By SHELTON BUMGARNER
Marmot’s Hole Guest Blogger
Several projects from “creative types” about their encounters with in the DPRK from their unique perspectives have been reviewed of late. One of them is a graphic novel called Pyongyang, A Journey in North Korea created by Canadian animator Guy Delisle who ended up in the Workers’ Paradise to oversee a “low-budget cartoon.”
Delisle is a wry but unsparing guide to his Axis Of Evil destination, a place that’s in some respects not as bad as he’s been led to believe, and in others, much worse. The streets of Pyongyang aren’t as deserted as he’d imagined, and at least the booze flows freely, even if it’s served with meals where the tablecloths come soaked in oil. Accompanied at all times by a guide and a translator, Delisle is allowed to visit some of the wonders of the nation Kim Il-Sung rebuilt from the wreckage of the Korean War, a journey that culminates in a visit to the International Friendship Museum, where a life-sized wax sculpture of Kim Sr. greets visitors who bow in supplication. Delisle plays along, biting his tongue to keep the laughter down.
Another report on the creative life — or lack thereof — in the DPRK comes from Art Under Control in North Korea by Jane Portal.
Though Portal??s text reads like it has been cribbed from tourist manuals, the 192-page trade paperback, with its 135 illustrations, 72 of them in color, does provide an outline of the art world, such as it is, in the Democratic People??s Republic of Korea.
A little cant is par for the course but it??s positively unnerving that North Korea??s official communist party insignia adds a paintbrush to the timeless revolutionary duo of hammer and sickle ?? actually a calligraphy brush, representing the intelligentsia…
2 Comments
Two problems with the first one for me:
#1. “Accompanied at all times by a guide and a translator, Delisle is allowed to visit some of the wonders of the nation”
Anyone who tells me they have come to a type of conclusion about how North Korea “isn’t as bad in parts as I was led to believe and worse in others” when the above direct quotation is known has take a huge step down the wrong path.
Next, Kristof from the NYT will be telling what North Korea is all about with “knowledge” he gained from his trip letting NK wine and dine him. And then I’ll start setting up policy board meetings with members from the West and SK who have taken the Mt. Kumgang tours or spent some time setting up computer systems at the Kaesong slave labor I mean free trade area.
How about this guy sitting down with groups of NK’s who have escaped and getting the real deal from them — people who had much more extensive access to the nation (though even they couldn’t move freely without fear from their own government) without political minders guiding them — and draw a graphic novel about what they KNOW about NK????
#2. Perhaps his not having lived the life of a NK nor moved around the country much at all to get an UNDERSTANDING of what it is like to be a regular NK……………makes some things up there funny….
I doubt he would be choking back laughter then…..
He did not see any of real NK. He just went through a planned tour through “NK Disneyland”, where everybody’s facial expression and movement is choreographed in excruiciating detail prior to his visit.
He hasn’t seen anything about real NK. He has been to a play.