Luminous Wounds: Exploring Han Kang’s 'Light and Thread' on humanity, and hope

Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024, Han Kang delivered an incandescent lecture, Light and Thread, at the prize ceremony.

As a child, Han Kang had a lot of questions. Why are humans born? What is the meaning of a human being’s brief stay in this world? Why do suffering and love exist? How difficult is it to remain human, come what may? As a writer, she has endured these questions and lived inside them while giving readers a profound reckoning of the human condition in novel after novel.

Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024 “for her intense, poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life,” Han Kang delivered an incandescent lecture, Light and Thread, at the prize ceremony, which has now been translated into English by e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris and published as a book. The eponymous title also includes some of her poetry, notes on nature as she watches her garden grow, and thoughts on her writing process, translated by Maya West.

Han Kang.

The South Korean writer found fame in the English-speaking world with her third novel, The Vegetarian, translated by Deborah Smith, which won the Man Booker International Prize in 2016. The protagonist, Yeong-hye, takes a radical step of giving up eating meat to protest against violence. She ends up refusing all food and drink, barring water, as she believes she is transforming into a plant. Thus, Yeong-hye finds herself in the “ironic situation of quickening towards death in her bid to save herself.” Han Kang says she set the final scene in an ambulance in the hope that Yeong-hye will remain alive in the world of the story. It took Han Kang two years from 2003 to 2005 to write The Vegetarian, and during that time she lived with some painful questions: “Can a person ever be completely innocent? To what depths can we reject violence? What happens to one who refuses to belong to the species called humans?”

Questions she continued to ask in her subsequent novels, Ink and Blood and Greek Lessons, but in both she expanded her probing. We cannot all turn into plants as a protest against violence, so how do we continue? “Must we not survive in the end? Should our lives not bear witness to what is true? If we must live in this world, which moments make that possible?”

The protagonists of Greek Lessons, a woman who has lost her speech and a man who is losing his sight, cross paths and a beautiful moment transpires when the woman writes a few words in the man’s palm. Han Kang says that in that “luminous instant that expands to an eternity,” the characters reveal their softer parts of themselves, prompting the writer to ask: “Could it be that by regarding the softer aspects of humanity, by caressing the irrefutable warmth that resides there, we can go on living after all in this brief, violent world?”

In 2012, soon after Greek Lessons was published, Han Kang thought her next novel would take “another step towards light and warmth,” but 20-odd pages on, she stopped writing. She realised that something was preventing her from writing a “life and world-embracing work” — and that was Gwangju.

In her brilliant lecture, she dwells at length on how and why she decided to write Human Acts, about the student uprising in Gwangju in 1980 and the violent takedown by the state. Han Kang was nine years old when her family decided to leave Gwangju for Seoul. The mass killings would begin soon, and Han Kang chanced upon a book of photos which contained evidence of Gwangju residents being killed with clubs, bayonets, and guns while resisting the new military powers that orchestrated a coup.

Juxtaposed with this act of violence, there was another photo of an endless queue of people waiting to donate blood outside a university hospital. The images stayed with her, prompting her to ask more questions: Are humans capable of extreme violence — and also profound kindness?  How are humans this violent? And yet how is it that they can simultaneously stand opposite such overwhelming violence?   Human Acts and the subsequent We Do Not Part, about the Jeju Island massacre in 1948, are a show of resistance against forgetting; both light a candle in memory of the dead. The parallel existence of human cruelty and dignity, as Han Kang reflects, is not unique to Gwangju or Jeju. It has happened “again and again across time and space, always in the present tense. Even now.”   But as her immersive writing process showed her, Han Kang’s work is not just about the internal struggle between two strands of thought — Why is the world so violent and painful?

And yet how can the world be so beautiful? In all her writing, she says the “oldest and fundamental undertone” has been directed towards love. The work of reading and writing literature stands in opposition to all acts that destroy life, and love is at the heart of it. In these dark, fraught times, Han Kang’s words are like a balm: “We cannot help but imagine hope, so long as we live.” Happily for her readers, she is on to her next novel, which she says is formally linked to The White Book, written in memory of her older sister who left the world two hours after she was born.  

The reviewer is a journalist based in Kolkata.