The Memory Keeper

Much of Han Kang's fiction traces the impact of the violence inflicted on ordinary lives by authoritarians and the burden of historical traumas

- Vineetha Mokkil

"Some memories never heal. Rather than fading with the passage of time, those memories become the only things that are left behind when all else is abraded. The world darkens, like electric bulbs going out one by one. I am aware that I am not a safe person." -Human Acts, Han Kang

HAN Kang, the 2024 Nobel Laureate for literature, has made history as the first Asian woman writer and the first South Korean author to be awarded the literature prize. Announcing her win, the Nobel Committee praised her “intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life” and “her empathy for vulnerable, often female lives…” Han didn’t hold a press conference after the announcement. She chose not to celebrate her win at a time when wars are raging between Ukraine-Russia and Israel-Palestine, with deaths being reported every day.

Much of Han’s fiction traces the impact of violence on ordinary lives, the suffering inflicted on those who stood up against authoritarian regimes in South Korea’s history, and the burden of historical traumas. She chronicles vulnerable lives with empathy, and looks tyranny in the eye without flinching. Her novel Human Acts gives a voice to the pro-democracy protestors who were massacred by the South Korean military at Gwangju city in 1980. By immortalising them in prose, she has ensured that their memory will live on and the massacre will not be denied. In We Do Not Part, (slated to be published in English next year), the shadows of the mass slaughter of the residents of South Korea’s Jeju Island darkens the fictional present. Many islanders, accused of being collaborators, were shot dead by the military in the 1940s. Both novels capture the brutality of state-sponsored violence and the inherited trauma of future generations.