1976: Kim Chi-ha

1976

Kim Chi Ha-South Korea

Imprisoned

Kim Chi Ha was born in February 1941 in Mokpo, in what is now South Korea. When a student at Seoul National University in the late 1950s, he became active in the student movement that rallied against the dictatorship of the President Syngman Rhee. In 1964 he was arrested for participating in another student movement, this time campaigning against the normalization of relations between Japan and the South Korea.

In 1970 his poem Five Bandits was published in literary magazine. It satirized the political, business and military elite portraying them as corrupt and decadent. Following its publication he was arrested and charged with violating anti-communist legislation and freed on bail. In March 1972 his poem Groundless Rumors led to another arrest for violating the same law.

On 13 May 1974 the Park regime issued Decree No. 9 which placed severe restrictions on opposition groups and activists. In response Kim Chi-Ha wrote Cry of the People which was immediately banned by the regime and he was arrested. He was sentenced to death by a military court however, the sentence was commuted to a life imprisonment and he was released in 1975.

Once free, Kim Chi-Ha gave interviews to the press leading to articles about his time in prison. He also claimed that a recent case against twenty three alleged members of the banned People's Revolutionary Party had been fabricated by the government. He was subsequently re-arrested and sent back to prison. The authorities even distributed a pamphlet called The Case Against Kim Chi Ha which accused him of being a communist. His Declaration of Conscience was smuggled out of prison and recorded in the US Congressional Record on October 22 1975.

Released in 1980 he was pardoned and rehabilitated in 1984 and in 2007 he was appointed professor chair of Dongguk University.

Writing Sample:

From the Darkness

From the darkness yonder
Someone is calling me
A pair of glaring eyes lurking in the darkness
The blood-red darkness
Of rusty prison bars.
Silence beckons me
And clogged, halting breath.

On a rainy day of grey lowering clouds
Faltering through the calls
Of pigeons cooing the eaves
It keeps calling and calling me
A tattered blood-stained shirt
Hanging from the window will
That red soul which thrashed through endless cellar-nights
the congealed cry of a body racked and torn
Beckoning me
Beckoning me.
The silence yonder is calling me
Calling on my blood
To refuse
To refuse all lies.

From the darkness yonder
On a rainy day of grey lowering clouds
From that darkness of blood-red bodies
A pair of glaring eyes.

From the Darkness in This Prison Where I Live, ed. Siobhan Dowd (London: Cassell, 1996). ISBN: 0-304-33306-9