oldest. It was at this cinema, in February 1991, where I watched my first film in Athens – An Angel at my Table – a movie which tells the dramatic life story of New Zealand author Janet Paterson Frame. Back then I was a recent immigrant, in Athens for only two months, without residency papers and knowing very little Greek. I can still recall some scenes from that movie. Janet Frame was horribly stigmatized and suffered a great deal but in the end she made it. Standing in front of this burned cinema in Athens, I hope that Greece will follow the same fate of this famous writer, coming out of its scary present stronger.Putting my memories aside, I continue a little further down the street. Near the cinema I notice an open-air stall selling used books. Five euros per book. Used books, especially during these times of crisis, are sold for pennies in Monastiraki, an area below the Acropolis in the center of Athens. So how do these books end up for sale at the bookseller’s stall for five euros? If you follow their trail perhaps you will understand something about how Greece’s economy works. Since the crisis began, the number of readers in Greece has dramatically decreased. The price of books, however, used or new, has not decreased and in some cases, the prices have even gone up.

    How can one find the nerve to write in a city that is collapsing? In my conversations with authors, new authors and well-established authors alike tend to feel despondent. They say the market for books is collapsing as well. Rumors about publishing companies are circulating: some are not paying authors, others are in danger of closing their doors, while bookstores are closing down one after another. People have other things to worry about and reading was never their strong point. “Author” was always a risky and extravagant “profession.” In a city that’s collapsing, however, being an author is like jumping into a void.

    I take a look at the best-seller lists in the newspapers. In fiction, mostly romantic novels and crime fiction are popular. Best-selling essays are those trying to explain the economic crisis and criticize ruthless capitalism. I talk with owners of bookstores who have shops in wealthy Athenian neighborhoods. They have not shut down yet, like hundreds of other bookstores in poorer neighborhoods which have had to close. They tell me that the “quality readers” are those who have been hardest hit by the crisis. And that many readers ask for books that will make them forget and not think about what is happening around them.  

    In a city that is collapsing, what can an author write about? And in the final analysis, who will read what you write? But if you don’t write when everything around you is tottering and changing, then when will you write? I recall something that Dino Buzzati wrote in one of his books: “Please write. At least two lines, even if your soul is restless and your nerves are gone. Every day, write.” Writing is a shield and therapy; it is an escape, an analysis, a reminiscence and it is imagination. You write because you have the illusion that you can translate the incomprehensible into a story. To borrow a phrase from Sepulveda, to write means to endure. Especially, to withstand one’s own fear, one’s own misery and melancholy. Through writing, you discover how unforgiving time is. And how every so often, hope springs from despair….

    Athens, February 2012

    About the Author

    GazmendKapllani was born in 1967 in Lushnjë, Albania. In January 1991 he crossed the border into Greece on foot to escape persecution by the communist secret services. In Greece he worked as a builder, a cook and a kiosk attendant, while also studying at Athens University and completing a doctorate on the image of Albanians in the Greek press and of Greeks in the Albanian press. He is now a successful writer, playwright, broadcaster and journalist. His best-selling first novel, A Short Border Handbook has been translated into four languages (English, Polish, Danish and French). A Short Border Handbook was published and by Portobello Books in 2009, and was translated by Anne-Marie Stanton-Ife.

    Additional Information

    Jean Claude Izzo (1945-2000) French writer – Sun for the Dying (1999) published by Europa Books, 2008. 

    Dino Buzzati-Traverso (1906 – 1972) was an Italian novelist, short story writer, painter and poet, as well as a journalist for Corriere della Sera. His worldwide fame is mostly due to his novel Il deserto dei Tartari, translated into English as The Tartar Steppe, 1939. Available in Canongate edition. 

    Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda (1489–1573) was a Spanish humanist, philosopher and theologian