Reflection on Han Kang

From the ferociously intimate and devastating philosophical realities of The Vegetarian, in her Booker-shortlisted Human Acts, Han Kang turns to one of South Korea’s defining modern events and moments: the 1980 Gwangju Uprising. It was a period of tremendous violence, and of great turbulence that still divides people and remains a visceral memory in the national mind. Han Kang imagines the Uprising through different eyes and bodies, some of them dead, some of them living. How does political violence stick in the body and in the psyche of the individual – and the collective imagination? The novel is a powerful interrogation of trauma that transcends violence constraints of time: how lives and communities remain affected by violence long after the event. In her writing, Han has said she wants to think about ‘the possibility of cruelty in human beings and the possibility of survival in violent circumstances’. Her writing is spare, and she confronts us with government violence while also showing us how people can be kind to each other even in pain and terror. In The Vegetarian and Human Acts, she asks us to consider what separates the human from the nonhuman, and how violence contours the self and impacts memory