Asian American Literature Fans

It’s been awhile since I’ve reviewed poetry, which is a total problem. I’ve been promising some folks that I’d start reviewing poetry again. The problem for me is that when I review poetry, I get too involved in the review itself, and they start to become these little articles. To save myself some grief, I will likely err on the side of gloss, meaning that I won’t likely quote too often from source material. In any case, given the problems with permissions in poetry, it’s probably the better way to go! But I digress. Don Mee Choi has returned with her third brilliant collection, the ferocious, confrontational DMZ Colony, which squarely situates South Korea from the framework of neocolonial discourses. This argument has been advanced by some scholars more generally but to see it play out in poetic form is truly a treat. Choi really pushes herself formally and contextually, as this collection uses a hybrid technique at times: combining oral history with lyric reimagination to produce something close to semi-fictionalized dramatic monologues. The official webpage for the book gives us this description:

“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 regard 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.”

This overview does a great job of reminding me of the interdisciplinary, multiformal nature of Choi’s collection. The other issue that it brings up is the problems and productivities of translation. When Choi’s lyric speaker travels to Korea to interview various individuals, who have been critical of the South Korean state apparatus, she “poetically” translates what she hears. The speaker’s translations are never equivalent and often whimsical in their manifestations, but what is crucial to remember is that Choi’s multidimensional work is uninterested in casting blame in any one direction. If anything, Choi’s DMZ Colony reveals the ambivalent ways in which South Korea went about its emergence as an independent nation, first under Syngman Rhee and then under Park Chung Hee. One of the most interesting intertexts that Choi weaves throughout DMZ Colony is Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony.” Here, you can’t help but reconsider certain events from the framework of torture and imprisonment that is at the heart of Kafka’s blistering social critique. For Choi and her lyric speaker, we know that diving back into that dark well of history is never totally hopeless. In the reformulations and translations of so much trauma, DMZ Colony still finds sites of possibility and potentiality in the productive mutations of art, visual culture, and language. In this malleable space and time, there are still “wings.”

Buy the Book Here:

https://www.wavepoetry.com/products/dmz-colony