The Northern Wind: Forced Journey to North Korea

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Would you like us to take another look at this review? Positioned diagonally from an introductory panel of the same size depicting a tall building, the map panel has meaning in dialogue not only with the introductory panel, but also with the two middle panels of the four-panel series Figure 4.

The Northern Wind: Forced Journey to North Korea by Therese Park

A similar white space on the bottom portion of the small map panel in the second row demarcates the water surrounding China, North Korea and South Korea. These two small light coloured panels, with their depictions of light-grey walls and white skies or water, contrast with the two longer and darker panels they frame.

Both long panels adhere to a similar colour scheme with dark grey across the top that darkens into black toward the bottom of the panel. In these panels, a parallel is suggested between the buildings that were flattened out during the Korean War , the people who were forced into conformance following the war and the country that was blocked off from all others. The contrast between the set of panels and their symmetrical alignment brings readers to read additional stories within the markings of each comic panel.

Within this cartoon rendition of an interstate map, the post-war condition of North Korea is linked to that of a fortified town, hence drawing forth at once notions of secrecy and enslavement. The cartoon map of North Korea, with its blatant modification, thus relates back to and confirms a narrative comment made in the introductory chapter. In a long panel showing Delisle lying on his bed after his first night in the hotel, an uncharacteristically lengthy text box specifies: In both this verbal narrative comment and the comic map, the isolation of the country is superimposed on the forced isolation of the people.

Delisle thus breaks from map conventions, including a wall around a piece of land, to indicate that the North Korea mapped out in Pyongyang is not just a geographical space, but a living space shaped by people and the institutions that govern them. By drawing the maps in the same cartoon style as all of the other comic panels or images that comprise Pyongyang , Delisle openly embraces the subjective and the imagined in his renditions of place and how it intersects with a political and social climate.

So, to include maps that are consistent with the dominant visual cartoon style in a graphic travel memoir is to assert that the subjective filters into each aspect of the narrative.

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In Pyongyang , the cartoon map is a highly self-reflexive image, one that accommodates our eye-witness narrator and his perceptions into its lines. When the introductory large-scale map of North and South Korea is once again reproduced in the narrative, it is presented as the image out of which begins a series of picture narrative boxes Figure 5. The picture narrative box series is accompanied by a narrative text box that specifies: Although the familiar portraits cannot be seen in full, it is obvious that they are what is intended by the partial view of the frames.

This is further supported by the fact that the city or town to which the first picture narrative box points to is a place that the narrator-protagonist has never visited: Critics have argued that cartography, more than any other geographic enterprise, pushes land into meaning through authorial acts of personal intervention as well as personal inscription. Instead, he works hard to argue that the reality represented in the map is one that has been framed and thus crafted by a particular vision of the world.

So, although posing as and often passing for objective representations of land, maps tell stories that are shaped by a particular version or knowledge of the world. The cartoon map, which is as malleable as all cartoon images, thus presents another occasion for Delisle to draw himself into the story. Unlike many other characters in Pyongyang , Guy is easily recognizable with his pointed nose, small eyes and dark short hair.

It is this living that Delisle sets out to convey to readers.

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Except now I write for my readers. As Guy becomes more familiar with North Korea and its social climate, as his vision matures, his critique of the regime becomes more and more poignant. Tellingly, another modified map of North Korea is presented in the following panel. The two narrative text boxes that are part of the map panel along with the wind-up doll silent panel that introduces the two-panel row draw a strong parallel between the people and the place: With this map, the last one of North Korea included in Pyongyang , Guy once again represents the territory in relation to what he perceives of the people and the social climate of oppression and inordinate display of power.

In this instance, however, his personal visual filtering also fills in some gaps with respect to information that is glaringly obvious in the official maps as well as in the official narratives that give rise to those maps. By charting once again the North Korean territory with the addition of triangles to indicate re-education camps and a dotted line to indicate the life imprisonment zone, the cartoon map functions to make up for an imposed silence and include aspects of reality that official mapping practices exclude. By doing so, however, it also serves to reveal and critique the lack of information that is part of standardized maps, such as the one reproduced at the beginning of Pyongyang.

The inclusion of a map that so overtly disregards the codes of censorship and whose agenda is to make known that which is normally silenced, exposes the standard, official maps of North Korea as tools of propaganda concerned with propagating not so much geographical knowledge, but rather geopolitical knowledge.

Questions?

Svetlana Alpers, who approaches maps as artistic images and not exclusively scientific ones , suggests that geography and, by extension, the cartographic chartings it authorizes, embodies a socially constructed knowledge of space: It follows that by producing maps that re-visualize the North Korean territory, showing things that normally fall outside the strictures of cartography, Delisle exposes maps as not so much charting the world as it really is, but actually contributing to its social construction. Throughout Pyongyang , Delisle adopts and adapts the language of maps to re-chart a place that through its very charting has remained somewhat unknown.

Here, Deslisle overtly embraces rhetorical manipulation, fully aware of his role in the filtering of knowledge through representation. Indeed, his maps accentuate the representational economy of comics, the fact that in its universe there are few, if any, technological constraints to representation.

Of comics, Delisle admits: Instead, they bring together fact and fiction to impart to readers the truth of first-hand experience valued in travel literature. The reader can make up his own mind.