Teesta Review: A Journal of Poetry

Teesta Review: A Journal of Poetry, Volume 1, Number 2. November 2018. ISSN: 2581-7094

The Accusation

Bandi, Grove Press, January 16, 2018,

ISBN-13978-0-8021-2751-8, $25, Pp.: 256.

“Bandi” is the Korean word for “firefly,” those tiny engines of nostalgia who briefly rise to illuminate the twilit dusk during summer months. Bandi also is the pseudonym of an anonymous North Korean writer who has authored the short story collection titled The Accusation, seven short stories that were smuggled out of what the West sees as a fortress nation.

In a poem used as a preface in the book the writer explains why exactly he chose the name “Bandi” for himself:

That old man of Europe with his bristling beard

Claimed that capitalism is a pitch-black realm

While communism is a world of light.

I, Bandi, of this so-called world of light,

Fated to shine only in a world of darkness,

Translated by PEN award-winning author Deborah Smith, the collection comprises small illuminations into the lives of ordinary North Koreans that rise up to enlighten and then fade back into the darkness of the reclusive and perilous nation. The book was first published in South Korea and, should Bandi’s identity be revealed, it is almost certain he will be executed. There will be no gala book-launchs, no cocktail parties for the author, no interviews with the literary press.

As Westerners, we know the Great Leaders of North Korea, the parade of Kims, Il-sung and Jong-Il and now Jong-un, and we know of the great threat that family has posed to the West and Asia for generations. But, as Westerners and, more importantly, as not North Koreans, our conception and understanding of the day-to-day lives of its citizens is severely limited. What we do know seems to come mostly from defectors from the North, and, honestly, they may not be the best source of information for a variety of reasons (their abandoned status in the North, a longing for attention and approval from the South and the West, Stockholm Syndrome, and PTSD to name a few).

Apparently, the pencil-written manuscript was smuggled from the isolated nation along a route through the border along The People’s Republic of China and probably involved the delicate art of military bribery. The characters are taken from a wide range of social classes from cooperative agricultural farm labourers to North Korean elites and highlight the Orwellian existence of everyday life of citizens living in a “perfect” society but forced to burn sawdust for fuel and eat corncobs for breakfast, The Accusation portrays the frustrations and absurdities that inhabitants of this “perfect” society face every day. Every story is apparently based in the reality of individual and true -to-life circumstances. We know of the growing nuclear threat, we know of the great famines that made that threat possible, we know of the slave laborers sent abroad to enrich the North Korean economy, we know of the internationally illegal fisheries, but we know nothing of a man trying again and again, only to be refused again and again, to visit his dying mother as Bandi writes in “So Near, Yet So Far.” The infuriating quest ends with the simple telegram “MOTHER DECEASED.” No personal matters are allowed interfere with the mechanisms of the North Korean dystopia and each inhumane indignity must be faced with stoic “patriotism.”

The first story in this burning collection, “Record of a Defection,” is dated December 12, 1989 and is presumably the first written. It reads as a note left behind by the protagonist to explain his decision to escape with his brother’s family in an uncertain endeavor to reach South Korea by a canoe. While the reader never learns if the attempt was successful, the impetuous for the desperate act is almost comically absurd and involves a packet of contraceptives and a lecherous supervisor. That birth control pills and a mean boss would lead to a potentially suicidal mission may seem odd to Westerners, but such small insignificances can be deadly under the regime described.

In “Pandemonium,” Bandi relates how a train trip and an unexpected encounter with the “Great Leader, Father of Us All, Kim Il-Sung” cruelly twists tears, injuries, misery and despair into “happy laughter” for a broadcast bit of propaganda. In “Life of a Swift Steed,” the promise and failure of the worker’s paradise is exemplified by elms trees and broken hearts to tell an “old tale, which was not really old at all.” It is a world in which “every rabbit has three holes” in which they are to hide should political disaster strike. The rabbits without holes are subject to the State’s full attention, and no rabbit would wish for that. It is a world where every citizen is an actor in constant training who, as in “On Stage,” must have the ability to perform appropriately, whether mourning a dead Kim with facile weeping or writing bland propaganda publicly in spite of whatever interior emotions might rage within the writer. And, when the actors become truthful, performing improvised skits titled “It Hurts, Hahaha” and “It Tickles, Boohoo,” the holes disappear and the rabbit is skinned. Bandi, if he is still alive, may be running out of such holes.

“On Stage” speaks of a country bereft of flowers where mourning rituals continue under the watchful eyes of security.

The stories speak of naive citizens who blindly follow but also transgress the dictum of the state and reach a position where they achieve political disillusionment. The characters are finally imprisoned, flee, turn mad, or die but all of them reach a culmination point when in a flash of revelation it becomes all too evident to them that despite the propaganda, the system that they were devoted to is false and eventually dangerous. A mother simply pulls down her blinds because of the giant image of Karl Marx outside that frightens her toddler. She is instantly humiliated and exiled by her fearful neighbors

If you can turn your attention to the structure of the stories they will strike you as identical. The writing style is unpolished and sharp to vent a bitter anger. The stories work in flashbacks that typically happen toward the end where the naïve citizens are disillusioned and enlightened. There abounds rhetorical questions and exclamation marks. In the “Afterword”, it is pointed out that instead of physically escaping the country, Bandi chose instead to smuggle out his manuscript to record North Korea’s oppressive regime. This simple fact only increases the readers’ anxiety as we puzzle his decision to remain in this malignant political regime. The reader must insert a rhetorical question and then, perhaps insert an exclamatory statement as well.

At a time in history when the American consciousness is filled with mushroom clouds and millions of soldiers on alert, The Accusation offers us a portrait of North Korea never seen before and, perhaps, never to be seen again, a “life out of kilter with the real world,” of a people so lost behind their iron curtain that they can never be certain which is up, which is down, which is famine, which is feast, which is freedom, and which is slavery.