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

The most precious thing for man is life, but socio-political life is more precious than that of the physical body, and the life of the social community is more precious than that of individuals.

—Kim Jong II (2014)

It is within the transition from the 1980s to the 1990s, encompassing the collapse of the Soviet Union, the death of “Great Leader” Kim II Sung, and a series of devastating natural disasters, that one can place Sandra Fahy’s Marching Through Suffering: Loss and Survival in North Korea. The book is a linguistic analysis of some 30 oral accounts of the famine years from defectors¹ now residing in Seoul and Tokyo, and is the first of its kind to present such ethnographically evocative material in English. In the years signaling the end of communism, American political rhetoric, popular news media, humanitarian discourse, and academic efforts have lent to the consolidation of an unshakeable image of the DPRK² as an evil-totalitarian-military-dictatorship-nuclearized-Stalinist-cult-regime where “the people” suffer under the excess of power. Fahy’s work gestures toward a much-needed counterpoint that positions “ordinary” north Koreans as “active agents making sense and negotiating the difficulties of their lives” (3). Although the book does much to achieve that end, it succeeds only partially, as it also perpetuates the very narrative it seeks to dispel.

The book’s six chapters are organized chronologically, following the emergence and development of the famine (Chapters 1 and 2), its critical stages (Chapters 3 and 4), the decisive points of defection (Chapter 5), and the 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 the most imaginative given anthropology’s commitment to writing and the question of representation. Fahy’s long-term engagement with defectors is premised on the idea that a better understanding of “[w]hat North Koreans did, how they understood things, how they made sense of difficulties” during the famine would not only “challenge the notion that North Koreans are brainwashed” (8), but also “explain how countries such as North Korea have survived as long as they have” (2). However suggestive, her aim to examine the relationships between famine and language, power and discourse, and to answer the “natural question” of “why people didn’t rise up in the 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 the analytical and theoretical apparatus most often employed in the study of north Korea.

Chapter 3, for instance, takes the “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 the 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 have 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 to Caroline Humphrey (1994), but her concept of “evocative transcripts” is taken up as part of the chapter’s analysis and regrettably not addressed in the context of larger debates in postcolonial studies. Scholars in this field have shown that ideological language and ritual discourse cannot be explained in terms of false consciousness or models of mimicry. The task now is to situate the famine experience and the many rich ethnographic moments Fahy assembles within north Korea’s socialist legacy.

Within the study of famine,³ Fahy’s position is clear: the north Korean famine “took place at a time and in a region of the world...