Review: DMZ Colony by Don Mee Choi

reviewed by Kion You

DMZ Colony
Don Mee Choi
Wave Books, April 2020.
$20.00; 152pp.
ISBN: 978-1-94069-695-9

Although Don Mee Choi’s new collection DMZ Colony weaves together oral history, memoir, translation, deconstructed deconstruction theory, doodles, and bricolage, it begins with the simplest of expositions, a matter-of-fact description of the DMZ. The opening statement reads like the heading paragraph of a Wikipedia article:

……..The Korean Demilitarized Zone is approximately 160 miles long and 2.5 miles wide. The
……..DMZ runs across the 38th parallel, a division created after World War II, with the end of
……..the 35-year-long Japanese occupation of Korea. The US occupied the south, and the
……..Soviet Union the north. The US still occupies South Korea with military installations,
……..bases, and troops. The Korean border is one of the most militarized borders in the world.

Choi mimics the timbre in which the Korean War, America’s “forgotten war,” has been taught in schools, usually as a brief statistic, an interlude between WWII and Vietnam. These five sentences, however, set up an arsenal of words Choi pressures throughout the rest of the collection, words like “division,” “occupied,” and “border.” Choi moves from sanitized, political language to the voices of Koreans who experienced the partition, from orphans to political prisoners to her own scattered family. However, her poetic work lies not in just presenting silenced voices, but reworking and amplifying them, which intensifies the absurdity of their suffering.

“The language of capture, torture, and massacre is difficult to decipher,” Choi writes. “It’s practically a foreign language.” Choi “translates” the violence embedded into geopolitical vocabulary through what she calls “mirror words,” a linguistic practice informed by her career translating Korean poetry. “Mirror words are meant to compel disobedience, resistance,” she says. “Mirror words flutter along borders and are often in flight across oceans, even galaxies.” Choi takes the phrase “Your Excellency, Is It Martial Law,” which harkens back to Korean military declarations that called for force against democracy protests, and deconstructs it into, “ㄱ-ㅏ-ㅎ-ㅏ-ㄱ-ㅖ-ㅇ-ㅓ-ㅁ-ㄹ-ㅕ-ㅇ-ㅇ-ㅣ-ㅂ-ㄴ-ㅣ-ㄲ-ㅏ.” The reader must not only reassemble the vowels and consonants, but also cobble together its meaning through translation or other means. Thus, DMZ Colony hinges on an active participation of the reader, who must pick up the fragments left after the partition of Korea and make meaning out of it.

DMZ’s first major section recounts an oral history of the political prisoner Ahn Hak-sop, who was tortured and jailed from 1953 to 1995 for protesting both the United States occupation and South Korean totalitarianism. In five iterations of Ahn’s life story, Choi slowly begins to undo narrative cohesion, enacting onto the form of each account the violence dealt to Ahn. The first telling, the most straightforward, is made up of breathy, punctuated phrases like, “I had a trial and was sent to a military prison … if you didn’t bleed for a day then you had your ancestors to thank for it,” and “the amount of food we received … less than a centimeter of rice in a bowl.” Here, Choi works as a preservationist and witness; she then intersperses Ahn’s words with photos of her handwritten interview notes which flit between Korean and English. She also inserts scrawled geometric shapes that trace the architecture of Ahn’s imprisonment, from his face to the dimensions of his cell, revealing to the reader Choi’s real time processing of Ahn’s story. In the fourth iteration, Choi riffs on Ahn’s words set during a time in which he was tortured and starved:

……..then I heard the vowels from my own mouth
……..O E
……..A E
……..I E
……..E E E
……..이이이

Choi strips down Ahn’s language to its most guttural, a siren-like scream of pain. She mirrors the Korean character “이,” which has the same sound as “e,” returning to Ahn’s own language and reversing the course of translation, making it so that the Korean reader hears Ahn’s echoing cry.

Choi then moves on to amplifying a collage of voices, “translating” the stories of eight orphans who survived the 1951 Sancheong-Hamyang massacre, in which the South Korean army massacred 700 of its people, largely women, children, and the elderly. On one page is a scan of Choi’s own handwriting, ventriloquizing the voices of these orphans, whose stories she only heard secondhand. On the other page is the English translation of her ventriloquization, showing to the reader the mirror Choi holds up to herself, blurring the lines between creation and translation.

In Choi’s “account” of thirteen-year old orphan Cheo Geum-jeon, she writes, “설이다. 아이 좋아라. 떡 많이 먹어 배가 부르다,” and translates as “New Year’s Day! I was stuffed from eating too many rice cakes.” However, the massacre soon begins, and the account ends, “개울 넘어서 산 올라가는데 군인들이 총 다시 쏘았다,” or “We ran across the creek and up the mountain. The soldiers saw us and started shooting again.” These orphans’ sentences are simple and direct, mimicking a diary form. When read in Korean, their unvarnished nature only heightens, as these accounts lack the honorific, reverent tones a Korean child would use when talking to an elder. In this way, Choi’s fictionalized accounts prove more intimate than if she had gone back in time and interviewed the children herself. Moreover, Choi left Korea when she was young, and calls her own Korean handwriting “childlike,” so these orphan passages perform her earlier claim that “language—that is to say, translation—arises from collective consciousness.” Choi and these orphans share a language of resistance. She does not pretend to own these voices, does not feign a Whitmanian, “I contain multitudes,” but instead lets language breathe and cohere on its own.

Choi’s other orphan accounts present much more ghastly pictures of the massacre: one child compares the smell of dead bodies to grilled meat, and another dreams of chewing his dead mother’s hair. However, Choi does not merely name these atrocities, but instills a sense of global solidarity, naming the trauma of these children in honor of “the nameless children who are still homesick, captive, in detention, in internment, in concentration camps, in seas, in deserts, on Planet Nine, and such.” A symbolic gesture perhaps, but Choi’s own immigration, from Korea to Hong Kong to the United States, mirrors the need for a global solidarity amid global oppressions.

In DMZ Colony’s last section, “(neo)(=)(angels),” Choi pairs prose poetry with a series of nine photos shot by her father and his colleagues. They range from family photos to shots of mass protests. These photos bring to mind Seo-Young Chu’s idea of “postmemory han,” a phenomenon that combines “postmemory,” the paradox of second generation Korean immigrants being haunted by historical traumas they did not experience, with “han,” the uniquely Korean feeling of collective, indeterminate grief. Choi operates under “postmemory han” and writes of this secondhand living: “Memory’s memory. Memory’s child. My memory lives inside my father’s camera, the site where my memory was born.” In conjunction with the paradox of immersing oneself in “memory’s memory,” Choi’s own captions take on paradoxical forms, such as, “we the angels who aren’t angels” and “we the orphans who aren’t orphans.” DMZ wrestles with being a witness to oppression while not experiencing it directly, with creating art while borrowing the art of others. There is a hopefulness to her poetry, one that includes the possibility of transcendence and flight, but it is grounded in a deeply macabre reality.

Choi’s integration of her father’s photographs makes her “postmemory han” legible and permanent. The photos sustain a cohesion to Choi’s familial memory while highlighting the fact that her family had been separated across the world due to her father’s exposure of government atrocities. The photos reverberate off each other, linking adolescent Choi with mass movements, her poetic eye with the photographic eye, visualizing the “collective consciousness” her language arises from. The ending words of DMZ Colony utilize a first-person plural, both bringing power to collective language and recognizing its limitations as a form of resistance:

……..Our vowels are incomprehensible. Only the consonants pass from
……..hand to hand, colony to colony. We cheer, we weep. We are e. We
……..are 이. We are eternally motherless. We are your orphans. We are
……..your angels. We are your mirror words. What’s written on paper
……..is obvious — See you at DMZ!

Kion You is a recent college graduate from San Diego. He enjoys writing about travel, fashion, religion, and Asian Americanness. He has been published in Sojourners, The College Hill Independent, and the Cleveland Review of Books.