Laying Claim to the Memory of May: A Look Back at the 1980 Kwangju Uprising

Kwangju in the 1990s

99 Kwangju in the 1990s Oh Kwangju of May! Oh revolutionary Kwangju! Oh city of youth who band ¤rmly together to ¤ght Your name eternally, eternally will shine.2 On May 17, 1998, I stood on Kümnamno in front of the Catholic Center in Kwangju, waiting for the Eighteenth Anniversary Pre-Eve Fest event to begin. As usual on this day, the street was closed to traf¤c, and at the end of the block, against the fountain in front of the Provincial Of¤ce Building, a huge stage (almost as wide as the fountain itself) with a gigantic television screen suspended above it (so those in the back could see) had been set up for the annual Eve Fest (chönyaje) gala. The stage, the plaza behind it, and the ¤rst block of Kümnamno, as well as the 5.18 cemeter(ies) in Mangwöl-dong, would be the sites of many of the main anniversary events to be held in the next few days; this year forty–six different of¤cial events were planned during the month-long (May 1–31) commemoration period.3 In about two hours, at 7:30 p.m., the stage show (typically including several popular singers, a children’s chorus, and some sort of 5.18 tribute) was scheduled to begin, and the entire block would be ¤lled with people, either sitting down in the street on scraps of folded newspaper, milling about at the back, or standing crowded along the sidewalks.4 At that moment, however, the street was rather empty, with only a few hundred spectators gathered around to watch the “event before the main event,” which this year was relatively simple and low key: a May madangguk, or open-air folk drama, entitled “The 100 Commemorating Kwangju People Who Rose Up” (“Ilösönün saramdül”), performed by the twenty-seven-member local troupe Shin Myöng. The theater genre madangguk ¤rst appeared in the late 1960s as part of what became the minjung culture movement of the 1970s and 1980s.5 Based on the aesthetic principles of Korean traditional maskdance drama, with its emphasis on hierarchical inversion and the use of satirical dialogue, improvisational bantering among the players, and the encouragement of audience participation, madangguk is used to generate a sense of communal solidarity and to foster the development of popular consciousness.6 Along with other reconstructed forms of traditionally marginalized folk culture, such as farmers’ music and dance and shamanic ritual performances (küt)—Korea’s “invented tradition of the 1980s” (Kim Kwang-ok 1994:195)—madangguk ¶ourished during the Chun Doo Hwan era (particularly on university campuses) as a vehicle for oppositional social and political protest, and peasant rebellion became a popular subject for the performing arts (Kim Kwangok 1994:208).7 As Choi Chungmoo says, “The methodology of the minjung culture movement is essentially a rereading of history as history of the oppressed minjung’s struggle and a representation of that history as a paradigm of change. In the history thus reread, hitherto marginalized people enter the central arena of history or become agents of history ” (1995:117). Minjung imagery celebrates resistance and revolution by the oppressed; naturally, the historical moment about to be reread for us in the performance that day was the Kwangju Uprising itself. As is customary at such events, a large mat had been put down on the street to demarcate the area representing the “madang,” which would function as a stage.8 A group of musicians with traditional percussion instruments, dressed in the peasant garb characteristic of a contemporary “farmers’ band,” sat on one end of the mat, and around the other three sides sat the audience, several rows deep. Surrounding this inner circle other spectators stood, jostling each other and trying to shove toward the front for a better view. I held my ground among the ¤rst row of standees and watched the opening scene. It was a familiar folk play scene, enacted in broad pantomime and dance: the wooing of a simpering, hunchback maiden by the slightly drunk village simpleton. The stock antics of the conventional country bumpkin pair drew appropriate chuckles of amusement from the audience, who seemed perfectly content to watch the gently Kwangju in the 1990s 101 humorous, clichéd little drama play itself out. I, on the other hand, was growing impatient with what appeared to be simply a generic...