Han Kang or what remains of the trauma

Like a great dark mass, trauma deflects and orbits people's lives and communities. It does not erase itself with the death of those who suffered it, but reverberates in those close to it, stretching its tentacles across generations. Although it is constantly mentioned today, it remains opaque. By its very nature, trauma is hidden. Rape first and foremost, the perfect crime, which shuts out those who have experienced it in silence, but also the other traumas that are too big, or too repeated, or too socially accepted for those who have been victims of them and those who have been spared them to be intelligible, even if they find themselves immersed in the aftermath. From the great planetary traumas of the last centuries, from colonisation to the slave trade, from the trenches of the First World War to the Holocaust, from societal violence against women and the weakest, to regional, national and individual scales, some of the most brilliant writers of our time have made them the focus of their work. The focus has shifted from the investigation of those who committed the crimes to those who suffered them. On the consequences on the victims and the perpetuation of the effects in societies through history, to the inheritance of trauma and violence.

This is precisely the focus of the work of Han Kang, the South Korean author who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature last Thursday. And it is so from the very first book of hers that we can read in Italian, which begins: 'Before my wife became a vegetarian, I had always considered her completely insignificant' (La vegetariana, 2007, Adelphi 2016, translation by Milena Zemira Ciccimarra). It is the story of Yeong-hye, a dutiful wife and obedient daughter who one day dreams of a dark forest and, inside it, a shack full of hanging meat dripping with blood. Awakened, she refuses to eat, cook and serve meat. The woman's sudden and impassive obstinacy generates increasingly violent reactions in her family, revealing to her sister, only at the most extreme moment, how their childhood had been a succession of small but repeated abuses that had slowly but surely changed the shape of those who suffered them, the space they occupied in the world, their trajectory. A violent father, an indifferent husband, therefore violent, an overpowering culture that did not give her the words to express what she was suffering, but only to hide it. Only the nightmares manage to give their enigmatic form to what Yeong-hye feels, while the rejection of violence progressively translates into an almost Jain-like renunciation of active living, even of feeding on anything other than water and sunshine.

"That inexplicable serenity terrified him: it made him suspect that it was just an impression, what was left on the surface after an enormous amount of unspeakable violence had been assimilated, or had settled inside her like a sediment,' observes Yeong-hye's brother-in-law, who became an artist after surviving the Gwangju massacre. He is the only one who somehow manages to get close to her, not without harming her, gripped as he is by an artistic and erotic obsession with her increasingly desire-deprived body.

Gwangju is the city where Kang was born in 1970 and which she left at the age of 9, when she moved to Seoul with her family (her father was a well-known writer), a few months before the army killed hundreds of students and civilians during protests against the authoritarian regime of Chun Doo-Hwan. The carnage, which in Vegetarian is barely mentioned, is instead central in Human Acts (2014, Adelphi 2017). A collective tale of the living and the dead of a massacre that Kang tackles with his usual imperturbability, his style succinct and purged of all passion, and his disturbing candour. A massacre and its reflection on society is also the focus of the novelWe Do Not Part, from 2021, which will be published in early November by Adelphi under the titleI Do Not Say Goodbye. The story takes place in the shadow of the extermination that took place in the late 1940s on the South Korean island of Jeju, where tens of thousands of people, including children and the elderly, were shot because they were suspected of being communists. A dreamlike descent into hell, in the story of a family, where the border between the visible and invisible seems to vanish. It does not vanish, but instead persists, the violence. Repeated traumas are also at the origin of the mutism of the protagonist of The Greek Hour (2011, Adelphi 2023), who by clinging to the radical foreignness of Plato's language hopes to regain her own voice. In the same way, the attempt to overcome a mourning never truly experienced, that for a sister who died before she was born, two hours after seeing the light, gives shape toThe white book (2017), not yet translated. The most autobiographical of all her novels, by the author's own admission. An elegy for a person who never lived, whom the narrator never knew. A meditation on a trauma that does not lurk in her own memory, but in that of others. Which exists in her, even if it has no form.