Necropolitics and Trauma in Heinz Insu Fenkl's Memories of My Ghost Brother

Abstract

This article examines the properties of econo-political power exercised in a military camptown shortly after the Korean War, and the negative impact of that power on the villagers' lives, as revealed in Fenkl's novel Memories of My Ghost Brother. From a Freudian perspective, this work focuses on the concept of “necropolitics,” describing social and political power that dictates the death or life of people. As expected, there are serious corruptions, perversions, sexual abuses, black-market transactions, infanticides, racist adoptions, and disastrous and appalling deaths into the camptown where necropolitics operates, while the Korean government casts its people aside, as the poverty-stricken villagers desperately pursue money flown in with the U.S. military. Like the protagonist Insu's cousin Gannan, who became a prostitute and then committed suicide, many Korean women at that time struggled against Confucian sexism, and American racism added to this gendered burden and forced Korean sex workers, YangKongjus to kill themselves or their own babies, or at least give them up for adoption, when GIs who might marry the women did not accept their babies. Insu's father's racist discrimination, as well as neighbors' misdeeds, incessantly wounded the protagonist Insu, a son of a YangKongju and an American GI. These painful experiences caused Insu to suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders, including anxiety, melancholia, and guilt as shown through his frequent nightmares or dreadful daydreams. His traumatic neurosis is deepened with nightmares about the ghost of his elder brother, Christopher, whom his mother gave up for adoption to marry his father. Also, the horrible memory of seeing Gannan's corpse always triggers Insu to recollect other ill-fated people's deaths in the camptown. This suggests that his traumatic neurosis will continue endlessly. (Chosun University)