7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Indian Express
In ‘The White Book,' Han Kang confronts the ghost of an unlived life
Swaddling bands, newborn gown, salt, snow, ice, moon, rice, waves, yulan, white bird, 'laughing whitely', blank paper, white dog, white hair, shroud… Nobel laureate Han Kang compiles a list of all things white, and invigorates them through episodic fragments in her novel, The White Book.
The book floats in the liminal space between a novel and a meditation, between prose and poem – perhaps a memoir for a life not lived. Reading The White Book felt like witnessing a snowfall- a thin veil of snow that steadily paints the landscape white.
Kang writes about her older sister, who passed away just two hours after her birth, years before Kang was born. Kang never met her, and has no memories with her or of her, only the unfulfilled possibility of her existence. The closest Kang got to knowing her is through the unfortunate story recounted by mother about the two hours she was alive. Yet, the ghost of her unnamed sister lingers throughout her life, a possibility of an alternate life – a life, perhaps, where Kang herself wouldn't have existed.
'Within that white, all of those white things, I will breathe in the final breath you released,' she writes.
The book is an expression of grief afflicted by possibilities, a ghost life. It is not expressed through raucous outcries or fulminating diatribes, but through impassioned silences and the stillness of reflections. The monochrome black and white photographs interspersed throughout the novel emphasises this stillness. Each white object compiled by Kang is used to craft a fragment that talks of grief, possibility, and the fragility of human life.
Grief in various forms has been a common theme in literature, grief for a person, for relationships, for memories, and for the past. Kang's The White Book attempts to recreate the possibility of a life unfulfilled, and ultimately contemplates what it means to grieve a possibility.
White can feel like an erasure, a void of colours or meaning. However, in The White Book, white holds a space of its own in between purity and silences.
The significance of the colour white varies from one culture to another. However, its intricacy lies in its paradoxical cultural contexts. While in Western cultures white is associated with weddings to symbolise new beginnings, whereas, wearing white to funerals is a common practice in countries such as China, Japan, India, and Korea. Not only is white the colour of stillness, blankness, and silence, but also the colour of purity, rebirth, and rejuvenation.
Kang deliberates on this dichotomy between white as an end, as well as a possibility. White is the colour Kang associated with her sister's death ever since her mother told her her sister had the complexion of a rice cake. However, Kang uses the same colour to craft an imagined life for her sister who witnesses the pristine and unsullied whiteness of falling snow.
In The White Book, white does not signify a lack of colour, it's given a space for itself where grief and possibility converge.
A white canvas may be devoid of meaning, but it also offers the possibility of creation.
'Now I will give you white things,
What is white, though may yet be sullied;
Only white things I will give.
No longer will I question
Whether I should give this life to you.'
How do we remember someone we never knew? What memories do we recollect? How do we grieve for them?
The White Book does not attempt to heal grief, or even understand it, it simply attempts to create a space for it. In the midst of an unrelenting world, Kang creates an imagined life for her sister through little anecdotes, contemplating what kind of person she would have grown up to be, the mundane things she would have experienced- the stinging burn of salt, or gazing at the stars.
None of this ever happened, but an empty white canvas allows us to colour it as we wish; and Kang used the empty white pages of an unwritten book to create a speculated life. She crafts images through her prose that invoke the silence of inactions and the imagined actions of a life not lived.
The novel is not only defined by what is said, but also what is left unsaid. Kang deliberately leaves spaces in between the prose, opting for a fragmentation wherein silence speaks in equal volumes. Instead of adding to the novel, Kang subtracts, leaving us with traces and slivers.
We often tend to define life through what is materially present, everything and everyone that surrounds us. But in a life defined by presence, we are still plagued by everything that is absent, and perhaps, these absences define us as much as the presences do.
Like how negative space in art defines an object, the negative space in our life also shapes us. For everything present there is something absent. For Kang, it is her sister. The White Book invites its readers to contemplate absences, and how these absences, these lacunae of whiteness define us.
(As I See It is a space for bookish reflection, part personal essay and part love letter to the written word.)
