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대학생기자단/해외상생기자단

Strange Days in Pyongyang

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

   Strange Days in Pyongyang  

 

       Autobiographic Graphic Novel Shows Author's Struggles in North Korea       

 

 

Jan Creutzenberg (jannberg@zedat.fu-berlin.de), May 2, 2009

 

 

 

When in Pyongyang do as the North Koreans do─apparently Guy Delisle did not follow this rule. The Canadian animator and comic book author was sent to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, one of the last unexploited low-wage countries, to supervise outsourced drawing work for an animated cartoon. His drawn rendition of the two months he spent there presents his struggles with the bizarre rules and perplexing customs he encountered as well as his─mostly futile─efforts to overcome strange situations with humor and tease little acts of resistance out of his fellow co-drawers.

 

 

 

 

 

  

Listening to propaganda music during an air-conditioned taxi ride, stralls along the Taedong River with an uneasy translator or a trip to the Taekwon-do Hall to see a competition that never takes place─anecdotes such as these make up the humorous heart of Pyongyang, A Journey in North Korea. Delisle also dwells extensively on more or less funny details like expensive Nescafés, pins with the faces of the two Kims, "volunteers" cleaning the streets and greasy tables in the restaurants.

 

 

During his stay, Delisle did some sightseeing, too: Besides situation comedy, the graphic novel features numerous impressions of a town that exists in black and white and pulsates to the tunes that hail to the Great and Dear Leaders. Although Delisle uses various shades of grey in his drawings, his view on landmark buildings such as the Juche Tower, the Workers Party Monument and the unfinished Ryugyong Hotel is very direct: Full-page renderings in simple lines stress their monstrosity and expose them as sketchboard fantasies turned real─gestures of power blown completely out of proportion.

 

 

Generally, Delisle seems to have had quite a clear idea of North Korea even before arriving there. He took along George Orwell's dystopian novel 1984 that serves as a kind of subtext to his experiences in the first chapters of the comic. The parallels he seems to suggest, however, are telling more about his state of mind during some lonesome days in an unfamiliar world than about this world itself. The bedside lamp might be one of Big Brother Kim’s more ingenious surveillance devices─it is clear, on the other hand, that the nights in Pyongyang can be long.

 

 

Sometimes the author's self-stylized paranoia makes it hard to judge what he actually witnessed─or what his imagination contributed: Although he admits that the city is not as gloomy as expected, he describes the streets of Pyongyang as suspiciously clean─a sterile phantom world that turns black after dark, due to the lack of street lighting. This restricted view did not stop the international success of Delisle's work: The French original from 2003 has been translated into nine languages so far, including Korean─of course, where talking about a South Korean publisher here.

 

 

But what does Pyongyang offer the interested reader, apart from personal anecdotes and city views? In between the short episodes Delisle provides explanations of the Juche-system, illustrations of historical events and references to economic statistics.

 

 

A "critical lecture" of Pyongyang, published online by The French Association d'Amitié Franco-Coréen, lists quite a number of incorrect or one-sidedly presented details. For example, the text explains the reluctance of Delisle's guide to answer straightforward political questions with different customs of politeness in Asia rather than the ideological indoctrination that Delisle suggests.

 

 

Of course, this reinterpretation throws the baby out with the bath water─replacing one commonplace with another. Furthermore, the motives of the Association d'Amitié seem to be dubious: Judging from the website, the friendship extends mostly to the northern part of Korea. And some of the "corrections" offered are simply hard to validate.

 

 

Whether or not Delisle’s facts and figures are right or wrong, the eclectic pieces of information do not really help to understand what is happening around the author. They rather stress his confusion by showing how he desperately tries to make a sense of the situations he gets into. Pyongyang ultimately is a very personal travelogue, not a critical evaluation of the current political situation in North Korea─although the comic book sometimes poses as one.

 

 

While it is clear that Pyongyang cannot replace investigative journalism and committed research, it still offers some interesting impressions. This is especially true for the episodes where the author gets involved into the local expatriot scene: Not only does he meet several old friends from the small world of cartoon business, he also dances his loneliness away with NGO employees at the regular Friday night parties in the isolated foreign quarter and plays pool with a quasi-exiled Lybian at the "Diplomatic Club".

 

 

During a trip to the country side he even encounters Americans who exhume the remains of fallen US soldiers of the Korean War─Washington supposedly pays $ 100 000 for each identified person. A more elaborated report on the people who are─more or less voluntarily?stranded in the world's most secluded country would make an interesting book, or even a documentary film.

 

 

Pyongyang has been published in French by L’Association in 2003. An English translation (Drawn & Quarterly) as well as a Korean one (Munhak Segye-sa) are available. A preview of the graphic novel can be downloaded at www.drawnandquarterly.com/imagesPreview/a424acad074b5c.pdf (in English). The author Guy Delisle maintains a blog with new drawings: www.guydelisle.com/WordPress. The “critical lecture” mentioned in the article can be read in full at amitiefrancecoree.over-blog.org/article-26586778.html (in French).