One thing that has always struck me about this valley in Daejeon is the way the story always finds itself either expressed in, or involved with, poetry in both its private and public manifestations. As someone who has spent the last twenty years thinking of poetry as one way to foster an engagement -or different attention - to the world surrounding us I find this encouraging. It is something that I recognize perhaps, among so many experiences that I can only fail to come to terms with otherwise.  

There is much to be written - and there will be shortly on this site - about the poet Jeon Sukja for whom poetry is a form of catharsis, or an extremely private and confessional way of dealing with what happened to her Father. Her story reveals one of these "untranslatable" experiences, and to see it written down and performed (always saturated with the pain of these memories) provides us with a unique and moving record of what continued to happen at this place long after fighting in the Korean War came to an end.

But there are also many public expressions of poetry here initiated by the Daejeon Writers Group who I was extremely privileged to accompany to a conference on the Jeju 4.3 incident a couple of years ago. At this time of year the whole valley is usually covered in poetry banners in different colours, expressing what this history means to these writers and how it connects to other more recent historical events in South Korea.

At Saturday's memorial I met the poet Park Soyoung for the second time who gave me a reading of her poem. I took my picture with her and talked about future collaborations with poets in the UK because of the Winnington connection. I hope that something meaningful can be arranged in the future.

Over the next couple of years I will be working for the local government in Daejeon in order to research the Daejeon Massacre before the building of a Peace Park here in 2024. Given the current state of the global pandemic this is proving more difficult than expected, but the goal is to have an International Conference in Daejeon at the end of this year, as well as a variety of other events that I aim to remind people of sporadically. Please get in touch if you would like to contact me about Winnington or the site in Daejeon where new information is emerging on an almost daily basis.

But what is desperately needed before any of this can happen is a clear sense of what actually happened here in the Korean War. We have very little information, and some of the sources that we do have are a little bit wanting. This is why Shim Kyu Sang and myself have dedicated the next few years to subjecting this matter to as much public scrutiny as possible. Mr Shim with the documents that exist in South Korea, and myself with neglected accounts like Winnington's that have recently come to light. Last month the Korean government passed a bill that called for the investigation of historical crimes on this peninsula, which should hopefully make our work a little easier.

The previous post was meant to be the first step towards a reappraisal and contextualization of Alan Winnington's 70 year old text "I Saw the Truth in Korea". It will hopefully be one of many. In this post i have included the pamphlet itself. Further posts will give information on the history of its production, as well as how things will be progressing on site in the future. Given that most people in England and America seem completely unaware of these events, I hope that they can be a primer for those who have yet to appreciate how significant this history - and its exclusion from most people's thinking - still remains.

The provisional title for these posts is "What is News", because this was the title of Alan's lectures on journalism in Maoist China. Actually, it was these lectures that saw him fall foul of the Chinese authorities, and led to his eventual move to East Berlin. This is part of a much-needed context I am aiming to build around Winnington's journalism, and will be the focus of later study.