제주평화연구원

Community at Peace

  [caption id="" align="alignright" width="150"] Heonik Kwon[/caption]

In 1952, Pablo Picasso completed another major work dedicated to the theme of war and peace. Installed in the curved vaulting of the village chapel at Vallauris in southern France, his War and Peace follows his oil-on-plywood Massacre in Korea (1951) and, of course, his larger and far better-known Guernica (1937). Massacre in Korea shows a group of helpless women and children on the left side of the composition. This group is confronted by a horde of heavily armed robot-looking soldiers on the right side of the composition. In the space between these two parts, a mass grave appears in the distance. His 1952 work consists of two murals, one of which is titled War and the other Peace, which face each other in the vaulting. Peace depicts a tightrope walker “as a symbol of the fragile nature of peace” as well as “mothers and playing children, around the central figure of Pegasus, pulling a plough at the bidding of a child, which is supposed to personify the fertile world of peace.” The mural also shows a family, under an orange tree, “calmly and happily enjoying themselves in the sunshine.”  The communal effervescence and conviviality in Peace appear to be in dialog with the lethal terror of Massacre—as if the lives lost in Massacre were summoned in Peace. The family consists of a woman breastfeeding an infant and a man tending the hearth and preparing a meal. Another man seems to be immersed in writing, and the woman is reading a book while breastfeeding. Here, I ask how the peaceful domestic life portrayed in the Peace mural could relate to the political concept of peace, that is, a peace that confronts the force of war.

*** At the end of 1989, when the world was riveted by the powerful drama of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the island of Jeju, at Korea’s southern maritime border with Japan, was undergoing its own end drama of the Cold War. In Jeju, this drama took the form of breaking down the wall of silence that had enveloped the islanders’ everyday lives for the previous four decades. Notable in this respect was the appearance of the book Now We Speak Out, in which twenty islanders testified to their experiences of the extreme violence in the period from 1948 to 1953, commonly referred to today as 4.3 or the April Third incident. The lead testimony is given by a simbang, the local word for a specialist in shamanism, which is a strong tradition in Jeju:

Nearly every family keeps some grievous spirits of the tragic dead from the time of the incident. If you listened to their stories, you would know that nearly all these dead were innocent people. They were neither on that side nor on this side: these people, caught between the two sides, were simply trying to escape a brutal fate. Some escaped to the mountains to preserve their lives and never came back others met death while staying quietly at home. Each time I performed a kut [shamanic rite], I heard these stories. In rituals for families who had people working for the police or the government, you would hear more stories about people killed by the mountain [partisan] side in other homes, stories were mostly about the victims of the government side. Many dead had no origin in this or that side. I heard from [the spirit of] a man how his death had been caused by his relative by law. His relative had had a grudge against him because of an old marriage dispute between the two families.

The appearance of these testimonies is regarded by the island’s intellectuals as one of the most important public events in recent decades and as an event that marked the end of the island’s long-held silence about its experience of state terror. Now We Speak Out introduces twenty important testimonies to the violence of 1948, which was experienced in different localities and by a variety of survivors, including secondary-school students in towns, village farmers, prisoners, and member of the mountain partisan group. These testimonies provide rare insights into the hitherto publicly unknown historical reality, and they comprise a view of the era from diverse standpoints. The story told by the local village shaman is the opening testimony in the collection, serving as the general introduction to the stories that follow.

The preeminence of shamanism in the act of historical testimony, as manifested in the organization of Now We Speak Out, draws upon the islanders’ everyday lives during the Cold War. The anthropologist Kim Seong-Nae conducted fieldwork in a seashore village on northern Jeju at the end of the 1980s. Her research initially focused on gender issues in the Jeju islanders’ religious lives, especially the significance of shamanism in the daily lives of the island’s women. Shamanism is a form of religion that exists in parallel with the rituals of ancestor worship, which also have an important place in the routines of the islanders’ family and communal lives. Subsequently, however, after hearing some fragmented remarks about the violence of 1948-1949, Kim changed her research focus to narratives of historical violence as they are told in shamanic rituals. Such remarks were rarely encountered outside the context of the rituals held at that time, which led Kim to conclude that in Jeju, shamanism is a distinct, powerful institution of historical memory.

Shamanism has continued to play a pivotal role in the commemoration of the victims in the following era. During the month of April, visitors to the island often accidentally encounter ritual occasions that are referred to as “the lamentations of the dead.”  Presided over by local specialists in shamanic rituals, these rituals are invitations to the spirits of the tragic dead, offering them food and money before enacting the clearing of obstacles from their pathways to the netherworld. A key element in this long and complex ritual occurs when the invited spirits of the dead publicly express their grievous feelings and unfulfilled wishes through the ritual specialist’s speeches and songs.

The lamentations of the dead constitute an important aesthetic form in Korea’s culture of political protest, which should be considered in light of the nation’s particular historical background. Most notable is its experience of the early Cold War in the form of a vicious civil war and prolific political violence. Equally important in this background is the postwar experience of anticommunism as part of the enduring Cold War politics, which has prevented society from coming to terms with the truth of its war experience. The proliferation of the spirit narration of violence, war, and death in the present relates to the repression of the history of mass death in past decades. Just as the silence of the dead was a prime motif in Jeju’s resistance literature under the anticommunist political regime, their publicly staged lamentations became a principal element in the island’s cultural activity after the democratic transition. Between the past and the present, a radical change has taken place in which the living are no longer obliged to remain deaf to what the dead have to say about history and historical justice. What has continued over time, however, is that the understanding of political reality at the grassroots level is expressed through the communicability of historical experience between the living and the dead.

The rituals displaying the lamenting spirits of the dead were an important part of civic activism in Jeju, which was focused on the moral rehabilitation of the casualties of the postcolonial violence as innocent civilian victims, departing from the classification in the previous era as communist insurgents or sympathizers. Such rehabilitative initiatives have affected the material culture of commemoration in Jeju. Most prominent is the large memorial complex at the center of the island, Jeju Peace Park. Completed in 2010, the Peace Park is intended to represent the history of the political violence the islanders underwent between 1948 and 1953 on a province-wide scale. The site consists of a state-of-the-art museum complex, beautifully conceived memorial sculptures, a large chamber containing the names of victims, and graves of the missing. The park attracts a great number of visitors from mainland Korea and overseas, Each April a province-wide commemorative event is held in the presence of notable guests, media, and families of the victims. Although the park is regarded as a public memorial dedicated to the victims of the state violence, the Jeju islanders join the annual commemorative gathering as an extension of the ancestral death-day rites held at home and in their home villages (see below).

New memorials were erected also in villages. Particularly remarkable is the local ancestral shrine in the village of Hagui, in the northern district of Jeju Island, which was completed at the beginning of 2003. The Hagui memorial consists of a white vertical stone that is located in a central space on both sides of which are two horizontal stones made of black granite. On the white stone at the center is the following inscription in Chinese characters: “Shrine of Spirit Consolation.” The two black stones on the left commemorate the patriotic ancestors in the colonial era (“stone for virtuous ancestors”), the patriotic fighters from the village during the Korean War and later from the military expedition to the Vietnam War (“stone for patriotic spirits”). The two black stones on the right side (“stones for spirit consolation”) commemorate the hundreds of villagers who fell victim to the protracted anticommunist counterinsurgency campaigns waged in Jeju before and during the Korean War.

The completion of this monument has a complex historical background. In the 1920s, the village was divided into two separate administrative units, which are now understood as having been a divide-and-rule strategy of the Japanese colonial administration at the time. The division was distorted during the chaos following the April 3 incident. Hagui elders recall that the imposed administrative division of the village caused a perilous, painful situation at the height of the counterinsurgency military campaigns. The zero-sum logic of these campaigns set the people in one part of the village, which was labeled a “red” hamlet, against those in the other part of the village, who then tried to dissociate themselves from the former. After these campaigns ended, South Koreans considered Hagui and the entire island of Jeju subversive and “red.” A document published in 1986 about anticommunist public education argues, “The characteristics of local communities [in Jeju] are such that once someone in the community’s leadership position was affected by communism, due to the tight webs of kinship and residential ties in the island communities, it was inevitable that members of the entire lineage and the entire village were to become members of the communist party.”  According to this logic of guilt by association, Hagui villagers seeking employment outside the village experienced discrimination because of their place of origin, which then aggravated the existing grievances between the two administratively separate residential clusters. People on one side felt that it was unjust that they were blamed for what they believed the other side of the village was responsible for, and the latter found it hard to accept that they had to endure accusations and discrimination even within a close community. Against this background, some Hagui villagers petitioned the local court, proposing to divide the village into two new units and name them differently. Their intention was to bury the stigmatizing name of Hagui and to eradicate all signs of affinity between the two units. This occurred immediately after the end of the Korean War in July 1953. The village of Hagui was eventually officially separated into Dong-gui and Gui-il, two names that no one liked, but which were, nevertheless, necessary.

The above historical trajectory resulted in a host of problems and conflicts in the villagers’ daily lives. Not only did a several suffer the effects of the extra-judicial system of associative guilt, which prevented individuals with an allegedly politically impure family genealogy from taking employment in the public sector or from enjoying social mobility in general. Some also had to endure sharing the village’s communal space with those who they believed were to blame for their predicament. This last point relates to the persisting wounds of violent postcolonial history within the community, which are the legacy of the villagers’ complex, violent experience with the counterinsurgency actions, including their being forced to accuse close neighbors of supporting the insurgents. These hidden histories are occasionally pried open and become explosive issues in the community. For instance, young lovers ask why their families and the village elders oppose their relationship so ferociously without telling them any intelligible reason for such opposition.

The details of these intimate histories of state violence and their contemporary traces remain a taboo subject in Hagui. The most frequently recalled and excitedly recited episodes are instead related to festive occasions. Before the villagers began to discuss the idea of a communal shrine, the two units of Hagui participated together in inter-village sporting events and feasts that were organized periodically by the district authority. Although they had met on many such events, on one occasion, the two football teams of Dong-gui and Gui-il both managed to reach the semi-finals, and both teams hoped to win the final match. During the competition, the residents of Dong-gui cheered against the team representing Gui-il, supporting the team’s opponent from another village instead, and the same happened with the residents of Gui-il in a match involving the team from Dong-gui. This experience was scandalous according to the Hagui elders I spoke to, and they contrasted the explosively divisive situation of the village with an opposite initiative that was taking place in the wider world. At the time of the inter-village feast, the idea of joint national representation in international sporting events was under discussion between South Korea and North Korea. The village was going against the stream of history according to the elders, and they said that the village’s shameful collective behavior on the district football ground was the momentum for thinking about a communal project that would help to reunite the community of Hagui.

In 1990, the village assembly in Dong-gui and its counterpart in Gui-il agreed to revive their original common name and to dissolve the nominal separation in the past four decades after the Korean War. They established an informal committee to be responsible for the rapprochement and reintegration of the two villages. In 2000, this committee proposed to the village assemblies the idea of erecting a new ancestral shrine based on donations from the villagers and from those living elsewhere. When the shrine was completed in 2003, the Hagui villagers held a grand opening ceremony in the presence of many visitors from elsewhere in the country and overseas (many Hagui natives live in Japan). The black memorial stones on the left are inscribed with many names of patriotic village ancestors, including one hundred names of those who lived in colonial times, dozens of patriotic soldiers who died in the Korean War and the Vietnam War, and a dozen villagers killed by communist partisans during the April 3 incident. The two stones on the right (from the audience’s perspective) commemorate three hundred and three villagers who were victims of the anticommunist political terror during the April 3 incident. The following poetic message is dedicated to the victims:

When we were still enjoying the happiness of being freed from the colonial misery,

When we were yet unaware of the pain to be brought by the Korean War,

Did come to us the dark clouds of history, whose origin we still don’t know after a ll those years?

Then many lives, so many lives, were broken and their bodies were discarded to the mountains, the fields, and the sea. For the past fifty years, Who can say in this mass of displaced souls some souls have more grievances than the others? What about those who couldn’t even cry for the dead? Who will console their hearts that suffered all those years only for one reason that they belonged to the bodies who survived the destruction?... For the past fifty years,​

The dead and the living alike led the unnatural life of wandering souls, without a place to anchor.

Only today,

Being older than our fathers and aged more than our mothers,

We are gathered together in this very place. Let the heavens deal with the question of fate. Let history deal with its own portion of culpability.

Our intention is not to dig again into the troubled grave of pain.

It is only to fulfill the obligation of the living to offer a shovel of fine soil to the grave. It is because we hope someday the bleeding wounds may start to heal and we may see some sign of new life on them…

Looking back,

We see that we are all victims. Looking back,

We see that we all are to forgive us all.

In this spirit,

We are all together erecting this stone.

For the dead, may this stone help them finally close their eyes.

For us the living, may this stone help us finally hold hands together.

***

A central myth in modern politics is that the milieu of human kinship is in the private sphere of life and has no place in the advancement of political society. In this myth, kinship was central to the moral order of premodern society and that the horizons of modern society and politics emerge when kinship relations retreat from the public world to the private sphere. The historical experience of the modernity of the Cold War in the outposts of global conflict does not sit comfortably with this understanding of kinship.

In his foundational sociological text, Community and Society, the German social philosopher at the end of the nineteenth century, Ferdinand Tönnies, makes an interesting observation on the conceptual distinction between community and society in terms of moral judgment. Addressing family and kinship relations, which he defines as an ideal type of community, Tönnies observes that it is impossible to conceive of a “bad community.” He argues that although one may speak of a society as a good or bad society (i.e., just or unjust society, or democratic or undemocratic society), this moral judgment cannot apply to Community:

All intimate, private, and exclusive living together, so we discover, is understood as life in Gemeinschaft (community). Gesellschaft (society) is public life—it is the world itself. In Gemeinschaft with one’s family, one lives from birth on, bound to it in weal and woe. One goes into Gesellschaft as one goes into a strange country. A young man is warned against bad Gesellschaft, but the expression bad Gemeinschaft violates the meaning of the word.

Tönnies’s point about the freedom of community from moral judgment speaks of the particular constitution of what he calls the “strange country” of modern society, in which members are to associate with each other, supposedly free from the dispositions of their familiar, rooted communal identities. Being strangers to each other, these newcomers (the parvenue) to the “strange country,” called individuals, invent new rules of mutual engagement and association. How they establish and agree upon these rules and what these rules may look like will speak greatly of whether the strange, new country is to be deemed a good society or not. Once they start engaging in building this strange country of society, however, they are all equal to each other and no longer to be judged according to their place of origin.

This early achievement in social theory has an interesting insight to offer to thinking about the subjectivity of modern war experience. South Korea at the time of the civil war and afterwards was a political society on the frontier of the global Cold War that took anticommunism as one of its constitutional principles the construction of national identity involved not only the creation of pure ideological selfhood on the frontier of anticommunism but also the containment of society from what the political authority defined as impure traditional communal ties. The construction of an ideologically cohesive and unitary society progressed, partly but crucially, through measures of control over traditional relations including the punishment of what the state regarded as politically impure and subversive communal ties. In this milieu, the complexity of kinship ties was pitted against the clarity of friends versus enemies, and the communal ties were judged good or bad depending on whether or not they were contained within the projected space of political interiority and ideological purity. In order to come to terms with these historical legacies, therefore, it is necessary to confront the way in which despite Tönnies’s theoretical conviction, the making of a modern political society continued to generate moral classification and judgment of traditional communities and communal relations.

If the idea of bad gemeinschaft has no place in modern life, yet nevertheless can exist as a formative element in the constitution of a modern political order, a progressive development away from this order must involve efforts to correct the disparity between the supposedly defunct conception of bad gemeinschaft in modern society and the actuality of its proliferation in modern politics. Political democratization, in this developmental context, is not merely about a struggle in representation, more accountable governance and the protection of individual liberty. It is also about the community’s recovery of its freedom from moral judgment and its destructive consequences.

The experience of the Cold War as a violent civil conflict resulted in a political crisis of the moral community of kinship. It resulted in a situation that Hegel characterized as the collision between “the law of kinship,” which obliges the living to remember their dead relatives, and “the law of the state,” which forbids citizens from commemorating those who died as enemies of the state.  The political crisis concerned a representational crisis in social memory, in which a large number of family-ancestral identities were relegated to the status that I have elsewhere called “political ghosts,” whose historical existence is felt in intimate social life but is traceless in public memory.

The epic heroine Antigone met her death by choosing family law instead of the state’s rule. Survival, for many families in postwar South Korea, meant following the state’s rule thereby sacrificing their right to grieve and seek consolation for the death of their kinsmen. The state’s repression of the right to grieve was conditioned by the wider politics of the Cold War. Emerging from colonial occupation only to be divided into two hostile states, the new state of South Korea found its legitimacy partly in its containment of communism. Its militant anticommunist policies included containing impure traditional ties, which engendered the concept of unlawful, non-normative kinship. In this context, sharing blood relations with an individual who was believed to harbor sympathy for the opposite side in the bipolarized world meant being an enemy of the political community in extension of the individual. In this political history, being on the left or right of the ideological spectrum was not only about opposing ideas but also about determining the bodily existence of individuals and collectives. Similarly, after the Cold War, this society has had to deal with corporeal identity. If someone has become an outlawed person by sharing blood ties with the state’s object of containment, that person’s claim to the lawful status of a citizen involves legitimizing this relation. This is how kinship emerges as the locus of the decomposing bipolar political world in the world’s outposts, and as a powerful force in the making of a tolerant and democratic society. A recent province-wide commemoration of the victims of the April Third violence opened with the following invocation to the souls of the dead:

Please come in, samchun,

Jokae, I have come.

Samchon!

Jokae!

Today, all the samchun in the world of the dead and all the jokae in this world are gathered together.

In local Jeju language, samchun (roughly translated to uncles and aunts) and jokae (nieces and nephews) refer to broad contiguous relations that incorporate ties of residence as well as those of kinship. In the context of the commemoration rite, the invited spirits of the dead (the victims of violence between 1948 and 1953 in Jeju) stand as aunts and uncles of the living participants in the ceremony (nominally all the people of Jeju).

On the same occasion, thousands of islanders from nearly all the highland and coastal villages gathered at the Peace Park located in the island’s central highlands. The reason they came to the memorial of the April 3 incident in the beautifully landscaped Peace Park that day was both individual and collective. Each participant had ties of kinship with some of the names inscribed in the Peace Park’s gigantic Chamber of Names of the Victims of the April Third Massacres. Many were related to the Graves of Missing Persons, which consist of row upon row of empty graves of those who went missing in the counterinsurgency war on the island in 1948 and 1949 or during the early months of the subsequent Korean War. In the Chamber of Names and the Graves of Missing Persons, the victims’ names are organized according to their village of origin. On this occasion, the islanders who travelled to the Peace Park also assembled according to their village of origin. They took part in the official memorial events, which involved messages and speeches of condolence by politicians, government officials, and family representatives. When the speeches were finished, the people dispersed to visit separately the Chamber of Names or the Graves of the Missing. At this time, the atmosphere changed noticeably. The event continued to be a public commemoration for the officials and the outside visitors each of whom proceeded to pick a flower from a bundle of chrysanthemums prepared by the provincial government and lay it on a stone tablet in front of the Chamber of Names.

For the families of the victims, however, the moment constituted the beginning of their rite of ancestral remembrance. They opened the bundle of fruit and drinks they had brought with them, and they presented these offerings at a specific village location beneath their relatives’ names inside the chamber or in front of specific graves of missing persons. Some families brought a full set of ceremonial utensils, the heavy copperware that people use at home exclusively for ritual meals offered to their ancestors. After these food offerings, the families gathered elsewhere in the park according to their village origins and shared the food they had brought with them with neighbors and other visitors. The ambience then changed again from the solemn atmosphere of the earlier formal commemorative event and from the chaotic dispersal of family groups to all corners of the park. I cherished the conviviality of these moments. There was an explosion of conversation about the unstable prices of spring onions and tangerines, about novice members of the village from the mainland and from overseas, about Chinese tourists, and about long-awaited visits to relatives in Japan. In one corner, several elders and youths were engaged in a conversation about recent clashes between China and Japan over an obscure island southwest of Jeju, which is called Senkaku in Japanese and Daiaoyu in Chinese. The island is one of the sites under territorial dispute in the region. In another corner, an elderly woman, whose youngest son recently married a woman from South Vietnam, was boasting to her friends about her new daughter-in-law. She said that she was surprised to hear from her daughter-in-law in the morning that the young woman knew why her mother-in-law was going to the Peace Park that day and that her family in Vietnam also had lost relatives in the war and many had not been buried.

The voice of kinship is heard in the shiny copperware utensils for ancestors that the villagers brought to the public memorial events. It is heard in the care these mourners give to unwrapping these objects while participating in the public space as an extension of their domestic space and in the fleeting moments when these caring and dignified acts are performed in public—moments in which the morality of kinship, free from the political legacy of the civil war, declares its sovereignty. For the living, this freedom means the recovery of the right to grieve and commemorate the dead without the fear of negative political consequences. For the dead and the missing, it means recovering the right to exist in the world of kinship without endangering this world by being part of it. After the massacres in Korea, the political life of kinship involved a long struggle to reclaim the inalienable rights of the memory of the dead to an intimate existence among the living. In these assertions of conviviality between the living and the dead, moreover, we witness how people harness the power of the amity of kinship in building the ideal of peace.

In her comments on Picasso’s War and Peace, art historian Kirsten Keen explains the image of the domestic life under the orange tree as depicting “an apolitical golden age in which figures symbolizing maternity and culture are warmed by an olive-branched sun.”  Keen is critical of Picasso’s Massacre in Korea, which she believes is principally a political artwork that expresses the painter’s political identity as a communist and critic of American power. She argues that, in contrast, in War and Peace Picasso parted with his ideologically charged selfhood, his “communist interlude” as she calls it, recovering his true vocational self as an artist. I question this conclusion. My question is not necessarily about the freedom of art from politics. Instead, it concerns the alleged freedom of War and Peace from politics. Viewed on its own, the image of domestic conviviality in Peace may appear idyllic, innocent, and obliviously apolitical.

However, I doubt whether it can be interpreted in only this way considering the larger composition of which the image is part. The peaceful domestic life portrayed in the Peace mural may be meant to be perspectival: Suppose that this imagery is seen not by any spectators but by those who, having experienced the destruction of war, are trying to gather the fragmented pieces of their lives. Then the seemingly apolitical scenery of ordinary life near the hearth may have different significance: it may invoke memories of a long lost past life or the aspiration for the return of this life in the future. I ask if the image of domestic conviviality, seen from the specific perspective in which the sorrows of war are integral, could relate to the political concept of peace, that is, a peace that confronts the force of war. I also ask whether we can see in the intimacy between the living and the dead among the Jeju islanders, as shown in their act of bringing food and drink to the public space of the Peace Park, a living art of “peace under the orange tree” that people in this island as part of their everyday life and on the basis of their specific cultural and religious tradition.