Marching Through Suffering: Loss and Survival in North Korea by Sandra Fahy

Abstract

Sandra Fahy, Marching Through Suffering: Loss and Survival in North Korea. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. 272 pp.The most precious thing for man is life, but socio-political life is more precious than that of physical body, and life of social community is more precious than that of individuals.-Kim Jong Il (2014)It is within transition from 1980s to 1990s, encompassing collapse of Soviet Union, death of Great Leader Kim Il Sung, and a series of devastating disasters, that one can place Sandra Fahy's Marching Through Suffering: Loss and Survival in North Korea. book is a linguistic analysis of some 30 oral accounts of famine years from defectors1 now residing in Seoul and Tokyo, and is first of its kind to present such ethnographically material in English. In years signaling end of communism, American political rhetoric, popular news media, humanitarian discourse, and academic efforts lent to consolidation of an unshakeable image of DPRK2 as an evil-totalitarian- military-dictatorship-nuclearized-Stalinist-cult-regime where the suffer under excess of power. Fahy's work gestures toward a much-needed counterpoint that positions ordinary north Koreans as active agents making sense and negotiating of their lives (3). Although book does much to achieve that end, it succeeds only partially, as it also perpetuates very narrative it seeks to dispel.The book's six chapters are organized chronologically, following emergence and development of famine (Chapters 1 and 2), its critical stages (Chapters 3 and 4), decisive points of defection (Chapter 5), and aftermath (Chapter 6). Each segment features extensive passages from Fahy's interviews interspersed with analysis and historical context- a practical way to utilize oral accounts, but not most imaginative given anthropology's commitment to writing and of representation. Fahy's long-term engagement with defectors is premised on idea that a better understanding of [w]hat North Koreans did, how they understood things, how they made sense of difficulties during famine would not only challenge notion that North Koreans are brainwashed (8), but also explain how countries such as North Korea survived as long as they have (2). However suggestive, her aim to examine relationships between famine and language, power and discourse, and to answer natural question of why people didn't rise up in face of such deprivation and difficulty (8) reproduces assumptions about socialist experience that need to be critically examined. This review focuses on Chapter 3, The Life of Words, and Chapter 5, Breaking Points, in an effort to retrofit analytical and theoretical apparatus most often employed in study of north Korea.Chapter 3, for instance, takes disconnect between discourse and reality (84) as its starting point, making reference to Austinian performativity, only to shape it as a perpetual performance of dissimulation or to describe a life lived in lies (102). This type of analysis is not unfamiliar to field of postsocialism (and postcommunism), and is problematic because it relies on simplistic binaries of truth/lie, oppression/oppressed, state/people, control/resistance, public/private that been used to portray life under socialism. Alexei Yurchak's (2006) concept of performative shift provides an alternative framework. A similar perspective should be afforded by Caroline Humphrey (1994), but her concept of evocative transcripts is taken up as part of chapter's analysis and regrettably not addressed in context of larger debates in postcolonial studies. Scholars in this field shown that ideological language and ritual discourse cannot be explained in terms of false consciousness or models of mimicry. task now is to situate famine experience and many rich ethnographic moments Fahy assembles within north Korea's socialist legacy. …