https://doi.org/10.67147/literariness.v1i3.024
Anatomy of an Erasure: Postmemory and the Embodied Archive in We Do Not Part
ALPHIN CHACKO
Assistant Professor
Department of English
Deva Matha College (Autonomous), Kuravilangad, Kottayam, Kerala
Affiliated to Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam, Kerala, India
RIA SEBASTIAN
Assistant Professor on Contract
Department of English, IHRD Kaduthuruthy
Affiliated to Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam, Kerala
Abstract: Han Kang’s We Do Not Part (2025) offers a devastating literary confrontation with the Jeju 4.3 Incident, one of the most violently suppressed chapters in modern South Korean history. This article examines how the novel dismantles decades of state-enforced amnesia by interrogating the physical, ecological, and archival dimensions of unmourned trauma. Drawing upon Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, Cathy Caruth’s trauma theory, and Heonik Kwon’s sociological framework of “bad death” (chet duong), the study demonstrates how historical violence is visceralized. The victims’ suppressed history bypasses language to become somatized in the physical agony of the living, functioning as a “phantom limb” of the national body.
Furthermore, the article explores how the desecrated, geomantically sacred landscape of Jeju Island transforms into a spectral witness, where snow and barren trees actively preserve the memory of the slaughtered. In response to the state’s destruction of official records, the novel champions the domestic counter-archive—specifically the gendered, clandestine preservation of memory—as a vital ethical imperative. Ultimately, by culminating in acts of surrogate mourning and radical hospitality toward wandering spirits, Kang’s narrative functions as a literary exorcism, asserting that historical reconciliation requires enduring the pain of remembrance to grant the displaced dead their final rest.
Keywords: Postmemory, Trauma Theory, Spectrality, Counter-archive, Somatisation
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