Maninbo has been written after first-hand experience of the consequences of thinking for oneself; Ko Ŭn’s Korea is a place where ‘wrong’ thinking and ‘wrong’ words can get a person killed. Bearing witness to the self-legitimizing tropes of colonists and dictators alike, Ko Ŭn knows that any challenge to official narratives can attract an all-too-efficient attention. This is revealed in an account of the execution of Cho Bong-am, a pro-democracy political opponent of Syngman Rhee, South Korea’s first military dictator:
Sentenced in January 1958, one day in the summer of 1959 Cho Bong-am, chairman of the Progressive Party, stood at the foot of the scaffold in Sŏdaemun Prison. His last words were: ‘Give me a cigarette.’ Having been refused even one last cigarette, thud! his two feet hung dangling. Here, since his death, faithful to his hope at least in words, ‘unification’ no longer means invading the North, as Syngman Rhee insisted, and saying ‘peaceful reunification’ is no longer a crime. But the day is still far away when the shadow of his death will lift. When his comrades went to jail or came back out again, that fine fellow would donate a sack of rice or a cartload of coal and so give courage to that comrade’s wife. A fine fellow, indeed. Last night in a dream I saw Cho Bong-am, smoking a cigarette.[19]
This exemplary poem underscores the undecorated, testimonial style of Maninbo; these are apocryphal records which resemble diary entries, texts unafraid to invoke the names of the expedited and eliminated. The poem ‘Cho Bong-am’ gestures toward remembrance decades before official apparatus shift into motion. In late January 2011 the front page of South Korea’s leading daily newspaper, the JoongAng Ilbo, carried news that the Supreme Court has judged Cho Bong-am’s death to be ‘Korea’s first judicial murder.’[20] More than fifty years after his death, and the murky details of this leader’s death are slowly coming to light. An official rewriting of history may soon follow, but it comes long after Ko Ŭn wrote and published his own unofficial version of events.
In this sense Ko Ŭn is eyewitness, activist, and avatar; but he is foremost an Orphic humanist who has traversed a very particular version of hell, a place where:
Missing persons are part of our land’s traditions between revolutions and counter-revolutions.[21]
Maninbo participates in a subgenre of texts rewritten from memory after a period of imprisonment – Solzhenitsyn’s long narrative poem, Dorozben’ka (The Trail) and Soyinka’s collection, A Shuttle in the Crypt, are two examples – and, like these memorized poems, Maninbo not only memorializes but refuses to be forced to forget. Of persistence, resistance, and hope, Soyinka says:
To be a poet is presumably to be persuaded not only of the inexhaustible poetry of the self, but to presume the even more transcendentalist view that the poetic self is in itself inexhaustible.[22]
Uttering from otherwiseness, Ko Ŭn performs a strikingly courageous counter-tradition of memorizing in the face of ideologies which, Solzhenitsyn reminds us while musing on his own repressive regime, give ‘evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination.’[23] Ko Ŭn inscribes inexhaustibly, and does not beg but demands to differ. From this speaking position, in a place where words can get you killed, Maninbo refuses to acquiesce to the logic of the military-industrial complex.
In this astonishing feat of cultural remembrance, Ko Ŭn’s poems are like distant lamps ‘shining/ down a long night road’[24] to the haunted and trauma-filled panoramas of the past. Maninbo casts light on unofficial histories ‘embodied and endured’ by all Koreans.[25] These are places of erasure and disappearance, where the lives of ordinary people have been interrupted by extraordinary events. But these founding sites are also bright with humanity, and Ko Ŭn single-mindedly reminds us these are stories that must be protected from the darkness of forgetting.
[1] Ko Ŭn. What? 108 Zen Poems (trans. Brother Anthony of Taizé): page 9.
[2] Ko Ŭn. Ten Thousand Lives (trans. Brother Anthony of Taizé, et al): page 35.
[3] Brother Anthony of Taizé. ‘Ko Ŭn’s Maninbo: History as Poem, Poem as History’. World Literature Today: page 44.
[4] Ko Ŭn. Ten Thousand Lives (trans. Brother Anthony of Taizé, et al): page 102.
[5] Ibid: page 151.
[6] Ibid: page 252.
[7] Ibid: page 325.
[8] Ko Ŭn. Ten Thousand Lives (trans. Brother Anthony of Taizé, et al): page 115-16.
[9] Ibid: page 233-34.
[10] Ibid: page 269.
[11] Ibid: page 137.
[12] Ko Ŭn. Songs for Tomorrow (trans. Brother Anthony of Taizé, et al): page 32.
[13] Charles Bernstein. ‘The Dollar Value of Poetry’. Andrew, Bruce and Charles Bernstein (eds). The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book: page 140.
[14] Ko Ŭn. Songs for Tomorrow (trans. Brother Anthony of Taizé, et al): page 32.
[15] Brother Anthony of Taizé. ‘Ko Ŭn’s Maninbo: History as Poem, Poem as History’. World Literature Today: page 45.
[16] Ko Ŭn. Songs for Tomorrow (trans. Brother Anthony of Taizé, et al): page 48.
[17] Ko Ŭn. Songs for Tomorrow (trans. Brother Anthony of Taizé, et al): page 35.
[18] Ibid: page 33-4.
[19] Ko Ŭn. Ten Thousand Lives (trans. Brother Anthony of Taizé, et al): page 277-78.
[20] JoongAng Ilbo 21.01.2011: page 1.
[21] Ko Ŭn. Ten Thousand Lives (trans. Brother Anthony of Taizé, et al): page 325.
[22] Soyinka, Wole. ‘And After the Narcissist?’ African Forum 1-4: page 57-8.
[23] Solzhenitsyn, Alexander. The Gulag Archipelago (trans. Thomas P. Whitney): page 174.
[24] Ko Ŭn. Ten Thousand Lives (trans. Brother Anthony of Taizé, et al): page 214.
[25] Brother Anthony of Taizé. ‘Ko Ŭn’s Maninbo: History as Poem, Poem as History’. World Literature Today: page 44.
Bibliography
Andrew, Bruce and Charles Bernstein (eds). The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.
Brother Anthony of Taizé. ‘Ko Ŭn’s Maninbo: History as Poem, Poem as History’. World Literature Today January-February (2010), pp 43-46.
Ko Ŭn. What? 108 Zen Poems (trans. Brother Anthony of Taizé). Berkeley: Parallax Press, 1997.
— Ten Thousand Lives (trans. Brother Anthony of Taizé, et al). København; Los Angeles: Green Integer Books, 2005.
— Songs for Tomorrow (trans. Brother Anthony of Taizé, et al). København; Los Angeles: Green Integer Books, 2008.
McCann, David R. (ed) The Columbia Anthology of Modern Korean Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004.
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander. The Gulag Archipelago (trans. Thomas P. Whitney). London: Collins/ Harvill Press, 1974.
Soyinka, Wole. ‘And After the Narcissist?’ African Forum 1 : 4 (1966), pp. 53-64.
