Beyond Murakami and Yoshimoto

ASIA is home to the richest and most diverse of cultures in the world. One of the best ways to get to know one of the 47 countries here, besides touring, is to read its literature.

But the Western-dominated publishing industry has led to the practice of most Asians buying, selling, and even exchanging American books, thus limiting their understanding of the Eastern world.

For South Korean novelist Bang Hyeon-seok, neighboring Asian countries come to exist only in maps, but not in the imagination.

“How many Koreans would have read literatures of Palestine and Iraq, countries that we see in the news everyday?” he said at the recent national congress of the Unyon ng mga Manunulat sa Pilipinas (UMPIL). “How many Asians would have read literatures of Thailand, Kazakhstan, or Korea?”

Themed “Trading Words, Tracing Worlds,” the union’s gathering this year discussed the challenges writers across Asia face in an industry where no “real” book trade exists.

UMPIL’s Karina Africa Bolasco explained that readers are at the mercy of whichever Asian writer the Americans would want to highlight, feature, and translate to English.

“And that is how we get to read Asians — the way they (Americans) have privileged Haruki Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto,” she said. But other writers, we will never get to read their works, because (these) are never translated to English.”

The struggles of an Asian writer are best told by multi-awarded fictionist Bang who took the challenge of putting up Asia, a quarterly literary magazine in South Korea that features works of Asian writers.

In his keynote speech, Bang recounted his experience in making the dream of Asia a reality. “It was through four lengthy internal seminars and overnight discussions, as well as a symposium with writers from seven Asian countries, that Asia‘s shape became clearer.”

Prior to the journal’s debut in September 2006, the writer said that he was very much concerned with the idea of bringing together creative imaginations from all 47 countries of Asia in one space, securing equality among them.

Trying to help, Bang’s friend, Vietnamese poet Ven Le said, “National boundaries do not matter if we try to learn from one another who has been coping with different natural interventions. As there are no national boundaries in nature, there should be no national boundaries in literature.”

Read Bang Hyeon-seok’s speech.

Another challenge for Bang and his colleagues was whether they would be able to produce discourses that can be called Asian, that is, whether they would be able to present values that could replace Western ones.

“We concluded that we could not,” he said, pointing out that Asia‘s role would be that of a passageway, where creative imagination born in the land of Asia can reach out to the world.

“It is Asia‘s task not to miss all the significant works that are going on in and around the land of Asia,” he said.

He also asserted that each continent should be able to read and speak about its own literature with its own perspective.

In the end, Bang said: “Asia may not be the very poem that will remember things unremembered, but we would like to become home for that poem. Asia may not be the fierce spirit of the prose that struggles with our squalid daily lives, but we will not give up being an enthusiastic supporter for that fierce spirit. Asia may not become the center of the Asian imagination, but our ambition is to make all our spaces a forest of creative imaginations emerging out of Asian lands.”

Born in Ulsan in 1961, Bang established himself as one of the most respected writers of “labor fiction.” Having worked as a laborer and a factory worker during the 1980s and 1990s, he writes about the hardships of labor in a post-capitalist society with sympathy and insight acquired firsthand.

While more and more writers are distancing themselves from social or political problems as literary concepts, Bang has remained a faithful observer and chronicler of Korean society and history.

He is currently the executive director of the Asia Culture Network and a professor of creative writing at Chung-Ang University.