The Aquariums of Pyongyang [review]
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Kim Il-sung -- a.k.a. the Light of Human Genius, the Unequaled Genius, the Summit of Thought, the North Star of the People...
Full Title:
The Aquariums of Pyongyang: Ten Years in the North Korean Gulag
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One of the most frightening books I've read, made so because of its inescapable probity. North Korea's a veritable black hole; so very little is known about it that when a book like this emerges from the abyss, it's instantly impossible to criticize -- it would be like a starving man turning to his benefactor and complaining that the steak is overdone. The book is a first-person account of life in North Korea, and most of the evening I devoted to reading it tread an uncertain line between tearful horror and a sort of incredulity that life really could be like this for people, and that because of the great walls of hypocrisy and untruth erected around the country, people might genuinely live and die thinking that what they have -- dulled hunger, corruption, the rantings of the authorities, poverty, rumours, the "official fantasy worldview" -- is all there is to have.
It's hard not to feel indignation when reading it; I fought a sort of rising impulse to rush over to Pyongyang and shower the people with chocolate bars wrapped in excerpts from world newspapers over the last forty years. It's harder still to be objective, but the study of history has trained me well; I wonder how much of it is proficient and teleological novelization by Kang himself, by Kang's French mouthpiece, Rigoulot, and subsequently by Rigoulot's translator, Yair Reiner. At times I felt that peering through these layers of translation and transmission, North Korea seems nearly as opaque as ever. Between my tears and quiet gasps of horror, I'm constantly assessing the agendas of the writers; Kang's fortunate background that has rendered him literate, tenacious and lucky enough to bring us this story; the difficult balance between description and histrionics.
I'm also all too aware of the howls of execration one risks exciting by being too cynical about writings like these (as with the Holocaust); I can only assure that my intent is not to devalue Aquariums of Pyongyang in any unfruitful way. Read this book with as much objectivity as you can muster. It is a subjective account, but no lesser for it: the hypocrisy, illiberality and injustice it recounts is real, and no amount of theorizing, historical skepticism and value-neutral analysis will erase that fact.
One day a discussion with a student member of Hanchongnyon, the university's leftist organization, grew rather heated. I was being bombarded with would-be intellectual arguments about class, domination and imperialism, featuring references to people such as Pierre Bourdieu. Onlookers had surrounded us. Whose side were they on? Did they agree with my interlocutor when he said that I had a "subjectivist" point of view and that my personal experience was no basis for a global condemnation of North Korean politics? [...] Though I lacked the theoretical arguments to counter their claims, I wasn't impressed. "Go to the North", I told my contradictors, "and you'll stop trying to excuse all Kim Il-sung's failures. Go find out for yourselves."