The language of violence, the memory of the dead

I recently finished reading We Do Not Part by South Korean author and Nobel Prize winner Han Kang. While reading it, I was reminded of another novel of hers that I had read earlier, Human Acts. Both novels deal with painful events in South Korea’s history, particularly the Jeju massacre of 1948 and the Gwangju Uprising of 1980. What I particularly like about these books is how Han Kang writes about violence, death, and suffering in a manner that is both haunting and deeply moving.

I was born two years before the EDSA Revolution, during the last remaining years of the Marcos dictatorship. Most of what I know about those years comes from books, movies, and especially stories told by people who actually lived through them. This is why I find Han Kang’s novels particularly affecting. Although they are set in South Korea, the experiences they describe are not entirely unfamiliar to Filipinos.

Human Acts, inspired by the 1980 Gwangju Uprising, also known as the May 18 Democratic Uprising, feels gloomy and almost funereal from the beginning. As the story progresses, there are scenes that will make your stomach turn because of the torture suffered by the characters and the cruelty of those responsible. Although the characters are fictionalized, their experiences are drawn from actual events and people involved in the uprising. Knowing that these atrocities really happened makes the novel even more heartbreaking.

Han Kang’s writing, together with Deborah Smith’s brilliant yet controversial English translation, makes the novel difficult to put down despite its disturbing subject. It is painful yet absorbing. The same can be said of We Do Not Part, although this novel approaches historical violence somewhat differently. While Human Acts brings us close to the brutality of the Gwangju Uprising, We Do Not Part focuses more on the memories of those who survived the Jeju massacre and the grief they continue to carry decades later.

Despite this difference, both novels show that the consequences of violence do not end when the killing stops. Han Kang writes about families searching for their loved ones, people who disappeared, and survivors who continue to live with painful memories. What I appreciate about her writing is that she does not simply tell us how many people were killed. Instead, she makes us think about the people behind those numbers and the lives they could have lived.

This attention to the victims and their families reminded me of another book, this time much closer to home. While reading We Do Not Part, I found myself thinking about the thousands of killings associated with the Philippines’ controversial war on drugs in recent years. I was reminded particularly of Patricia Evangelista’s Some People Need Killing, a work of literary journalism that documents the experiences of victims and their families during the campaign.

Although Han Kang writes fiction while Evangelista writes nonfiction, their works have much in common. Both examine violence committed by the state and how ordinary people suffer because of it. More importantly, both are concerned with how these events are remembered, especially when those responsible have the power to influence what the public knows and believes.

One connection that particularly interests me, especially as someone who teaches language, is how words can be used to justify violence. In Some People Need Killing, Evangelista discusses what she calls the “grammar of violence,” or how language can influence the way people understand and even accept killings. During the drug war, expressions such as “drug personalities” and “neutralized” became common in official statements and news reports. These words can make the killing of a person sound like an ordinary police operation rather than the loss of a human life.

Something similar happened during the Gwangju Uprising, as depicted in Human Acts. The government used censorship and propaganda to portray protesters as threats while suppressing reports of the violence committed against them. In both situations, language was used not only to describe events but also to influence how people perceived the victims. It becomes easier to justify violence when the people being killed are no longer presented as ordinary human beings.

This is also why Han Kang and Evangelista pay so much attention to the victims themselves. If language can be used to make people appear less human, it can also be used to restore their humanity. Han Kang does this through fiction, revisiting historical events and imagining the experiences of those who died and survived. Evangelista, meanwhile, documents the names, lives, and circumstances of people killed during the drug war, including the families who continue to seek justice.

I find this particularly important because we often encounter reports of killings through numbers, headlines, and official statements. Eventually, these become so familiar that we may no longer pay much attention. Reading these books, however, makes it difficult to dismiss the victims as mere statistics. We learn about their families, their ordinary lives, and the people who continue to mourn them.

Having read these three books, I am also reminded of how easily societies can forget uncomfortable parts of their history. Some people remain silent out of fear, while others would rather move on. But for those who lost their loved ones, forgetting is not always possible. Their grief stays even when the rest of society has stopped talking about what happened.

What I find particularly disturbing is that the events in these books happened decades apart, in different countries, and under different circumstances, yet the experiences of the victims and their families are strikingly similar. I wonder how many more stories like these remain untold, especially in the Philippines, where we are still struggling to come to terms with some of the darkest periods of our own history.

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Michael Caesar C. Tubal teaches language, literature, and pedagogy at West Visayas State University College of Education. In his free time, if he is not reading or writing, he watches past episodes of RuPaul’s Drag Race or joins book clubs in Iloilo City.