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kevinhu's review against another edition
slow-paced
5.0
I appreciate bricolages of this sort that merges multiple forms of art, in the tradition of Dictee. And DMZ Colony is certainly a literary posterity of Dictee’s with its image pairings, codified employs of languages in order to speak into a liminal space between languages: Choi might call this translation which feels right, it’s a language of migration, language of the diaspora and diaspora progeny.
DMZ Colony uses intimate images — scribbled notes and drawings from interviews, photographs captured by the author’s father throughout South Korea’s lifetime under US occupation, post-Japanese colonization, and stills of her father’s memories (family, DMZ, etc) — paired with poems, reflections, anecdotes translated from archival diaries, survivors caught between the 38th parallel, the author’s documentation of her father. Each section is thoughtfully introduced with epigraphs translated to English from its original languages.
Choi starts where many diasporic people begin: at the question of transplantation. How did I get here? From the ontological place of migration and dislocation, she returns to South Korea to trace the root of her migration and her family’s separation. In translating Ahn Sop’s story of being accused as a communist sympathizer to hunger strikes and torture, she innovates language in form and syntax in order to forge a language that she considers anti-imperialist, anti-colonial: that language being translation. A language of resistance allowing the victims of empire self-determination over their own stories.
She reaches into the archives to translate juvenescent diary entries of innocence and morbidity written together on the page to create what she calls in her notes poetry if the unconscious. An incredible complement to what she seemed to already have written, a sort of poetry of the subconscious.
In much of this work, she attempts to reflect how colonization before and neo-colonization now is no different. Different style, same apparatus. And to show that the ideology of colonization is embedded into the very way we use language which she calls impellation or “hailing” (hey, you there!). Other might have called it deputization. By mixing languages, creating language in code, translating for self-determination, she is attempting to liberate language — to free, first, Koreans on separate sides of the 38th parallel, in the diaspora, and second, us across our own diasporas, from the ideology of empire in our language. A metamorphosis of the tongue for resistance.
DMZ Colony uses intimate images — scribbled notes and drawings from interviews, photographs captured by the author’s father throughout South Korea’s lifetime under US occupation, post-Japanese colonization, and stills of her father’s memories (family, DMZ, etc) — paired with poems, reflections, anecdotes translated from archival diaries, survivors caught between the 38th parallel, the author’s documentation of her father. Each section is thoughtfully introduced with epigraphs translated to English from its original languages.
Choi starts where many diasporic people begin: at the question of transplantation. How did I get here? From the ontological place of migration and dislocation, she returns to South Korea to trace the root of her migration and her family’s separation. In translating Ahn Sop’s story of being accused as a communist sympathizer to hunger strikes and torture, she innovates language in form and syntax in order to forge a language that she considers anti-imperialist, anti-colonial: that language being translation. A language of resistance allowing the victims of empire self-determination over their own stories.
She reaches into the archives to translate juvenescent diary entries of innocence and morbidity written together on the page to create what she calls in her notes poetry if the unconscious. An incredible complement to what she seemed to already have written, a sort of poetry of the subconscious.
In much of this work, she attempts to reflect how colonization before and neo-colonization now is no different. Different style, same apparatus. And to show that the ideology of colonization is embedded into the very way we use language which she calls impellation or “hailing” (hey, you there!). Other might have called it deputization. By mixing languages, creating language in code, translating for self-determination, she is attempting to liberate language — to free, first, Koreans on separate sides of the 38th parallel, in the diaspora, and second, us across our own diasporas, from the ideology of empire in our language. A metamorphosis of the tongue for resistance.
Content Warnings
Minor: War, Violence, Torture, and Colonisation
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