After absorbing the lyrically beautiful and profound but chilling “Human Acts” and “At Night All Blood is Black“, I turned to “The Near North” for a respite before delving into the “Seven Moons“. While welcomed, it was at first surprisingly out of place and came across as piddling, trivial, almost irrelevant. I persevered, desperately needing a diversion. If only, to better absorb the trauma and themes hidden in Kang and Diop’s stories.
Han Kang‘s powerful story telling opens with bodies, dead bodies. Absorbingly narrated, shining light in such dark places of Korea’s brutal past. Uncle Sams support too. Different voices: 15-year old boy, a soul still attached to its body, tortured activists and workers, and the writer herself. Different periods: while focused on the Gwangju Uprising (1980), Kang also shines a light on the Jeju (1948-9) and Busan-Masan (1979) Uprisings, the Seoul Forced Evictions (2009) and indirectly on so many such massacres in Korean history. She almost brings to life those brutally killed during the student protests for democracy and workers’ strikes for better working conditions in 1980. She laments the failure if not impossibility to heal the tortured and the bereaved. Poignant and timeous given the recent failed martial law decree.
I’m fighting, alone, every day. I fight with the hell that I survived. I fight with the fact of my own humanity. I fight with the idea that death is the only way of escaping this fact.
So tell me, professor, what answers do you have for me?
You, a human being just like me.
David Diop, on the other hand, delves into the less documented role of African soldiers in the first world war. It could have been any colonial war. Asking tough questions about the madness of war then but especially now. “Gods truth”.
Until a man is dead, he is not yet done being created. (Fula proverb)
At its core, the book is about how a man tries to understand primal, ethical questions about those on the other side of the front line: What is our obligation to the Other? Are we any different from the enemy, and is he in fact us — if we look closely enough? And if so, is it even possible to have an enemy?
… would never have thought of the trench as an outsized female organ ready to receive us, Mademba and me. The insides of the earth were outside, the insides of my mind were outside, and I knew, I understood that I could think anything I wanted to, on the condition that the others knew nothing of it. So I locked up my thoughts back in my head after observing them from up close. Strange.
In the background of the story, left usually as incidental happenings, are the sharp, protruding edges of colonisation, racism, societal conceptions of masculinity, and so much more.
I had left the door of my mind open to the thoughts of others, which I mistook for my own, I wasn’t hearing myself think anymore, but was hearing the others who were afraid of me. You have to be careful, when you believe you’re free to think what you want, not to let in the thinking of others, in disguise, the false thinking of your father and mother, the spurious thinking of your grandfather, the masked thinking of your brother or sister, of your friends, in other words, of your enemies.
So Near North after some persistence provided a respite. Ivan Vladislavic offers some interesting tidbits and opportunities to meander through Johannesburg if one took the time. He non-chalantly references artists, writers, places, suburbs, fauna, flora, books, poets and poems. I was piqued when I learnt that he lives a block away. His walking route is therefore familiar as is his specific references to neighbourhood sites.
We are all emigrants from the homeland of our childhood – Georgi Gospodinov
So much so, that when he mentioned Faraglioni, I knew exactly which house, literally around the block. While he noted an incorrect address, the Italian tile description is unmistakable. As Diop would say “inside outside”. I came to know the house because the architect Luis Ferreira Da Silva who designed it took us there to give us an idea of his work. I even read about it in one of the Home magazines. I recall the curved entrance hall staircase and the Italian shutter windows on the inside, the exact scene recreated when the husband proposed to his wife. Romance infused architecture. The owners have since sold and moved on.
So together, Ivan observing and writing from the outside, and my recollection of the inside of just this home, somewhat makes for the double which Diop talks about. When he speaks nostalgically about hollyhocks, a flower which Han Kang also describes, the connection was surreal.
Vladislavic compiles a smorgasbord of his personal journal, starting from the Covid-19 pandemic through the darkness of load shedding. It reveals his penchant for micro sculpture found by collecting odd small items during his daily walks amidst high walls. He laments his parents, celebrates his friends, grapples with displacement, trauma, fragility and mortality, all as an ode to walking as it is to the city of Johannesburg. His writing weaves through suburbs, streets and gardens.
We’re always trying to save what we can from the previous generation, I think. To take something, perhaps the best thing, from our fathers. And our mothers. – Dave Edwards
Being familiar with the sculpture of the peacock by Kurt Lossgott at the Oriental Plaza, I was piqued enough to search and find another of his sculpture, the Owl and the Child by the Johannesburg Zoo, which Vladislavic observed in his walks. I have yet to venture to Langermankop but I too had noticed the iron roads holding the city together and the informal takeway vendors for workers. Vladislavic inspired me enough to continue walking, be more observant while sometimes just to allow ideas in your head to float and bounce around to come out a better version on your return.
Losing territory, in the sense of access rather than ownership, undoes memory. As the doors to parts of this city have closed, the memories associated with them have faded. I am cut off from this past as surely as if I had emigrated. Like other exiles, I write against the fear of oblivion, tending and replenishing my file in the archive of collective memory. Recreating a place in words gives it some kind of continuance, even if the exhibit has the artificiality of a museum and cannot provide a home. ‘In the end,’ as Theodor Adorno understood, the writer is not even allowed to live in his writing. Ivan Vladislavic
For my final holiday read I chose the magical realism and satire of “Seven Moons” delving into Sri Lanka’s turbulent history with the soul of Maali Almeida as my guide. A magically realistic ride into Sri Lanka’s brutal past showcasing unbounded human cruelty with spell binding storytelling using ghosts, ghouls and demons each riding the wind from down there, up there and in between. Shehan Karunatilaka provides a spiraling exposure to Sri Lanka’s (Ceylon’s) 5000 year history exposing the savage role played by the various groups especially over the last 40-50 years – the state, army (especially the Special Task Force), LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam), JVP (People’s Liberation Front) and the Indian Peace Keeping Force.
It is therefore fitting to close this post depicting the roof and pillars shaped like characters for “human” in Chinese in this sea of inhumanity at the Tzu Chi Foundation which I came across cycling through Bedfordview described by Ivan Vladislavic.
What does 2025 hold for us? Happy reading and reflection as we head into 2025.
