[Opinion] Forgetting and Silence Can Also Be Forms of Violence

When I first went to Poland this summer, I was overwhelmed by a vague sense of duty and visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp museum. It is the largest camp where the massacre of Jews was carried out during World War II. At this extermination camp, 1.4 million prisoners, including Jews, were killed by the Nazis. The high walls, barbed wire, gas chambers, and crematoria that made the camp like a fortress vividly show the site of immense violence that annihilated the body. Remembering and mourning the victims is the only way for the survivors to keep death alive.

I visited Jeju Island after several years. Even before boarding the plane, I was overwhelmed by an urgent sense of duty. Although I had been to Jeju more than ten times, this was my first visit to the Jeju 4.3 Peace Park. The Jeju 4.3 Incident, which is the backdrop of Han Kang’s novel “The White Book” and the short story “White Flower”, was a massacre of civilians that occurred on Jeju Island over seven years and seven months starting in 1947. The 4.3 Incident investigation report defines it as “an incident that began with the police shooting on March 1, 1947, as resistance against the oppression by the police and the Northwest Youth League, followed by the armed uprising of the South Korean Workers’ Party Jeju Provincial Party on April 3, 1948, and continued until September 1954, involving armed clashes and suppression between armed groups and suppression forces on Jeju Island, during which many residents were sacrificed.”

At the 4.3 Peace Park, memorial stones without the victims’ names but only their ages are noticeable here and there. “OOO’s son, age 1,” “OOO’s daughter, age 3”... Many houses in Jeju villages share the same memorial day. Families who lost members during that time held memorial services on the same day because the missing family members were all commemorated on that day. Recently, Jeju Island has been promoting historical educational tourism (dark tourism) following Han Kang’s Nobel Prize in Literature. I encountered group tourists and students on school trips whom I had met earlier at Jeju Airport. Most of them seemed like first-time visitors, just like me. For those who remember the 4.3 Incident through Hyun Ki-young’s novel “Sun-i Samch’on” and the film “Jiseul”, this was a good opportunity to reconsider the historical facts on site.

All entities whose truth has not been revealed are unjustly treated. Violence under the names of concealment and oblivion interacts cunningly. Any act of making immediate judgments based on one-sided information can become violence. The reason why great literature and honest journalism are precious is that they persistently pursue the truth and make the most careful judgments.

The depiction of violence in Han Kang’s “The Boy Who Came” is difficult to read. Han said, “What actually happened was far more horrific than what I could even think of writing in the novel, and I even erased some of what I wrote; what remains is barely that much.” The Nobel Prize judges said he portrayed violence with beautiful prose, but I think he chose beautiful language because he originally struggled to write violent scenes. Han is someone who said, “Sometimes it is hard even to watch meat being grilled on a hot plate.”

A Jeju 4.3 Peace Park official said that visitors have greatly increased after the Nobel Prize award. While this is welcome, there are opposing voices. Some argue that the novel The Vegetarian should be classified as harmful to youth and banned from reading. They claim that the depiction of the relationship between the brother-in-law and sister-in-law in the second chapter, “Mongolian Mark,” is ethically inappropriate.

Classifying The Vegetarian as a banned book for youth for these reasons sounds like saying Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary are stories about women who committed suicide after having affairs. This is close to verbal violence. Violence also operates when one gives up trying to accurately understand a person or event or chooses to forget.