by Serin Lee
My work within the Mapping Migrations research cluster focused primarily on poetry from East and Southeast Asia. Looking through collections written by Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Tibetan, and Cambodian poets, I found myself astonished by the haunting overlap in motifs that I came across in their works. Whether invoking their own journeys or those of their families/fellow citizens, it was clear that origins and destinations were frustrated terms for these voices. Some presenced the blurring, absence, or even erasure of their cultural roots—“All birds—even those that do not fly / —have wings / A constant confession / Admission of omission” (Sun Yung Shin). Others tried to transcend the problem altogether— “As your soul is growing new wings / such words will disappear from your dictionary: / boundary, complain, cowardice, collapse…” (Ha Jin). At their heart, however, it seemed that what they all wanted to convey was that it takes more than fixed locations for migrants to claim their roots, let alone make sense of them. “As a migrant, you are your own archive,” they seemed to say. “Train your eye on your self, your symptom.”
With this in mind, I chose to return to Sun Yung Shin’s work and map “the worldwide Korean diaspora,” to which Skirt Full of Black is dedicated—“six to seven million overseas Koreans living in 140 countries.” As a collection of points fans outward from the small peninsula, from the mid-19th century onwards and seeking everything from asylum to the betterment of lives, I wish to explore Shin’s “atomization of the self” by quantifying it in a direct and engaging visual way. What does it mean for migrants, as individuals and collectives, to have atomized selves and kaleidoscopic identities “complicated by arrivals and departures, myth and rewriting” (Jenny Boully)? Are origins a fluid, all-encompassing journey for them—and in that sense, more continual becomings than beginnings? Formulated differently, if beginnings are indeed a transitional time and constantly moving space for migrants, is it possible for them to concretize/fashion a home for these ambiguities in poetry? Do migrants live, as Kristeva notes in Strangers to Ourselves, in “a lost origin, the impossibility to take root, a rummaging memory, the present in abeyance”?
If so, then I hope mapping an Asian diaspora doesn’t serve simply to reinforce migrants’ felt otherness but also to, as poetry does, “lighten [it] by…coming back to it…through the harmonious repetition of…differences” (ibid.). Maps establish place and direction, but I hope this map also helps us explore how migration poetry helps writers rework such boundaries into new possibilities for transformation. As the eye traces the prism-like refracting of a nation, I hope this map and the dynamic language of poetry will visually and textually exemplify the “dazzling [spaces] of metamorphoses, wherein the ‘I’ atomizes into multiple and self-replicating new mythologies of what constitutes an authentic being” (Ed Bok Lee)—which this project’s cited poets ceaselessly strive for in their writing.
Important Figures in the History of Korean Diaspora Poetry
Early Influences
Ko Un (b. 1933)
A preeminent figure in bringing Korean literature into the international limelight, Ko Un has been one of South Korea’s most important writers for decades. Ko grew up during, and would later engage the traumas of many of the country’s defining 20th-century events, including Japan’s brutal occupation during World War II, the Korean War and ensuing division of the peninsula into North and South, and the absorption of both countries into the larger backdrop of Cold War politics punctuated by authoritarian power on both sides, as well as uneasy gestures towards reconciliation. Accordingly, Ko’s poetry centers around a sense of division and statelessness that tensions Korea’s very ideas of citizenship and existence as a people. Instead, Ko strives to fashion a new vocabulary for identity and community in ways that leave room for difference.
Works include: Ten Thousand Lives; Maninbo; Peace &War; First Person Sorrowful; Himalaya Poems; What?: 108 Zen Poems
Choi Seung-ja (b. 1952)
Born in 1952, Choi Seung-ja is one of South Korea’s most distinguished contemporary women poets. Choi began writing poetry in college, and became Korea University’s first woman editor, as well as, later on, the first woman to be published in South Korea’s preeminent counterpolitical journals during its 1970s era of military dictatorship: Literature and Intellect (Munhak-kwa jiseong) and Creation and Criticism (Changjak-kwa bipyeong). Choi has remained in Korea for most of her life (though she participated in the Iowa International Writers’ Program in 1994), but her work, like migration poetry, gestures to fissure and disjunction of self—departing fiercely too from impositions of decorum and emotional sensitivity hitherto imposed on women poets by Korea’s predominantly male literary establishment. Often troubling figures of the father and lover against the backdrop of her time, Choi stitches both public disempowerment and the private alienation of women into a vexed body within her poems—one that tenaciously seeks to free itself from gendered constraints (including those found in the lyric form) by brushing against shocks of transgression and trauma that Choi has affixed in unflinchingly concrete images throughout her career.
Works include: Love of This Age; Happy Diary; House of Memory; My Tomb, Green; Lovers; Lonely and Faraway
Kim Hyesoon (b. 1955)
Kim Hyesoon joins Choi Seung-ja as one of Korea’s most imaginative and important living woman poets. In 1997, Kim became the first woman to receive Korea’s renowned Kim Su-yong Contemporary Poetry Award for her book Poor Love Machine (Bulssanghan sarang kigye), and in 2001 was also awarded the So-weol Poetry Award. Kim cites recognition of her work as a result of the gradual emergence of women’s poetry upon Korea’s literary scene, which she was also instrumental in bringing about. Among Korean contemporary women poets, Kim’s poetry is distinct for its experimental nature, which derives from her resistance to literary conventions and forms defined by men. She often subverts these constraints, and the highly structured Korean society they are an analog for, with a polyvocality and simultaneity of presenced women: as longtime translator Don Mee Choi writes, “She explores women’s multiple…existence[s] as grandmothers, mothers, daughters, and lovers.” Kim’s commitment, along with Choi Seung-ja, to establish a more fluid exchange between nature and women’s identities—particularly through the mediation of “the object of their bodies” (Don Mee Choi)—reflects an interest in the emancipatory potential of self-creation by reassembly, one that many migration poets would continue to take up.
Works include: From Another Star; Father’s Scarecrow; My Upanishad; Poor Love Machine; A Glass of Red Mirror; An Autobiography of Death
Contemporary Migrant Poets
Myung Mi Kim (b. 1952)
Born in Seoul, Myung Mi Kim immigrated to the United States at age nine and grew up with her family in the Midwest. As a poet engaging her craft in her second language (English), Kim employs a poetics characterized by linguistic fragmentation and careful use of negative space, which point to language’s various inadequacies to its subjects and objects—spaces of lack that presence conversations of dislocation, colonization, immigration, transculturation, and failures of history. Her own situatedness outside a language that was once an ‘inside’ drives her work to expose the blurred boundaries between the two, and depict an emerging self that continually comes up against and is conditioned by the hegemonic, patriarchal structures under which it functions—asking in this process of self-atomization whether accessing a pieceable self is in fact possible. Her works answer to this in their fracture-sensitive language, one punctuated by generative silences that prompt participatory rearrangement. That is to say, poetry, in Kim’s words, highlights the migrant sense of interregnum between cultures while also producing the “new ways of participating in perception, thinking, historical being and becoming” that such suspended experience of “mutability [and] undecidability” (Kim, as quoted in UWisconsin Press) demands.
Works include: Under Flag; The Bounty; Dura; Commons; River Antes; Penury
Cathy Park Hong (b. 1976)
Born in 1976 to a Korean family, Cathy Park Hong was raised in L.A. and eventually went on to earn her MFA at the Iowa Writers Workshop. Having engaged with poetry as well as prose reviews/writing on politics, and performances across various media; Park Hong pursues ways in her work of engendering new modalities for aesthetic engagement and political consciousness—especially in a world whose distinctions between art and structures of power grow ever more closely enmeshed. As such, her poetry is distinct for its visceral awareness and treading of dualities, including its own, that signal felt alienation from Western culture. Her poetics sits at the threshold between conceptualism and analysis, and experiments with language’s capacity for meaning-making under duress. To invest in these projects, she remarks, is to open up poetry’s “interactive possibilities” for fashioning “alternative ways of living within the existing real”—or, to return the possibility of reimagining the social, living art, and one’s existence as an instrument; all problems important to the migrant experience.
Works include: Translating Mo’um; Dance Dance Revolution; Engine Empire