Violence and Humanity

Rare insight into N Korean captors

In 11/2017 I heard in the news that a man had accidentally or intentionally burned himself alive. The news article explained that the man was Aijalon Gomes who had authored this book after being a prisoner in North Korea. Out of respect for the deceased man I decided to read his book. His book was extremely insightful and it displayed a very human side of his North Korean guards and other staff. However the story seemed to needlessly start out “slow” with his college years and specifically his sexual struggles (ie. am I gay or not). This all seemed very irrelevant to the overall story and some of the sex stuff seemed to drag on to the point of discomfort. I literally skipped over a lot of that because I wanted to know about his time in North Korea.
Yet after I read the entire story, complete with his suicide attempt while in custody, and knowing that he ultimately did succeed in his suicide, I feel that Gomes wanted to lay it all out there for everyone to see. Sort of his life manifesto. I feel sad for him knowing the hell that he endured before, during and after his time in North Korea. Of course I’d like to really believe all of the humane things that he said about most of his “captors”. Such as watching Tom and Jerry cartoons with his guards and the “High Official”, the kind young nurse, the jovial artist guard etc.. for me this was the most interesting part of the book. I’d hope that these descriptions were all true. It would be wonderful to know that such humanity exists in North Korea.
There was one paragraph in the book that seemed very out of place, however, and maybe even cryptic or a lapse into his insanity. Out of nowhere, Gomes used very vulgar and racially charged words to describe his mother as hypothetically stated by the Korean guards. This was either cryptically placed or this was mistakenly not seen during the final edit. Despite pages and pages of mostly decent accounts of his captors, this short paragraph made me think about his psychology and sanity. Was his overall positive portrait of the majority of his captors merely his false illusion to help him cope? Sort of like understanding the inner battle for reality of a schizophrenic person. I think this would be a good analytic piece for an advanced psychology class.
Overall, I feel sad that Gomes endured so much, and had so many people working on his behalf, and yet in the end he chose suicide. I’ve read through news reports and it appears uncertain if Gomes died accidentally or if he did it intentionally. After reading his book, though, suicide does seem probable.