Notes from the Punishment Room
For this issue of Lost in Gwangju, I’ve spent a great deal of my recent free time doing an amateur corpus analysis of messages I found scrawled on the walls of a dozen or so “punishment rooms” (징벌실) within the now-shuttered Gwangju Prison in Munheung-dong. There’s nothing academic about my analysis, and my methodology is spotty, but I think the messages I’ve found nevertheless hold deep value: They lay bare many of the thoughts and emotions that the human spirit conjures up while locked away in a solitary cage.