Internal Communication in Asia and The Quarterly Magazine of Literature Asia
– To look at ourselves with our own eyes
Bang Hyun Seok (Executive Editor of Asia/novelist)
Hello everyone! I’m so glad to meet you folks here in such a beautiful place like Manila. First of all, I would like to express special thanks to Philippine Writers’ Association who invited me and Karina Bolasco from Anvil Publishing.
I had a chance to spend some time in Philippine about a month back in 2006 (year two thousand six). During this time I had opportunities to learn and understand better about history & literature of Philippine. That’s the reason why I feel exciting making speech front of you folks and somewhat I even feel comfortable.
Let me introduce myself first. I am an executive editor of Asia which is a quarterly literature magazine published in Seoul Korea. I would like to start my speech which is based on the experiences that I went through making this magazine.
I felt that we needed different coordinates and imagination than those of the twentieth century, if the twenty-first century would be different from the twentieth century. I wanted to see the dreams of the conquered rather than the greed of the conquerors, and the wisdom and imagination of the people who endured oppression rather than the logic of the oppressors.
1.
Although the editors of Asia have been contemplating the publication of this journal for a few years, we found it rather complicated to work on this project once we started the job. Even the nature and role of this journal, which we thought we would be very straightforward, had to be re-examined. We constantly ran into gaps that couldn’t be easily filled, the gaps between thoughts that were in our minds and their execution through written words. It was no easy task to figure out how to organize this journal into different parts and to look for writings to fill each part. Even translation was not a task free from trouble.
All of us who participated in this project of inaugurating Asia struggled with the following two major questions. How could we create a journal that deserves its title Asia? And how could we nurture Asia to grow into “a mental free trade zone,” a space where creative imaginations of Asia freely interact?
Although Asia’s editors and publisher are Korean writers and although this journal is printed in Korea, Asia’s space should be open to creative imaginations of all Asian. This has been the firm principle for all of us who are involved in this publication. It would have been entirely impossible for us in Korea, located in Northeast Asia, to work on this project if writers from Palestine with their Southwest Asian networks, from Indonesia with their Southeast Asian networks, and from Mongolia with their Central Asian networks did not offer us their help. I visited Southeast Asian countries, and Lee Dae-Hwan, our publisher, visited Central Asian countries and Europe. It was through four lengthy internal seminars and overnight discussions as well as a symposium with writers from seven Asian countries that Asia’s shape became clearer.
Just before we finalized the format of Asia, I boarded an airplane to Ho Chi Minh. I didn’t necessarily have to go to Vietnam in order to inaugurate Asia. But I felt I owed a conversation with those friends who had filled an empty area of my imagination before I actually finalized the shape of the journal.
My friends in Ho Chi Minh City responded with as much enthusiasm as ours to the news of the inauguration of the journal Ngu Long – the head of the culture section of the newspaper Saigon Giaipong (=Liberation) – said, raising one fist up, “This is exactly the kind of work we needed!”
Relieved by my friends’ cheerful responses, I began sharing my own secret worries. How could we bring together creative imaginations from all forty-seven countries of Asia in one space? How could we secure equality among them? My friends, however, erased my worries one by one with their characteristic optimism.
“National boundaries do not matter if we try to learn from one another who has been coping with different natural interventions. As there are no national boundaries in nature, there should be no national boundaries in literature.”
Van Le, a poet, also said, “There won’t be any problem, as long as you approach this work in the same way as you have treated us. If you had tried to teach and preach to us, could we have become friends like this?”
Those of us Van Le called ‘you’ are the writers who belong to “A Group of Young Writers Who Try to Understand Vietnam.” This name characterizes the approach of Korean writers who came together as a group in 1995. We chose the phrase “try to understand” instead of “love” or “be friends with” in order to warn ourselves against love and friendship without understanding. We had already witnessed in the Vietnam War how love and friendship without understanding became violence towards the object of love. It is also what we are currently witnessing in the Iraq War. We called ourselves “young” not so much because we were in our thirties as because we wanted to sympathize with the Vietnamese without any fixed conventional ideas and preconceptions. Instead of “association” or “council,” we decided to call ourselves a “group” of writers in order to reflect our desire to form a humble organization that is governed by voluntary interests of individual writers rather than to become a bureaucratic institution.
“A Group of Young Writers Who Try To Understand Vietnam” has been fairly faithful to this principle during our ten or so year history. We have not had any by-laws or rules. Anyone who participated in it was a member and anyone who did not was not. We did not assign any tasks or services to writers who did not attend our meetings. It was not clear who was or was not our member. If one day someone came to our meeting after one or two years absence, then he or she was a member. If someone considered herself a member, then she was a member. If she did not consider herself a member, then she was not. When Vietnamese writers visited us, our members voluntarily helped them throughout their entire stay. Our members used their own cars, money, and time, but they did not blame those who did not share their obligations.
This quasi-organization has been contributing to the decrees of the distance between Vietnam and Korea through exchanges, writings, and translations. By translating Bao Ninh’s novel The Sorrows of War, Van Le’s novel If your Are Still Alive, and Huu Thinh’s poetry collection Winter Letter into Korean, our members introduced to Korean readers the Vietnam that is completely different from the Vietnam as shown in Hollywood movies. Our biggest achievement was probably that our member writers came to see a world with different horizons.
My conversation with my friends in Ho Chi Minh ended with Van Le’s playful and theatrical statement.
“Thou, keep on going. Then thou would arrive at some place.”
Everyone laughed. It was a line that the character Van Le speaks in the short story ‘The Form of Being’, a story I wrote modeled after him.
But, as in Korea, writers mattered less and less, and readers’ interest in literary magazines was decreasing. All the way back to my hotel I could not shake off Tran’s remark that the success of Asia would depend entirely on whether or not Asian writers would feel proud to publish their writing in it.
Bao Ninh, whom I met the next evening, said as playfully as usual, “Who could tell our future? Don’t set too high a goal and don’t expect too much. Just think that you’re doing a fun thing. It would be great simply to connect Asians with each other, wouldn’t it? Vietnamese call Laos their brother country, but we in fact don’t know Laotians at all. We have read many German and French novels, but we haven’t read a single Laotian novel.”
How many Koreans would have read literatures of Palestine and Iraq, countries that we see news about everyday? How many Asians would have read literatures of Thailand, Kazakhstan, or Korea? There are too many neighbors who obviously exist only on our maps but not in our imagination.
Koreans aspire to “globalization” so much that some parents teach English to babies who haven’t yet learned to speak Korean well, but you cannot find a single person who can translate Cambodian literature into Korean. This indeed is not just a Korean problem.
2.
“By the way, what about Bac Taieu Tien? What are you planning to do with North Korean literature?”
We had also been contemplating this question, but I did not expect that I would be asked this question from Bao Ninh in Vietnam. Bao Ninh used to live close to the North Korean Embassy in Vietnam when he was young, and was himself a fighter who went to war when he was seventeen and lost almost all of his friends in the war. While his friends were dying in the war against the US, North Korea fully supported them, whereas South Korea, as the primary ally of the US, sent 320,000 troops to Vietnam. Now I am a South Korean author meeting Vietnamese, whereas Vietnamese are living knowing little about North Koreans.
The Korean peninsula is probably a place where the most dangerous problems in Asia exist. Indeed, this was one of the reasons why Korean writers felt the need to build a passageway such as Asia. Together with Vietnam, Korea went through every single affliction that the twentieth century brought to Asian countries. Although South Korea achieved a remarkable level of economic growth and political democracy, it is a country that bears one of the most difficult tasks handed down from the twentieth century. We can see one example of the South Korean dilemma in the fact that that it has to send its troops to Iraq despite its most sympathetic understanding of the disastrous nature of the war in Iraq. Asia is initiated in a country which has reconciliation and peace rather than confrontation and war as its most urgent present progressive task.
Three years ago I went to Pyongyang ahead of other writers as an organizer of the South Korean delegation for the South-North Writers’ Talk. I ran into the reality of division even before I set foot into the North Korean territory. July 19th, 2005, I remember that day very vividly. I was onboard Koryo Air flight JS 152 from Beijing to Pyongyang.
“You are now crossing Amrok River.”
Listening to the announcement in a strong North Korean accent, I looked out the window. All I could see was a very thick fog. I could not really feel that I had crossed the border of my divided homeland into the North, where previously I had never set foot. In my hand I was holding a “Democratic Republic of Korea” disembarkation card, on which I could not fill out two questions yet. Nationality? I traveled many countries and had no problem answering this question, but I found it difficult this time. Although both South and North Koreans call themselves ‘Korean’ in English, South Korea calls itself ‘Han’ in Korean, and North Korea calls itself ‘Chosun’. Tae-Han-Min-Guk (Republic of Korea), Han-Guk (Korea), Nam-Han (South Korea), Nam-Chosun (South Korea)… After the announcement that we would arrive at the Pyongyang Airport in fifteen minutes, I wrote ‘Nam (South)’. The last item was ethnicity. Ethnicity? Han, Chosun, Baedal … none of them seemed appropriate. I asked a young woman sitting next to me. That young woman with a Kim Il-sung badge showed me her disembarkation card. Chosun-Saram (Korean). I could not write that. Just before we landed, I wrote ‘Uriminjok (our people)’.
Division does not exist only on the military demarcation line. It pervades all aspects of the lives of Koreans. The disembarkation card that I encountered on my way to Pyongyang was the beginning of the question of whether it would be possible for me to meet the North with the grammar with which I was accustomed. All the while I stayed in North Korea and dealt with its authorities and writers, I experienced my mother tongue becoming infinitely strange.
It is clear that Eurocentric values and order met their limits and that the world has already entered a new phase of spatial rearrangement. This does not mean that the non-West or Asia will automatically become an alternative to the West. A culture based on the use of Chinese script, or a mystified Indian culture, or a religious fundamentalism cannot be a pan-Asian culture. None of them alone can become values for the new world. A simple compromise like “Eastern Philosophy, Western Technology” is not our way, either. Asia has a double task of overcoming Western modernity while simultaneously completing the work of modernity. If necessary, we should as well be able to do “Western Philosophy, Western Technology”, “Eastern Philosophy, Eastern Technology”, and even “Western Philosophy, Eastern Technology”. In order to go beyond the world order of the last century dappled with conflicts and war, we have to use both Western and non-Western experiences and wisdom.
One of the biggest questions that troubled us in preparing for Asia was whether we would be able to produce discourses that can be called Asian, i.e. whether we would be able to present values that could replace Western ones. We concluded that we could not. Asia’s task is to play the role of an excellent passageway, where creative imagination born in the land of Asia can reach out to the world. It is Asia’s task not to miss all the significant works that are going on in and around the land of Asia.
3.
At the top of the Cape Point, the southernmost tip of all continents on earth, I looked for a long time at the sea where the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic Ocean are meeting and mixing their bodies. The Cape of Good Hope is on a hill below the Cape Point. When I was reading the story of Vasco da Gama’s voyage, how far away the Cape of Good Hope seemed to be! I walked down to the beach and rolled up my pants to dip my feet into water. The autumn water was cold. It was spring in Korea. I realized that I skipped over two seasons at the same time as I was going back seven hours.
On my way back, I took out a map and looked at it for a long time. How small Europe was on the map! To me, who grew up imagining the world through reading European literature, Europe was a continent of gigantic size. Noticing that I could not take my eyes off the map, Dr. Lee said: “Did you know that Congo is as big as the entire Western Europe? This big country, Congo, was a colony of Belgium. Accurately speaking, it was a personal estate of the King of Belgium.”
He is a scholar of English literature who specializes in post-colonial literature. He chose Africa, while most scholars of post-colonial literature, let alone scholars of regular English literature, went to the US or Europe to study. To study post-colonialism, it is indeed natural to study in the country whose major task is post-colonialism. How could we talk about post-colonialism if we do not know what the lives of the people in former colonies are like?
This is also true of English. English is not the language of the US and Britain only. There are as many as fifty-four countries that use English as their official language. Eighty percent of them are in Africa and the Caribbean. The category of English literature should be reconstituted to include more than just twenty percent. The West cannot initiate this reconstitution. As long as the West maintains its initiative in the selection and circulation of literature, cultural diversity is a sham. Each continent should be able to read and speak about its own literature with its own perspective. Creative imaginations from each continent should be able to freely interact with each other without going through the filter of the European values.
“It would be great if Asia can also play the role of a passageway that connects Asia with Africa.”
It is with the same hope that I came to Africa skipping over two seasons.
The next day I went to the Center for African Studies at the University of Cape Town to meet a Nigerian critic, Harry Garuba, Associate Director of the Center. Garuba agreed to be on the Advisory Editorial Board of Asia. He succinctly summarized for me the current state of African literature according to genre, trend, and writers.
“Ironically, African literature acquired an easy international recognition because of the nature of its colonial past. We wrote in the languages of our colonizers, the ‘international’ languages. In the past African literature was mostly interested in anti-colonial struggles, but now it is concentrating its energy on the task of rectifying false images of Africa that the European gaze has been creating. Have you seen the movie “Out of Arica”? Images of beautiful nature but savage humans…”
Four African writers have won the Nobel Prize in Literature, including John Coetzee, who was a professor at the University of Cape Town for twenty years. However, there are other writers in Africa who are more respected and influential among its people. Writers like Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Tiong’o.
With regard to African writers’ interest in Asia, Harry Garuba said that the interest was undoubtedly significant. Yet, only a few Asian writers – such as Kawabata Yasunari, Oe Kenzaburo, and Kim Ji-Ha – were known.
Do they see Asia as some unified entity? Harry Garuba answered without a moment of hesitation.
“It is a European way of thinking – a very dangerous one – to conflate diverse entities into a unified whole.”
March 1st was an election day in South Africa. I met James Matthews at the OBZ Café in the morning. A leading South African poet and short story writer, and a staunch opponent of apartheid, he appeared as an extremely healthy and strong 77 year old man. I asked him in a tentative voice if he voted for ANC (African National Congress). He said yes right away.
“But you have to understand clearly what this power shift means. I did not vote for ANC in order to express my support for a black government but for the government which is working for justice.”
From Matthews, this was not a word play. A recipient of three prestigious literary awards, he did not accept a literary award from Mbeki, president of the ANC and president of South Africa, for three weeks. Announcing that he would not accept any award from a political party, he asked Mbeki to clarify whether it was ANC or the state that was giving him the award. He accepted the award only when it was made clear that the president gave him the award as the representative of the state. He believes that he should be a poet of South Africa rather than of the ANC, even though he supports the ANC.
“Outsiders might think that the South African regime changed hands from white to black, but that it not true. We have to bear in mind that the power shifted from the elite minority to the majority of people. In the 1960’s, our slogan was “Black is beautiful.” But now our slogan is ‘People is beautiful.’”
James Matthews was born into a poor black family. He grew up in a tiny two-room house with seven siblings. He had not worn a single pair of shoes until he entered high school. Since he could not afford books, he had to walk barefoot to a distant library that allowed blacks to enter. He dropped out of high school during eighth grade and at seventeen became a writer while working as a newsboy and office boy.
“The power changed hands, but the poverty remains the same. We have to overcome this problem of poverty and race. Now is a very important time for South Africa. Literature can play a very important role – more than at any other time. Literature should discuss both the achievements and the faults of the current government as truthfully as before. My poems will sing about the rainbow. South Africa should become a country of the rainbow. This applies to the entire African continent as well.”
I did not expect to hear the word ‘rainbow’ in South Africa. The task of literature is to call every different and diverse living being on earth by its proper name. The last candidate for the title of this journal other than Asia was ‘Rainbow’. Rainbow is an entity, in which many things with different colors unite to become one beauty. We envisioned Asia as something similar to a forest that includes different aesthetic personalities. Some suggested “Rainbow Asia” as an eclectic solution, but in the end we decided that we could show the beauty of rainbow by accurately reflecting the diversity of Asia.
The title Asia does not simply denote a specific spatial area. Nor do we have an aesthetic self-governance in mind. It is also not our intention to instigate a cultural separatist movement. We simply would like to look at ourselves with our own eyes. Only when we can see ourselves with our own eyes can we also see others as they truly are. As we prepare this journal, we sincerely hope that this journal bears the spirit of a rainbow.
Meeting with James Matthews was the last item on my official schedule for this trip. I looked at his back for a long time as he was walking away, his small old bag on his shoulder. On his bent back I saw a twelve-year-old black boy who walked barefoot all the way to a free library to read Emil Zola, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, and John Steinbeck.
4.
Asia hopes to become the passageway wherein Asians can communicate with creative imaginations born outside of Asian soils. Prejudices and conflicts arise from ignorance and lack of communication. Asia will strive for communication, in which interaction is based on understanding and understanding is based on interaction. Interaction without understanding can easily become blindness, and understanding without interaction can easily miss substance and become pure presumption. I decided again to not forget that true communication could change others and myself through understanding and interaction.
During the twentieth century led by the West, a century of war and barbarity, innumerable elements and genes of civilization disappeared without any race. Even now, somewhere on this earth, there are things that are disappearing forever, neglected by our memories.
If Asia claims that it could prevent beautiful beings in Asia from disappearing without any trace, it would be presumptuous and grandiose. Asia does not have an ambition to create specifically Asian discourses that will replace Western modern values.
Asia, however, has aspirations. Asia may not be the very poem that will remember things unremembered, but we would like to become home for that poem. Asia may not be the fierce spirit of the prose that struggles with our squalid daily lives, but we will not give up being an enthusiastic supporter for that fierce spirit. Asia may not become the center of the Asian imagination, but our ambition is to make all our spaces a forest of creative imaginations emerging out of Asian lands. We know what a graceful dream this is. We also know the underwater reality of the swan that maintains a graceful figure over water. Until we publish this first issue, all of us on the editorial board have struggled like those swans that put forth every ounce of their energies into rowing their webbed feet underwater. If luckily there are readers who find this journal interesting, we will not forget that their each and every facial expression will be our signpost that will lead our way hereafter.
We have just published the 10th issue back in 25th August this year. We still have a long way to go. But we don’t worry too much because we are not along. We have such a long way to go. But we don’t worry because we are not alone. While we were working on the each book, we could witness that there were the pioneers who had walked on the path we are trying to walk and that the writers whom we have never met before had such similar thoughts to ours. This is the immovable proofs that we started to look at our selves with our own eyes.
I was told that there is a ceremony for Korean Contemporary Literature Publishing in Philippine today. This is such a meaningful event. Asia publishers in Seoul had published Sionil Jose’s Emita in Korean and I introduced Rizal through Asia magazine. These are what we want to call “communications” and “bond” that ties all the people in Asia countries. We witness that these works connect all of us even though those are not visible.
I would like to thank you again for inviting me. Thanks again to each one of you listening my long speech. I truly wish for success today’s conference.
Thanks again.
* * * * *
Bang Hyun-seok
Born in Ulsan in 1961. In 1988, he started his work by introducing his short story The First Step in the spring edition of Silcheon Munhak, but as he did not make a literary debut, he was known as a “faceless writer” for a while. He is one of the representative writers of the 1980s in the tumultuous modern history of Korea. Books by Bang include: The House Welcoming Tomorrow, Time to Have Lobsters, a collection of stories. For a Decade and Your Left Side, the essay collections, Beautiful Resistance, and A Star Rising in Hanoi. He is an awardee of “Sin Dong-yup Prize for Literature (1991),” “Oh Young-soo Literary Award (2003),” and “Hwang Sun-won Literary Award (2003).” He serves as the executive director of “Asia Culture Network.” Currently he is a professor of creative writing at Chung-Ang University.