Coincidental Companions

Earlier this year, I caught the virus that wreaked havoc on the world. Fortunately for me, it only chewed me up and spat me out. After finding my way through the fever and delirium - out of sheer boredom - I reached to the books on my bedside table. Guess what I found? Han Kang’s Human Acts and Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Misery truly does love company. No matter who my coincidental companions were, I was going to make the most of it. Human Acts (ISBN: 9781101906729) was for a book club and One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (ISBN: 0451527097) was checked out for… well, fun reading. And it was going to be good fun because my being bed-ridden was rare and having time to read even rarer.

So, did I find anything new? Well, it turns out that no matter how far we have advanced as a species, our capacity to inflict cruelty on each other has remained unchanged.

Human Acts is visceral experience of such torture. It is about the violent Gwangju student uprising in South Korea in the 80s, an event not well-known yet oddly familiar in the way it played out. The horrors and indignities of standing up against dictatorship have been well documented but get an unexpected treatment in the hands of Han Kang. The casualties of the massacre, as they pile up, speak through their putrefaction and stench. Looking away was not an option for those who were there at that place and time. And you, the reader, don’t get to look away either. For those left behind in the hell, the ones who could not look away that day in the summer of 1980, recounting the story does not bring any kind of solace. Having to grapple with bodily horror each day, they are plagued with the question of what dignity means in such conditions. Does it even exist? Kang’s question stays with us and so does her answer in the form of a short verse: ‘Break open that moment and out of it will come massacre, torture, violent repression. It gets shoved aside, beaten to pulp, swept away in the tide of brutality. But now, if we can only keep our eyes open, if we can all hold our gazes steady, until the bitter end….’

Dignity need not be given or taken; it already exists in the here-and-now. Imagine finding it embodied in the character of a book. For Ivan Denisovich, the protagonist of Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (translated by H.T. Willetts, note: it has got to be this translation, no other will do), day-to-day survival in the hard-labor camp is a suffering that he has turned into art. I had braced myself for a depressing read, but surprisingly this work - or rather the protagonist Ivan Denisovich aka Sukhov - has so much heart and humor that it is positively uplifting. I was so blown away by his colorful expressions that I read it in one go, and then went back again for a slow read to enjoy this beautiful, beautiful writing---'There are two ends to a stick, and there’s more than one way of working. If it’s for human beings---make sure and do it properly. If it’s for the big man---just make it look good.’

To be sure it is about the hard life of the labor camp. What sparkles through the below twenty-seven degrees Celsius freezing cold day and the toil, is Sukhov’s keen eye for the particularity of each zek (convict), his keen sense towards each evolving situation, and his ever-ready presence to act in it with consideration. Instead of using differences to further conflict, Sukov uses his knowledge of differences in the backgrounds of fellow-convicts to form a working basis for everyday interdependence. The ever-changing nature of freedom in a labor camp turns the most ordinary into something luminous---a surprisingly grateful heart! Having undergone a body-crushing day of toil in hell, Sukhov thinks about the good things that happened. He is pleased at the end of the day and almost happy at that! I couldn’t believe the gift of Sukhov, of his disposition, and I was immensely grateful to have a found such a gem on one of most my physically difficult days.

Upon recovery and back at work again, I found a third companion to this duo: The Barefoot Woman by Scholastique Mukasonga (ISBN: 9781939810045). Yet another infliction of mass cruelty from recent memory. When one refers to the Rwandan genocide in the 1990s, often what comes to mind instantly are the words “Hutus and Tutsis” with no real relation to either group. Mukasonga’s loving telling of her family’s life in exile in barren Nyamata, especially of her mother Stephania, makes this war and the casualties real; not a nameless, faceless happening in some far-off land. Nyamata the desert, Stephania’s efforts to grow food in it, the insatiable hunger all around on the one hand and impending death by the machete on the other - the detailed realities of war cannot be escaped. Despite the circumstances, Stephania builds an inzu in the midst of the shacks for displaced people. ‘An inzu: the kind of house that was vital to her as a water to a fish, as oxygen to a human being. Not because she’d come to accept her fate as an exile—she never resigned herself to that—but because she knew it was only in he ancestral dwelling place that she’d find strength and courage to face our misfortunes…’

There is no place to escape to and a price is paid, in Mukasonga’s case, by thirty-seven members of her family. Having come from a country with a colonial past, I quite empathized with Mukosonga when she lamented Rwanda’s loss of everything valuable to the colonial rulers. According to Mukasonga, before colonization, Hutus and Tutsis were divided only in their occupation: Hutus were farmers whereas Tutsis owned cattle, both ethnicities closely related to the land. Mukasonga, uses her very personal story of exile and loss to shine a light on the broader effort by colonizers to deliberately drive a wedge between the Hutus and the Tutsis.

These three books offer thought-provoking ways of looking at the horrors of violence and aggression, of wars and conflicts in nations all over the present world. Of course, what we do with this offering is entirely up to us. 

For a list of ongoing armed conflicts, you may follow the Wikipedia link at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ongoing_armed_conflicts

- by Shilpa Shanbhag, Hickory Corner Branch