I was 29 when I first began drawing attention to North Korean propagandists’ heavy use of mother symbolism, and their depiction of adult Koreans as overgrown children or babies. See my article “Mother Russia: Soviet Characters in North Korean Fiction” (Korean Studies 16, 1992).
In my first book Han Sŏrya and North Korean Literature (Cornell East Asia Series, 1994) I contradicted conventional notions of a Stalinist-cum-Confucian personality cult by showing that the pioneer iconographer of the personality cult depicted Kim Il Sung as a mother figure instead.
In 2004 I wrote a long article for the Atlantic entitled “Mother of all Mothers: Leadership Secrets of Kim Jong Il.”
I returned to this topic in The Cleanest Race (Melville House, 2010). In a chapter entitled “Mother Korea and her Children” I discussed the Mother Homeland, the Mother Party, and the preponderance of young maternal characters in fiction. In other chapters I discussed the matricentric symbolism of the personality cults of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il.
To drive home the importance of this unique aspect of the North’s official culture I translated the following entries from a dictionary (Pyongyang, 1964) and used them as the epigraph to the book:
MOTHER: 1) The woman who has given birth to one: Father and mother; a mother’s love. A mother’s benevolence is higher than a mountain, deeper than the ocean. Also used in the sense of “a woman who has a child”: What all mothers anxiously want is for their children to grow up healthy and become magnificent red builders. 2) A respectful term for someone of an age similar to one’s own mother: Comrade Platoon Leader called Dŏngmani’s mother “mother” and always helped her in her work. 3) A metaphor for being loving, looking after everything, and worrying about others: Party officials must become mothers who ceaselessly love and teach the Party rank and file, and become standard-bearers at the forefront of activities. In other words, someone in charge of lodgings has to become a mother to the boarders. This means looking carefully after everything: whether someone is cold or sick, how they are eating, and so on. 4) A metaphor for the source from which something originates: The Party is the great mother of everything new. Necessity is the mother of invention.
FATHER: the husband of one’s birth mother.
Imagine my complete lack of surprise then, upon finally catching up with Suzy Kim’s “Mothers and Maidens: Gendered Formation of Revolutionary Heroes in North Korea” (Journal of Korean Studies, Fall 2014, 257-289), to find the first reference to my work only after 11 pages, 46 citations and the statement — made in the tone of someone breaking new ground — that “North Korean discourses do not emphasize the father figure so much as the mother” (Kim 268, italics in the original).
I suspect I might have received even less/later acknowledgment in the article had Suzy Kim not felt the need at that point in her text to invoke those dictionary entries I’d discovered.
And these couldn’t very well be cited without the admission that “Myers has documented the extensive use of maternal imagery in North Korean publications” (Kim, 268-9). I think even the Closely Knit Club might have understood the circumstances behind this unfortunate recognition of my contributions. They would surely have granted points for the author’s keeping it far away from the introductory state-of-research paragraphs, where the requisite homage-nods to the field’s gatekeepers are made instead. (See endnotes 2, 3 and 4.)
To be on the safe side, though, Suzy Kim writes in the attendant endnote: “Despite my use of [Myers’] work here, I have critically reviewed it elsewhere.”
That’s not enough of course. No CKC or CKC-minded reference to my work is complete without disparagement of my supposed characterization of North Korea as fascist.
Myers interprets this emphasis on the mother and the motherland as reminiscent of fascist ideology that unites the idea of nation with territory (Kim 269).
At the very least this formulation omits the 90% of my interpretation of maternal imagery that has nothing to do with Japan or fascism. (Suzy Kim has no apparent interest in that 90%.) But I’ll let that go.
Then issue is taken with my description of some salient attributes ascribed to the North Korean dictator as “feminine.” The logic as I understand it is that there’s nothing necessarily feminine about the tropes in question, eg cute dimples, Kim nurturing all Korean children at his expansive bosom, etc.
No argument here. I’m the guy who once wrote, while reviewing detective fiction for the Atlantic, “Like all men I have a maternal instinct, but I can clutch only so many characters to my breast at one time.”
In my book however I was speaking of what the North Koreans manifestly consider typically feminine. I was never asserting my own view let alone some objective truth. When I wrote that female protagonists preponderate “because they are more natural symbols of chastity and purity and thus of Koreanness,” I thought it obvious that this too referred to the North Koreans’ perspective as reflected in their culture. I admit it wouldn’t have cost me much to say this more clearly. Sloterdijk says somewhere that we neglect at our peril the full-time misunderstanders, be they amateur or professional.
Suzy Kim goes on to ask rhetorically:
How are “chastity” and “purity” naturally associated with a feminine “Koreanness” that is then read as fascist? (Kim 269)
The second part of the sentence is what I find so wearisome. A few times a year I see attributed to me, with disapproval of course, the model of a fascist North Korea. I tend to encounter this in the work of gatekeeper-puffing grad students or junior scholars whom — I’ve been sternly told — one must never “punch down” at by refuting. This is why I now discuss a five-year-old paper by an established professor instead.
I do indeed write often of North Korean culture’s iconographic similarities to the official culture of fascist Japan. Does anyone except the North Koreans deny them? Yet I get the impression a few Western academics, often the same ones who make much of the Japanese aspects of Park Chung Hee’s ROK, think it very bad form of me to tar the “guerrilla state” with this brush.
All I can say is I didn’t start it. South Korean and Japanese observers have been pointing out the obvious similarities for a lot longer than I or any other Westerners have. In Kim Jillak’s fascinating memoirs (1972), to name just one example, he talks of his surprise at encountering Japanese-style sloganeering while training as an operative near Pyongyang in 1967.
But let me say this as clearly as possible: Nowhere in The Cleanest Race or my other books do I call North Korea a fascist state. Nowhere do I refer to its culture or ideology as fascist. Similar to fascism in many ways, as has often been said of communism itself, and vice versa? Yes. Fascist? No. When writing The Cleanest Race I considered the disclaimer “I do not, however, intend to label North Korea as fascist” important enough to be included in the preface (TCR 15).
Nowhere have I treated mother symbolism as something inherently or characteristically fascist either.
For a quarter-century my emphasis on the North’s matricentric imagery has been part of a greater effort to counter the fallacy of a communist or Stalinist North. Among other things I assert that the Marxist-Leninist spontaneity-consciousness dialectic that formed the “master plot” (Katerina Clark) of Soviet official culture — and that has an obvious counterpart in Confucian culture — is turned on its head in North Korea.
The Soviet protagonist learns to temper his spontaneity with political consciousness, often under the tutelage of a fatherly cadre, thereby becoming a “positive hero” for readers to emulate. Ostrovskiy’s How the Steel Was Tempered (1932-34) is the classic example. I used to help American audiences understand by saying An Officer and a Gentleman (1982) was a socialist realist narrative minus Leninism — see Lou Gossett, Jr in the cadre role — but no one remembers that film anymore.
In contrast the North Korean hero is often depicted as fatherless, living with a mother who is more an indulgent than a disciplinary or didactic figure. Very often the narrative goes not from spontaneity to greater consciousness but in the opposite direction, with the hero casting off the shackles of mere theory or book-learning in order to give rein to his or her instincts – which being Korean are thus pure and good. The parallels to fascism need hardly be pointed out. But as I said in my first book, there’s an indigenous tradition of this very thing, as witness the New Tendency tales of purgative violence written by Ch’oe Sŏ-hae et al in the 1920s.
The cults of Kim Il Sung and Hirohito, I write, are “fundamentally alike … because they derive from a fundamentally similar view of the world” (TCR 109). I stand by that.
The second part of that sentence makes clear, however, that “alike” is to be understood as “similar” (which is one definition for alike in the OED) and not as “indistinguishable” (which is another). On the same page I stress that unlike Hirohito before 1945 — and contrary to a once-common bit of American fake news — Kim Il Sung is not worshipped as divine. Surely no one who admits that huge difference can be accused of equating the two cults!
And in the conclusion I write:
But while drawing a clear line between North Korean ideology and communism, we should not overlook that which distinguishes the former from Japanese and (even more so) German fascism. The Text has never proposed the invasion of so much as an inch of non-Korean territory. This is not to say that it does not propose military action against the US either as a preemptive strike or as revenge for past crimes…. But this is not the same as wanting to reshape the world. Where the Nazis considered Aryans physically and intellectual superior to all other races, and the Japanese regarded their moral superiority as having protected them throughout history, the [North] Koreans believe that their childlike purity renders them so vulnerable to the outside world that they need a Parent Leader to survive. Such a worldview naturally precludes dreams of a colonizing or imperialist nature (TCR 166).
So you see, my main motive has always been a destructive one, namely, to get people to discard both the communist / Stalinist and the Confucian model and to grasp what is sui generis about North Korea, as opposed to replacing one label with another.
Everyone is more than welcome to disagree with my assertion that North Korea is “at the very least, ideologically closer to America’s adversaries in World War II than to communist China and Eastern Europe” (TCR 16). They may challenge also my characterization of the North as a far-right state, keeping in mind, I hope, that there’s much more to far-rightism than fascism. See the Nationalkonservativen in Weimar Germany.
What I feel I have a right to ask — and would not need to ask in a less dysfunctional field — is that my work not be reduced to a reduction that isn’t in it.
UPDATE: 9 May 2020:
A reader of the above has kindly reminded me that in an article in the fall/winter 2011 issue of Columbia University’s Journal of International Affairs I wrote (on page 118):
Not all far-right states are alike any more than all far-left ones are, and to apply the fascist or Hitlerian label to North Korea would be grossly misleading.
UPDATE: 23 August 2022:
For a few years now, amused friends and readers have been sending me the link to a Youtube video (2016) with Slavoj Žižek, for much of which he sounds like he’s just read a certain book. But perhaps he’d been doing his own primary research. You decide.
