Review By Harsimran Kaur | Rating: 5/5
We never part with what destroys us!
We never part with the ascension of our conscious!
The soul thereby knows how to cross the uneven deluge to bring us back to where we belong.
Kyungha-ya and Inseon are soulmates, navigating the catastrophic relapse of the anachronistic war vertiginous. They find themselves trapped in unresolved angst that has left the mind crumpled and disoriented. Both women are suddenly awakened to be a percipient to the sub conscious. Will their souls surrender to a signified rationale or perch on a spiritual efflorescence?
Kyungha-ya lies listless. Her nightmares vision disproportionate logs painted in black. The nearer she goes to them, her feet dawdle in anguish. She sees now graves insipidly floating on the waves; has delusionary dendrite turned into prophetic callousness? Could the river also be a poltroon in distress? Does she owe all this to her writings on the massacre in ‘G’?
Inseon is getting her fingers pricked with needles at the hospital; it’s the duly cutting of logs which is the culprit. Or, perhaps, is it when we turn a dream into reality, the memories once breathing in perfect solitude roll into the realm of conscious, discerning mysteries that make us. If Kyungha’s nightmares have a plan to be sculpted by Inseon, their souls must recognize the need to be in coherence.
Thus, they unite to crack open the roughage life leaves behind, and to walk on it again is a convulsion of beliefs; some die to be never born and some revive to again tread on the eccentric patterns of life, and now we stand at ‘present’ in retrospect, “when reality is always in front of us, why we make it look like a perfectly orchestrated lie”!
‘WE DO NOT PART’ by Han Kang, the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2024, is about soul friendship and the imaginative crust of human mind to explore the depths of the buried fragments of life.
Kyungha-ya is sent by Inseon to take care of the only bird left in her home. Is it the dying bird as the piece de resistance or ‘reality’ of the soul purpose that makes Kyungha-ya go through the muddled snow stretching on the pavements and the fluffy flakes falling like cotton balls to reach Inseon’s abode? What she sees there is the synchronicity of her dreams etched in the letters resting in the boxes, piteously expanding on the atrocities felt by Inseon’s family in the island of Jeju.
Does Kyungha-ya think of restoring pain or releasing it? She thinks,
“Now when its fineness has perforated every inch of me, parting with it will not be easy. I create my own nightmares. Is this all delusional or the ‘perfect reality’ has aggrandized the soul to churn out the clogged fibers invoking the need to be free?”
Inseon films documentaries on the catastrophic killings of innocent, traces the voices left behind to contemplate the extent of human casuistry. She thinks,
“Is life about settling with what has been lost or mourning the loss through an unsettled explanation”? ‘Logic’ will always remain a perennial burden on humanity’!
Kyungha-ya finds darkness awaiting her at home. The phantasmagoria of the dying bird rotating around the roof creating sketches of her new found freedom entangles her in a web of her own imprisonment to migraines and stomach cramps. Could she too be like a bird where perceptible hegemony to life is a pellucid flow breaking the parietal cumulonimbus of rigidity?
‘We do not Part’ is about creating your own carapsse to fight the depredations of life; the bludgeoning weapon is not the desultory battle-axe but the ability to question the grotesque repression that puts humans at ripper’s edge. As the tormenting stories of Inseon’s family blow out as the melted lava, what comes through is the validation to a deplorable massacre on the Island seventy years ago.
Thus, starts an awakening, a reaffirmation often of the dubious to bring out clarity left on the hinges of boredom. But, doesn’t life still go on in duality? Delusion becomes reality and the perfect breathing becomes an anomaly to the heart resurrecting peace within.
TAKE AWAY
Soulful and heat-warming…