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Summary
Summary
WINNER OF THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY
"Don Mee Choi's urgent DMZ Colony captures the migratory latticework of those transformed by war and colonization. Homelands present and past share one sky where birds fly, but 'during the Korean War cranes had no place to land.' Devastating and vigilant, this bricolage of survivor accounts, drawings, photographs, and hand-written texts unearth the truth between fact and the critical imagination. We are all 'victims of History,' so Choi compels us to witness, and to resist."--Judges Citation
Woven from poems, prose, photographs, and drawings, Don Mee Choi's DMZ Colony is a tour de force of personal and political reckoning set over eight acts. Evincing the power of translation as a poetic device to navigate historical and linguistic borders, it explores Edward Said's notion of "the intertwined and overlapping histories" in regards to South Korea and the United States through innovative deployments of voice, story, and poetics. Like its sister book, Hardly War, it holds history accountable, its very presence a resistance to empire and a hope in humankind.
Author Notes
Born in Seoul, South Korea, Don Mee Choi is the author of Hardly War (Wave Books, 2016), The Morning News Is Exciting (Action Books, 2010), and several chapbooks and pamphlets of poems and essays. She has received a Whiting Award, Lannan Literary Fellowship, Lucien Stryk Translation Prize, and DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Fellowship. She has translated several collections of Kim Hyesoon's poetry, including Autobiography of Death (New Directions, 2018), which received the 2019 International Griffin Poetry Prize.
Reviews (1)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The stunning third collection from Choi (Hardly War) is a feat of docupoetics, collage, and translation that bears witness to unheard voices from the Korean War and the Park Chung Hee military dictatorship. Choi braids personal and political histories, including her family's flight from South Korea, her father's work as a photojournalist, transcriptions of conversations with activist Ahn Hak-sop, and imagined accounts of eight orphans who survived the 1951 Sancheong-Hamyang massacre. These accounts serve as crucial investigations into the role of translators as "practitioners of memory." "The language of capture, torture, and massacre is difficult to decipher," Choi writes, "It's practically a foreign language." Thus, Choi's project is one of interpretation--between Korean and English, text and image, transcription and imagined experience--which becomes "an anti-neocolonial mode" and a way to remember victims of state violence. Choi creates a logic and language that carves a space for counternarrative, and that questions what it means to be human in the face of ongoing wars. "Our eternity of war!" Choi writes, "Are we orphans of beauty? Are we angels of eternity? Who are we, really?" Virtuosic in its range and empathy, this is a book that shifts the reader's understanding of historical narrative from one of war to one of flight. (Apr.)
Excerpts
Excerpts
What I remember about my childhood are the children, no older than me, who used to come around late afternoons begging for leftovers, even food that had gone sour. The drills at school in preparation for attacks by North Korea kept me anxious at night. I feared separation from my family due to the ever-pending war. I feared what my mother feared--my brother being swept up in protests and getting arrested and tortured. Our radio was turned off at night in case we were suspected of being North Korean sympathizers. At school, former North Korean spies came to give talks on the evil leader of North Korea. I stood at bus stops to see if I could spot any North Korean spies, but all I could spot were American GIs. My friends and I waved to them and called them Hellos. In our little courtyard, I skipped rope and played house with my paper dolls amongst big glazed jars of fermented veggies and spicy, pungent pastes. I feared the shadows they cast along the path to the outhouse. Stories of abandoned infant girls always piqued my interest, so I imagined that the abandoned babies might be inside the jars. Whenever I obeyed the shadows, I saw tiny floating arms covered in mold. And whenever it snowed, I made tiny snowmen on top of the covers of the jars. Like rats, children can be happy in darkness. But the biggest darkness of all was the midnight curfew. I didn't know the curfew was a curfew till my family escaped from it in 1972 and landed in Hong Kong. That's how big the darkness was Excerpted from DMZ Colony by Don Mee Choi All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.