North Korean Literature, Zach McGuckin
As one of my blog posts I wanted to write about literature in North Korea. I originally wanted to read and write a book review on a book in North Korea, but with that came challenges and that’s why I chose to instead write a blog post about it. As I’m sure most of you know, North Korea and the United States of America are two pretty different countries. North Korea is a communist country with a dictator, meaning everyone obeys the commands of one ruler. North Korea has a lot of limitations and restrictions set in place compared to the options available in America, and in order to continue to live and rule their country the way they want to, they need to make sure that the up and coming generations also believe in it and children’s books can play a crucial role in that. For starters, there’s only one publishing house in North Korea. That means that all books that want to be legally published and sold within the country, all go through one publishing house that is watched closely by the government. This way, they know exactly what kind of information is going into the children’s books, and they also can drive the propaganda of their country and eliminate the negative information or persuasions. One thing I found really interesting was that even leaders have written children’s books to help drive their agendas. The leader before their current one, Kim Jong Il, was known to have written several children’s books, but it’s hard to pinpoint which ones were actually written by Kim and which ones were just written in his name. This is because there are a lot of writers close to the dynasty that get permission to write books and have them published with the name of the leader to help drive the popularity of it if the leader likes the content and believes it to be supportive. It’s clear that North Korea is doing a great job of retention rates within their country due to the continued growth and passion that is within North Korea, and it was interesting to read and learn about how children’s books could play a role in that.
Sources:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/03/18/while-slaughtering-thousands-north-koreas-dictators-also-took-time-to-publish-childrens-books/?utm_term=.d537bac0e5fa
http://vt.co/news/world/inside-weird-world-north-korean-childrens-books/