Human Acts

by Han Kang

a reminder of the human acts of which we are all capable, the brutal and the tender, the base and the sublime.

When a living person looks at a dead person, mightn’t the person’s soul also be there by its body’s side, looking down at its own face?

Why would you sing the national anthem for people who’d been killed by soldiers? Why cover the coffin with the Taegukgi? As though it wasn’t the nation itself that had murdered them.

No one had ever taught me how to address a person’s soul.

After you died I could not hold a funeral, And so my life became a funeral.

After you died I couldn’t hold a funeral, So these eyes that once beheld you became a shrine. These ears that once heard your voice became a shrine. These lungs that once inhaled your breath became a shrine.

If life was the summer that had just gone by, if life was a body sullied with sweat and bloody pus, clotted seconds that refused to pass, if life was a mouthful of sour bean sprouts that only served to intensify the hunger pangs, then perhaps death would be like a clean brushstroke, erasing all such things in a single sweep.

Some memories never heal. Rather than fading with the passage of time, those memories become the only things that are left behind when all else is abraded. The world darkens, like electric bulbs going out one by one.

Is it true that human beings are fundamentally cruel? Is the experience of cruelty the only thing we share as a species? Is the dignity that we cling to nothing but self-delusion, masking from ourselves this single truth: that each one of us is capable of being reduced to an insect, a ravening beast, a lump of meat? To be degraded, damaged, slaughtered – is this the essential fate of humankind, one which history has confirmed as inevitable?

Enduring things is what you do best. Gritting your teeth and bearing them.

In other words, ‘Gwangju’ had become another name for whatever is forcibly isolated, beaten down and brutalised, for all that has been mutilated beyond repair.