[Opinion] Oma Island

“Only an endless track of dry red clay/ And heat that stops the breath before me/ Crossing paths with an unfamiliar friend/ We lepers are happily met…/ Taking off my laborer’s shoes beneath a willow tree/ Reveals another toe gone/ Until the remaining two fall off as well/ The road stretches on and on, this thousand-li road to Jeonla-do.”

This poem describes the journey taken by the poet Han ha-un (1919~1975)—who suffered from Hansen’s disease and was dubbed “the poet punished by Heaven” after the popular name for leprosy, “divine punishment”—as he traveled from his hometown of Hamheung, Hamgyeongnam-do to Sorok Island in Jeonlanam-do. His poems, including “The Oaten Flute,” “The Road to Jeonla-do: To Sorok Island,” and “Bluebird,” appear in textbooks to this day and are loved by many.

Among Han’s writings is a poem entitled “Oma Island.” “A fertile land of 3,300,000 pyongs…/ Formed by rocks thrown into the sea/ By leprous hands/ …O, that glorious land/ Where, for the last time in this life/ Our abused names are washed clean/ And we are men once more/ The land of Oma, filled with sun/ The ray of light shining in the dark.” The poem appears to be a commemorative piece commissioned by Sorokdo Hospital to mark the occasion of the land reclamation project on Oma Island (Goheung-gun, Jeonlanam-do). The exact time of composition is unclear, but Oma Island never turned out to be the “glorious land” or the “ray of light shining in the dark” lauded in the poem.

In 1962, some 2,000 Hansen’s patients from Sorok Island bonded together under the common goal of building a settlement and embarked on the Oma Island reclamation project. However, the Republican government, in anticipation of the coming elections, ran the laboring patients out of the project site and handed over the project rights to Jeonlanam-do. This was not the only atrocity inflicted on Hansen’s patients during those days when “lepers” were not treated as human beings. Immediately after Korea’s liberation from Japanese rule, a peacekeeping force slaughtered 84 Hansen’s sufferers in an attempt to quell a riot of patients on Sorok Island. In 1957, a group of patients trying to build a rehabilitation settlement on the coast of Samcheonpo were attacked by local inhabitants, and 23 of them were killed.

The Korean Bar Association announced that it will appeal to the National Assembly to pass a law to uncover the truth behind the Oma Island incident and make the necessary restitutions. Although 40 years have passed, an injustice like the Oma incident must be righted, and the unfair deaths redressed. But dizziness takes hold of me, as if I’ve climbed onto a never-ending merry-go-round. After our history of colonial servitude, division of North and South, war, and military dictatorship, what island floating upon our seas, what valley shadowed beneath our mountaintops does not hide undeserved deaths buried in its depths?

Hwang Ho-taek Editorial writer. hthwang@donga.com