민족의 탈정체화와 안-아르케의 문학 - 이동순의 <강제이주열차>와 김숨의 <떠도는 땅> 나란히 읽기

In September 1937, about 170,000 Koreans living in the Primorsky Krai were suddenly forced to relocate to Central Asia. This was due to the suspicion of the Soviet authorities that the Koreans might become spies for the Japanese army in the run-up to World War II. The deportation, which was carried out through violence and coercion, deprived the Koreans of all their rights and resulted in numerous victims and permanent trauma for the survivors. This caused a fundamental change in their fate and identity, as the Koreans in the Soviet Union tried to adapt to reality in order to survive. The deportation that began to be depicted in literature after the dissolution of the Soviet Union was usually driven by a strong nationalism that sought to overcome the suffering through the factual reconstruction of the events and the preservation of cultural traditions. Since then, the arche of Korean nationalism has been a central theme in literature dealing with the deportation. Lee Dong-soon’s Deportation Train(2019) and Kim Soom's Wandering Land(2020) are works that depart from this trend and deal with the issue in a different way. While the former emphasizes the tragedy of the nation and its overcoming in an epic form, the latter focuses on the individual voices of the characters and attempts to depict life beyond the nationalism. In particular, the latter explores the possibility of new relationships and communities beyond the nationalism by showing the outside of the official context of deportation. The Wandering Land dismantles the singular identity of a people and focuses on the unfamiliar ways of being that are formed in a new environment. Deportation is a question that encompasses even the process of identity change experienced by the victims and survivors of the event. So-called “the literature of An-Arche” expresses newly created identities and communities, and is writing that seeks to respond to the future life that is created from the here and now.