Farmers’ Dance is the title poem of Shin Kyeong-nim’s first collection of poetry, Farmers’ Dance, and an example of his minjung (folksong) poetry. In this collection, Shin presents us with a heartfelt vision of displaced farmers in South Korea who faced the industrialization and urbanization of President Chung Hee Park’s administration during the 1960s and 1970s and have either stayed in hopeless rural towns or moved to city slums.

Most of them are helpless and desperate, watching their families break up, losing what little land they had, and wondering “what’s the use of struggling in this small rural town.” Without hope for the future, some of them choose to commit family suicide by ingesting herbicide or eating poisonous fish.

Shin’s depiction of an empty, desolate rural town in Farmers’ Dance is particularly poignant because here he portrays a deteriorated version of a traditional farmers’ dance. Traditionally, a farmers’ dance was performed to inspire excitement for a rural festival or to celebrate the planting or the harvest of a year’s rice crop. Thus the dance was always associated with joy, laughter, and communal unity and was closely related to the natural rhythms of an age-old agricultural lifestyle.

But the farmer-musicians presented in this poem are different from the traditional ones. They perform on “a temporary stage” set up in an “empty school yard” only for a handful of spectators in the evening; their dance and music are not for celebrating the village spirit, but for earning a few coins with their “faces… smudged with make-up.”

After their performance they do not feel a sense of harmony or unity shared with the audience. Feeling alienated and abandoned, they drink up hard liquor (soju) and try to forget about their hard lives. The remote rural town looks so forlorn and hopeless at night that they even make a joke of inviting legendary robber-rebels Kok-jung and Suhrim to visit. Returning home, they dance for themselves, letting the blaring sounds of kkwaengggwari (pipes) and jing (a gong) fill the night sky.

The contrast between the traditional setting in which a farmers’ dance used to be performed and the makeshift stage for this night’s performance before the now-departed spectators is so dramatic that it suggests both the inner and the outer breakdown of displaced people.

Even so, Shin can express his deep anger and frustration at Park’s dictatorial regime only figuratively, by letting the farmers mention legendary robber-rebels. In the context of widespread urbanization and industrialized progress in Korea, the farmers’ final dance gestures—in the absence of the old-time, agrarian, and communitarian excitement—look all the more desperate, forced, heavy, and agonizing.

http://anthony.sogang.ac.kr/FarmersDance.html

Categories: British Literature, Korean Literature, Literature

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