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The Red Years: Forbidden Poems from Inside North Korea by Bandi – review



It’s hard to imagine living in a country where publishing anything critical about the government could get you executed. But that’s the pressure that an anonymous North Korean dissident writer known only as Bandi lives under.

In 2017, Bandi (which means “firefly” in Korean) caught the attention of the world when The Accusation, a collection of short stories, was published in English. Chronicling the lives of ordinary people under the oppressive regime of the current dictator’s grandfather, Kim Il-sung, The Accusation became a global sensation, winning several literary and human rights prizes, not only because of its political message but also because of how the book had come into being. Translated into 30 languages, it has now been published in 28 countries, though not, of course, in North Korea

Little is known about Bandi except that like all North Korean writers he will have worked for the state writing “approved” literature, he is now almost 70 and chose not to defect because of his family. He began writing dissident literature soon after the so-called Arduous March, a famine that lasted throughout the Nineties and is estimated to have killed up to two million people, including many of Bandi’s own friends and colleagues. Exacerbated by Kim Il-sung’s death in 1994, the withdrawal of Russian support from North Korea and a series of droughts and floods, it was caused above all by decades of government mismanagement and incompetence. 

It wasn’t until 2014 that Bandi finally managed to smuggle his bombshell of a manuscript out of North Korea into China, and from there to the rest of the world. With the help of one of his relatives, who had decided to defect, the 750-page document was concealed between pages of government propaganda, which foiled the X-ray machines at the Chinese border but would have been picked up had the luggage been searched by hand. 

These tales of tyranny have been compared to Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, likening the whole of North Korea to a prison labour camp, where slogans are blared through loudspeakers, a child being frightened of an image of Karl Marx at a rally “had serious implications” for the parents, and drawing the curtains in a Pyongyang apartment at night is considered to be “extremely suspicious… some kind of secret code to communicate with spies”.

The Red Years: Forbidden Poems from Inside North Korea by Bandi (translated by Heinz Insu Fenkl)

The original bundle of papers also contained some fragmentary poems written on scraps of paper, and it is these that are now being published for the first time in English. Given their fragile state, it has taken time to piece them together. But here they are. The Red Years: Forbidden Poems from Inside North Korea, a slim volume of 51 short poems, makes for pretty depressing reading, the brutality of life under Kim Il-sung and his son Kim Jong-il expressed even more crudely than in the stories. 

In one, 50 Red Years, the Fifties are described as “bloody, knife-wielding years of peasant struggle”, the Sixties are “sweat-soaked years under the yoke of servitude” while the Seventies are “tear-stained under the terrible chains of oppression”. 

In another, The Song of the Five Thieves, Kim Il-sung is unequivocally denounced: “Fatty Kim, the worst thief on Heaven and Earth, squats down,/ Squashing factories, farms, the whole countryside, under a single cheek of his ass, / And in broad daylight he bites off chunks to devour at his whim.”

In The Hitchhiker, Bandi acknowledges the existence of a better life elsewhere: “Out in the world they take airplanes, taxis!/ But why, in our land, must we hitch our rides?/ Take me with you, take me all the way./ Take me away from this sickening Red land.”

The manuscript would almost certainly never have seen the light of day without the help of South Korean human rights activist Do Hee-yun, who has worked on Bandi’s behalf from the beginning and knows more about him than anyone else, although for obvious reasons can divulge only certain facts. Speaking from Seoul through an interpreter, he tells me he has not had any contact with the poet since January 2018.

“Bandi could have been taken prisoner or executed, although if he had there would probably have been news leaked from the government. There’s no way of knowing and I’m not pushing to be in contact with him as that in itself could be dangerous.” 

The North Korean government is aware of Bandi’s existence, he says, given that his work has been published worldwide, but they still don’t know his identity, “otherwise he wouldn’t be safe”. 

It’s a dangerous undertaking for Do too. Does he fear for his own safety? “Yes, and as a human being I’m afraid. But as a human rights activist it’s normal to be in constant danger. I’m still working as part of the revolution for change in North Korea to make sure that one day in the future North Koreans will be able to experience freedom. That’s what keeps me going.”

Life in rural North Korea is probably even worse under Kim Jong-un than it was under his father and grandfather, he continues, “because although the regime is going out of its way to show the rest of the world that there’s an economic boost in big cities such as Pyongyang, people in the countryside still depend on rations and government handouts to live.” And while Kim ​Il-sung was “an expert in totalitarianism, worse than Karl Marx himself”, Kim Jong-un is “unskilled, and still a novice”.

But he remains optimistic. “I wouldn’t be putting my life at risk if I didn’t believe in a future of freedom for these people. They don’t even know what they’re missing, they just think they’re born that way and will die that way. Freedom isn’t even a word there. But it’s the responsibility of the free world to let them know that there’s another place; that there’s freedom outside.” 

The last word surely should go to Bandi. A Dream is the final poem:

Dark and fearful, the night was long,

But the new day has come, this bright new world,

The bells of freedom, clamorous, ringing,

The birds in the sky do their fluttering dance.

Mansae, mansae, manmansae!* Hail freedom!

The sound of chains and whips, those chilling sounds

Gone — and the barred windows thrown open, wide open.

Kick away your seats and arise, my friends.

Do you not hear the sound of freedom’s bells?

Mansae, mansae, manmansae! Hail freedom!

Our mouths, once packed with gravel, are open again.

Let’s sing the songs we love — to our heart’s content.

They took away our ears, but now they’re open, wide.

Let us fill ourselves with joy, this taste, this world, so vast.

Mansae, mansae, manmansae! Hail freedom!

*A traditional Korean exclamation equivalent to “long live”; literally “10,000 years”

The Red Years: Forbidden Poems from Inside North Korea by Bandi (translated by Heinz Insu Fenkl) is published by Zed Books



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