하종오의 시에 나타난 통일, 북한, 북한주민

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to examine the perspective on unification and the North Korean people in Jong-oh Ha’s poetry. Although negotiations on the denuclearization of North Korea and the end of the war have raised expectations for peace and unification on the Korean peninsula, this change has not had any major effect on Korean poetry. It is not easy to identify poems that display awareness and understanding of the real world implications of unification, rather than normative and emotional perspectives on it. However, Ha, who has constantly written about division, the lives of peasants, capital, and labor, has attempted to imagine the contours of unification in real life in his North Korean Studies Series. His poems are significant in that they begin with the daily lives and feelings of North Korean people and end with the image of peace on the Korean peninsula. However, his poetry is trapped in a schematic and hierarchical fantasy of unification. Through the ecosystem surrounding unification that Ha elaborates in his work, he repeatedly envisions the anxious rapprochement between South Koreans who are entrenched in capitalism and North Koreans who are suffering from poverty and hunger, as well as the tense commingling of South Korean capital and the North Korean labor force. This focus is based on the goodwill and concern of Ha, who has consistently written about the evils of capitalism. However, if the relationship between the two Koreas is likened to a food chain, conceiving of peace and coexistence between them or imagining anything other than an influx of cheap labor from North Korea is almost impossible. The perspective on the ecosystem surrounding unification, which is a way of thinking about the two Koreas as parties to a hierarchical relationship, should be carefully reconsidered and superseded not only in literature but also in conceptions of all aspects of unification.