Last night was the first night of a new spin off venue from City Voices, the Wolverhampton group where local writers read their poems, prose or whatever to a generally appreciative audience. The new venue is close to my home at the Cafe Metro in Bilston and I was very pleased to be one of the readers invited to perform at the inaugural event. There were some teething problems, the room is long and thin and the furniture layout wasn't perfect. It also got rather hot in there, but that's a good thing in its way because the reason for the closeness was the unexpectedly high attendance.
The five performers were a mixed bag. One read a story - more of a vignette, really - about a prostitute in a cell, and part of a memoir about making and selling toffee apples as a kid. I was on second with my account, reproduced below, of my recent trip to North Korea. Last before the break one of the regulars read an anecdote about her own life. After the break we had poetry from two readers, one relatively sombre and the other a lively performer (shortly to do a stint on the plinth!) who gave us a mix of humorous and serious poetry including a couple in Black Country dialect. Everyone had a great time and, as I was leaving, I was invited to reprise my performance in September at the main City Voices event in Wolverhampton, which I think is on September 8th.
So, for anyone who wants to know exactly what I performed, here it is - a piece adapted from several previous entries in this blog.
In my travels, I've been to some strange places, some surreal places, some disturbing places.
I was once in San Francisco at a time when the city was simultaneously hosting the X-games and the Gay Pride march. That was fairly strange.
For a surreal time you'd be hard pressed to beat the Star Trek ride at the Las Vegas Hilton. As for disturbing; well I was in Beijing just a couple of years after the Tiananmen Square incident. But without any question the strangest, most surreal and most disturbing trip I've ever made was just a couple of months ago: to North Korea.
I could tell you about the grand concert hall and the program of revolutionary music from the State Symphony Orchestra, weirdly interrupted by a spirited rendition of Those Were The Days. I could tell you about the circus that was performed against projected backdrops of the proletariat, building power stations and pylons. I could tell you about the fanatical fervour of the army of schoolchildren in Kaesong performing music and dance in honour of Kim Il Sung's birthday. I could tell you about the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum where I learned, to my surprise, that World War Two had been a local conflict in which North Korea had single-handedly defeated the Japanese.
But I won't tell you about any of those things.
Instead I'd like to tell you about three visits that together sum up the feeling of the trip which was, taken as a whole, like a collision between Franz Kafka and Lewis Carroll.
First though, you need to understand how a trip to North Korea works. As a foreigner you are free to wander wherever you like, providing that wherever you like doesn't involve leaving the hotel, and talk to whoever you like providing they are hotel employees or the polite, pleasant and above all vigilant minders that are with you at all times. Your view of the country is restricted to a very carefully controlled itinerary.
On the third day of our visit we assembled in the hotel reception in our smartest clothes to go to the Kumusan Memorial Palace, the Mausoleum of Kim Il-Sung.
The rules were clear: smart clothes, empty pockets, no cameras, no outer jackets, no inappropriate remarks or humour, lots of respect.
At the memorial palace, which is certainly more of a palace than a memorial, it was clear that this was a place that everybody has to come. Probably literally "has to come". There were groups of soldiers, schoolchildren, businessmen and ladies in traditional dress in a queue that was several hundred yards long but we were marched straight to the front of it and into the buildings. It felt uncomfortable but the people waiting seemed to accept it as part of the way things are. Inside, we were led through what felt like miles of marble-lined corridors. Automatic devices cleaned our shoes and blew the dust from our clothes. We were searched and X-rayed. Periodically we were asked, for no apparent reason, to line up in three columns, or four columns, or two columns, or single file - groupings that were inevitably shuffled into some new arrangement moments later so that the only reasonable explanation was that it was simply to show us who was boss.
We were led, this time in fours, into a room the size of a concert hall. At the far end of it was a statue of Kim Il Sung. The tuneless, but vaguely uplifting, martial music that had been playing throughout the experience was much louder in here. The wall behind the statue was lit with pastel lighting. It reminded me of something and for a moment I couldn't place it. Then it came to me. It was very like the statue of Christ that I had seen in the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City. The statue, the lighting, the music were all designed to produce the same effect.
From that room we were led to another, with another statue and this time we were given audio sets to listen to. It was very hard to listen with a straight face. Imagine someone with a deep voice, full of gravitas, perhaps Orson Wells or James Earl Jones, solemnly intoning, "When the Great Leader was taken from us the hearts and souls of the people were filled with a great grief and sorrow and with one voice they rose up and demanded a memorial be built to honour his name."
Now imagine about ten minutes of it.
After another trip through a wind-tunnel to clean us up we were led into another hall, this time with a glass coffin at the centre in which the body of the Great Leader lay. We lined up in fours again and walked to the coffin, circling it and bowing three times to show our respect. After that there was a museum showing all of the honours and awards bestowed upon Kim Il Sung from leaders and universities of the world. Most of them seemed to be from other Communist countries or dodgy Central African republics. The dodgier the source the more elaborate the award.
Afterwards we were led back through the corridors and out into the fresh air where we were allowed to retrieve our cameras and take a couple of shots of the outside of the building, providing we were careful not to accidentally include anyone in a uniform in the shot.
I had found the whole two hour experience deeply disturbing. They may say this is respect for a man, that this is politics, but I know religion when I see it. This isn't hero worship this is plain and simple worship. Regardless of what they are called it has temples and rituals and a God figure. It's a religion.
That afternoon we left Pyongyang to drive out to the mountains so that tomorrow we would be well placed to visit the International friendship exhibition.
The drive to the mountains was through a drab, flat landscape that looked anything but fertile. Here and there, there were workers in the fields. They appeared to be doing everything by hand with no agricultural implements, however primitive. Only once did I see as much as a simple Ox-drawn plough. It was a depressingly Medieval sight to encounter in the modern world. Next morning we left our hotel for the exhibition. In its way this was as unnerving as the Memorial Palace had been, perhaps more so because we had now observed, albeit from a bus travelling along the road, just how impoverished the majority of the country actually was.
As you approach you see what looks like two very traditional Korean buildings. They are no such thing. They are a decorative front for an extravagant exhibition of gifts received by Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. As befits his higher status we visited the Great Leader's section first. Once we had passed the smart, unsmiling, armed guards, handed in our coats and cameras and put cotton outer covers over our shoes, we proceeded into somewhere that was every bit as overblown as the Memorial Palace had been. Room after marble-lined room has been built into the side of the mountain, joined by marble lined corridors. In every room there are display cases containing the gifts. It's a bizarrely eclectic selection. There are statues made of every conceivable material from wood, to metal, to stone, to ivory, horn, Bakelite, plastic, glass. They are of every kind of subject, from revolutionary scenes to animals to abstracts to sports figures. There is furniture and there are costumes. There are cars and a train. There are silver bowls and golden tea services. There is a drinks tray made from a dead crocodile.
As you read the captions or listen to the guide certain things become obvious. As with the Mausoleum, the greater and more elaborate the gift the more disreputable the country it comes from. Valuable gem-studded artefacts often turned out to be from the countries, communist or otherwise, with the most apalling human rights records. There were, for example, several very large (not to mention illegal) ivory carvings presented by Robert Mugabe. The gifts from European nations tended to be not from Governments, but from individuals, business organisations or fringe left-wing political groups with tiny memberships. Where there were official state gifts from western nations they tended to carry an apparently unnoticed level of ironic comment. The gifts from the UK for example filled a single small cabinet and included the kind of "Present from London" souvenir rubbish that you'd be ashamed to give to your least favourite auntie. In the only slightly larger United States cabinet a present labelled as being from "Ex-President and Mrs Jimmy Carter" was a cheap and nasty glass ash-tray.
Part of the way round there was another compulsory opportunity to bow to an effigy of the Great Leader. The lifelike wax figure was at the end of a long room. It had been placed in a setting of artificial trees on a footpath that merged into the painting of the mountains on the wall behind. There was more of that music playing, this time rather softly, accompanied by the noises of birdsong. Fans ruffled the faux-foliage with a semblance of a summer breeze. We duly lined up in front of this figure and bowed though it was such a ragged affair that it looked more like a Mexican wave.
More rooms full of more gifts followed until we were led back outside, across the car park and into the second building. Smaller, but similar it was devoted not to Kim-Il-Sung, the Great Leader but to his son Kim-Jong-Il, the Dear Leader. If anything his gifts were a weirder selection than his dad's. In addition to the statues and paintings and tapestries, the exhibition had more furniture than a branch of Ikea. There were radios and computers, cameras and telescopes. There was a Basketball signed by Michael Jordan and presented by Madeleine Albright.
We rather rushed this second experience as time was moving on and we needed to get to lunch before taking that dull drive back to Pyongyang for a visit to a flower show.
The flower show proved to be the sole time in the whole trip that we were allowed to be out of the direct sight of our guides. We were escorted into the ground floor of the building housing the event. There we were told to take the escalator to the next floor where the main event was held and work our way through and round the exhibition until we reached the far doors where we would be met again.
It was certainly popular, filled with crowds of Koreans, mostly in their best clothes, all looking at the hundreds of displays. Of course the displays were what made it such a bizarre event. There were exactly two varieties of flower on display - the purple orchid, known as Kimilsungia, and the red begonia, known as Kimjongilia. Here and there, there were very small splashes of white but clearly set to show off the contrasting red and purple in front of them. The displays themselves ranged in size from tabletop to hall-filling but had a startling uniformity of theme. Probably ninety percent of them were models of the Great Leader's birthplace, surrounded by forests of those two flowers. The few that were different were models of the country's various revolutionary monuments, also surrounded by those same flowers.
I was first at the exit door where I found one of our guides waiting. Cautiously I asked him a few questions about the exhibition, questions which I also researched independently later. The flowers, he said, were grown locally in hot houses. Everyone expressed their great love of the two leaders by entering displays. The smaller ones were from companies and individuals working in DPRK, the enormous one in the middle (at least twenty yards long and twelve wide) would be from a combination of Government ministries and organisations.
Translated by my independent research this comes out as "if you are a company that wants to go on doing business in DPRK you had damned well better enter a stand" and "if you are a Government employee who wants to find himself moving up instead of out, ditto". As for the hothouses, it seems that they are the only buildings were the power supply is guaranteed to be maintained, the rest of the city being subject to regular powercuts.
There were other incidents in my trip, far too numerous to go into now but all reinforcing the sense of a country that has built itself on a myth, and an unlikely myth at that. Overall North Korea was quite possibly the most chilling place I've ever been and recent developments in the country are even more chilling. In most countries with nuclear weapons, even the ones most hostile to us, I think the leaders might hesitate before pressing the button. I don't think Kim Jong Il would miss a heartbeat. And from what I saw of the fanaticism of the people I think they would probably just accept things as he dragged the world into hell. They might even do a dance to celebrate.
The five performers were a mixed bag. One read a story - more of a vignette, really - about a prostitute in a cell, and part of a memoir about making and selling toffee apples as a kid. I was on second with my account, reproduced below, of my recent trip to North Korea. Last before the break one of the regulars read an anecdote about her own life. After the break we had poetry from two readers, one relatively sombre and the other a lively performer (shortly to do a stint on the plinth!) who gave us a mix of humorous and serious poetry including a couple in Black Country dialect. Everyone had a great time and, as I was leaving, I was invited to reprise my performance in September at the main City Voices event in Wolverhampton, which I think is on September 8th.
So, for anyone who wants to know exactly what I performed, here it is - a piece adapted from several previous entries in this blog.
In my travels, I've been to some strange places, some surreal places, some disturbing places.
I was once in San Francisco at a time when the city was simultaneously hosting the X-games and the Gay Pride march. That was fairly strange.
For a surreal time you'd be hard pressed to beat the Star Trek ride at the Las Vegas Hilton. As for disturbing; well I was in Beijing just a couple of years after the Tiananmen Square incident. But without any question the strangest, most surreal and most disturbing trip I've ever made was just a couple of months ago: to North Korea.
I could tell you about the grand concert hall and the program of revolutionary music from the State Symphony Orchestra, weirdly interrupted by a spirited rendition of Those Were The Days. I could tell you about the circus that was performed against projected backdrops of the proletariat, building power stations and pylons. I could tell you about the fanatical fervour of the army of schoolchildren in Kaesong performing music and dance in honour of Kim Il Sung's birthday. I could tell you about the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum where I learned, to my surprise, that World War Two had been a local conflict in which North Korea had single-handedly defeated the Japanese.
But I won't tell you about any of those things.
Instead I'd like to tell you about three visits that together sum up the feeling of the trip which was, taken as a whole, like a collision between Franz Kafka and Lewis Carroll.
First though, you need to understand how a trip to North Korea works. As a foreigner you are free to wander wherever you like, providing that wherever you like doesn't involve leaving the hotel, and talk to whoever you like providing they are hotel employees or the polite, pleasant and above all vigilant minders that are with you at all times. Your view of the country is restricted to a very carefully controlled itinerary.
On the third day of our visit we assembled in the hotel reception in our smartest clothes to go to the Kumusan Memorial Palace, the Mausoleum of Kim Il-Sung.
The rules were clear: smart clothes, empty pockets, no cameras, no outer jackets, no inappropriate remarks or humour, lots of respect.
At the memorial palace, which is certainly more of a palace than a memorial, it was clear that this was a place that everybody has to come. Probably literally "has to come". There were groups of soldiers, schoolchildren, businessmen and ladies in traditional dress in a queue that was several hundred yards long but we were marched straight to the front of it and into the buildings. It felt uncomfortable but the people waiting seemed to accept it as part of the way things are. Inside, we were led through what felt like miles of marble-lined corridors. Automatic devices cleaned our shoes and blew the dust from our clothes. We were searched and X-rayed. Periodically we were asked, for no apparent reason, to line up in three columns, or four columns, or two columns, or single file - groupings that were inevitably shuffled into some new arrangement moments later so that the only reasonable explanation was that it was simply to show us who was boss.
We were led, this time in fours, into a room the size of a concert hall. At the far end of it was a statue of Kim Il Sung. The tuneless, but vaguely uplifting, martial music that had been playing throughout the experience was much louder in here. The wall behind the statue was lit with pastel lighting. It reminded me of something and for a moment I couldn't place it. Then it came to me. It was very like the statue of Christ that I had seen in the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City. The statue, the lighting, the music were all designed to produce the same effect.
From that room we were led to another, with another statue and this time we were given audio sets to listen to. It was very hard to listen with a straight face. Imagine someone with a deep voice, full of gravitas, perhaps Orson Wells or James Earl Jones, solemnly intoning, "When the Great Leader was taken from us the hearts and souls of the people were filled with a great grief and sorrow and with one voice they rose up and demanded a memorial be built to honour his name."
Now imagine about ten minutes of it.
After another trip through a wind-tunnel to clean us up we were led into another hall, this time with a glass coffin at the centre in which the body of the Great Leader lay. We lined up in fours again and walked to the coffin, circling it and bowing three times to show our respect. After that there was a museum showing all of the honours and awards bestowed upon Kim Il Sung from leaders and universities of the world. Most of them seemed to be from other Communist countries or dodgy Central African republics. The dodgier the source the more elaborate the award.
Afterwards we were led back through the corridors and out into the fresh air where we were allowed to retrieve our cameras and take a couple of shots of the outside of the building, providing we were careful not to accidentally include anyone in a uniform in the shot.
I had found the whole two hour experience deeply disturbing. They may say this is respect for a man, that this is politics, but I know religion when I see it. This isn't hero worship this is plain and simple worship. Regardless of what they are called it has temples and rituals and a God figure. It's a religion.
That afternoon we left Pyongyang to drive out to the mountains so that tomorrow we would be well placed to visit the International friendship exhibition.
The drive to the mountains was through a drab, flat landscape that looked anything but fertile. Here and there, there were workers in the fields. They appeared to be doing everything by hand with no agricultural implements, however primitive. Only once did I see as much as a simple Ox-drawn plough. It was a depressingly Medieval sight to encounter in the modern world. Next morning we left our hotel for the exhibition. In its way this was as unnerving as the Memorial Palace had been, perhaps more so because we had now observed, albeit from a bus travelling along the road, just how impoverished the majority of the country actually was.
As you approach you see what looks like two very traditional Korean buildings. They are no such thing. They are a decorative front for an extravagant exhibition of gifts received by Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il. As befits his higher status we visited the Great Leader's section first. Once we had passed the smart, unsmiling, armed guards, handed in our coats and cameras and put cotton outer covers over our shoes, we proceeded into somewhere that was every bit as overblown as the Memorial Palace had been. Room after marble-lined room has been built into the side of the mountain, joined by marble lined corridors. In every room there are display cases containing the gifts. It's a bizarrely eclectic selection. There are statues made of every conceivable material from wood, to metal, to stone, to ivory, horn, Bakelite, plastic, glass. They are of every kind of subject, from revolutionary scenes to animals to abstracts to sports figures. There is furniture and there are costumes. There are cars and a train. There are silver bowls and golden tea services. There is a drinks tray made from a dead crocodile.
As you read the captions or listen to the guide certain things become obvious. As with the Mausoleum, the greater and more elaborate the gift the more disreputable the country it comes from. Valuable gem-studded artefacts often turned out to be from the countries, communist or otherwise, with the most apalling human rights records. There were, for example, several very large (not to mention illegal) ivory carvings presented by Robert Mugabe. The gifts from European nations tended to be not from Governments, but from individuals, business organisations or fringe left-wing political groups with tiny memberships. Where there were official state gifts from western nations they tended to carry an apparently unnoticed level of ironic comment. The gifts from the UK for example filled a single small cabinet and included the kind of "Present from London" souvenir rubbish that you'd be ashamed to give to your least favourite auntie. In the only slightly larger United States cabinet a present labelled as being from "Ex-President and Mrs Jimmy Carter" was a cheap and nasty glass ash-tray.
Part of the way round there was another compulsory opportunity to bow to an effigy of the Great Leader. The lifelike wax figure was at the end of a long room. It had been placed in a setting of artificial trees on a footpath that merged into the painting of the mountains on the wall behind. There was more of that music playing, this time rather softly, accompanied by the noises of birdsong. Fans ruffled the faux-foliage with a semblance of a summer breeze. We duly lined up in front of this figure and bowed though it was such a ragged affair that it looked more like a Mexican wave.
More rooms full of more gifts followed until we were led back outside, across the car park and into the second building. Smaller, but similar it was devoted not to Kim-Il-Sung, the Great Leader but to his son Kim-Jong-Il, the Dear Leader. If anything his gifts were a weirder selection than his dad's. In addition to the statues and paintings and tapestries, the exhibition had more furniture than a branch of Ikea. There were radios and computers, cameras and telescopes. There was a Basketball signed by Michael Jordan and presented by Madeleine Albright.
We rather rushed this second experience as time was moving on and we needed to get to lunch before taking that dull drive back to Pyongyang for a visit to a flower show.
The flower show proved to be the sole time in the whole trip that we were allowed to be out of the direct sight of our guides. We were escorted into the ground floor of the building housing the event. There we were told to take the escalator to the next floor where the main event was held and work our way through and round the exhibition until we reached the far doors where we would be met again.
It was certainly popular, filled with crowds of Koreans, mostly in their best clothes, all looking at the hundreds of displays. Of course the displays were what made it such a bizarre event. There were exactly two varieties of flower on display - the purple orchid, known as Kimilsungia, and the red begonia, known as Kimjongilia. Here and there, there were very small splashes of white but clearly set to show off the contrasting red and purple in front of them. The displays themselves ranged in size from tabletop to hall-filling but had a startling uniformity of theme. Probably ninety percent of them were models of the Great Leader's birthplace, surrounded by forests of those two flowers. The few that were different were models of the country's various revolutionary monuments, also surrounded by those same flowers.
I was first at the exit door where I found one of our guides waiting. Cautiously I asked him a few questions about the exhibition, questions which I also researched independently later. The flowers, he said, were grown locally in hot houses. Everyone expressed their great love of the two leaders by entering displays. The smaller ones were from companies and individuals working in DPRK, the enormous one in the middle (at least twenty yards long and twelve wide) would be from a combination of Government ministries and organisations.
Translated by my independent research this comes out as "if you are a company that wants to go on doing business in DPRK you had damned well better enter a stand" and "if you are a Government employee who wants to find himself moving up instead of out, ditto". As for the hothouses, it seems that they are the only buildings were the power supply is guaranteed to be maintained, the rest of the city being subject to regular powercuts.
There were other incidents in my trip, far too numerous to go into now but all reinforcing the sense of a country that has built itself on a myth, and an unlikely myth at that. Overall North Korea was quite possibly the most chilling place I've ever been and recent developments in the country are even more chilling. In most countries with nuclear weapons, even the ones most hostile to us, I think the leaders might hesitate before pressing the button. I don't think Kim Jong Il would miss a heartbeat. And from what I saw of the fanaticism of the people I think they would probably just accept things as he dragged the world into hell. They might even do a dance to celebrate.
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