At a reading Myung
Mi Kim gave on November 2, 2001 at SUNY-Buffalo, a member of the audience
asked a question about the connection between Kim's ethnic background
and her poetry in words to this effect: Given your visible Otherness,
are you trying to reclaim your Koreanness, or to dwell in English? Kim
replied that her poetry was about the impossibility of either. This
essay explores the possibilities that are opened up for Kim's poetry
as a result of this impossible position of either reclaiming a seemingly
stable ethnic identity, or seeking to be at home in the dominant language.
For Kim, an oppositional position constricted by an "either-or
proposition" is incapable of addressing the complexity in the process
of bringing social, political, and aesthetic change. The fact that "we're
each implicated in a machinery that works to maintain the loci of power,"
Kim notes, makes it even more necessary "to pose how we might participate
in inventing how 'change' takes place." As a poet seeking to be
a shaping force in the way change takes place, Kim believes that "Poetry
is simply how you participate in language [. . .]" (Morrison 75,
77). Language in Kim's poems is a site for destabilizing ethnic and
national identities, for interrogating power relations, and for articulating
an irreducible alterity that resists assimilation. "It's the locating
of one's own condition by agency of a text," says Kim in an interview,
"that is so profound" (Morrison 81).
In her poems about
the Korean immigrant experience collected in her first volume, Under
Flag (1991), Kim investigates the diasporic subjects' relationship
to language, history, and U.S. citizenship. She interrogates the encounters
between cultures and languages, including the ways in which language
reproduces or unsettles power relations. Her rendering of English with
foreign accents dislodges binary constructs of cultural and national
identities which assume essence, fixity, and hierarchy. Interweaving
her investigation of language with an exploration of collective memory
and history, Kim examines what she refers to as "the questions
of translation between cultures and languages and in particular the
kinds of resemblances and contaminations that inform how language(s)
systematize and engender notions of power" (Lee 94). She employs
what might be called a language of diaspora, whose other-sounding music
transforms the prosodic structure of traditional English lyric, making
the English language "shift," putting it "to flight,"
to borrow Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet's terms and concept (58).
In their discussion of marginalized and subjugated people's relationship
to the English language, Deleuze and Parnet note that it is precisely
by being "a hegemonic, imperialistic language [. . .]" that
English "is all the more vulnerable to the subterranean workings
of languages and dialects which undermine it from all sides and impose
on it a play of vast corruptions and variations." This subversive
and creative "shift" in a hegemonic language, they contend,
also characterizes official American English: "The American language
bases its despotic official pretensions, its majoritarian claim to hegemony,
only on its extraordinary capacity for being twisted and shattered and
for secretly putting itself in the service of minorities who work it
from inside, [. . .] nibbling away at that hegemony as it extends itself
[. . .]" (58). To corrupt the hegemonic language from within is
precisely Kim's strategy.
In fact, Kim materializes
immigrants' experience of disjunctive time in terms of "speed,
"duration," and "music" in the English language
inflected with "foreign" accents. In the opening poem of Under
Flag "And Sing We," Kim uses displaced English words to
enact Korean immigrants' fragmentary memories of home, including the
"Um-pah, um-pah sensibility of the first grade teacher" and
the sound from "feet firm on the pump organ's pedals," pumping
water into rice fields (14). At the same time, she explores the possibilities
of what Deleuze and Félix Guattari call "the deterritorialization
of language," opposing "a purely intensive usage of language
to all symbolic or even significant or simply signifying usage of it"(Kafka
18,19). By making such intensive use of both English and Korean,
Kim is able to oppose the "oppressive quality" of either language
and to arrive at the kind of "perfect and unformed expression,
a material intense expression" which Deleuze and Guattari refer
to when speaking of the deterritorialization of Yiddish and German in
Kafka's writings (Kafka 27, 25, 19). Kim's use of language as
such articulates the immigrants' memory of home and sense of dislocation
in a land where they can no longer trace their ancestry. As she invents
a new prosody in English to render the experience of diaspora visceral
through verbal sound not identifiable with any single system of language,
Kim allows immigrants to confront their feelings of exile and the process
of their becoming. Indeed, Kim employs what Deleuze and Guartari might
call "deterritorialized sounds" (Kafka 26) to destabilize
national and cultural identities:
Once we leave a place is it there
Prattle (heard, found, made) in kitchen
No longer clinking against the sides of the pot set to boil
Prattle displaced. Guard birds
That should have been near, all along
Prattle done trattle gone just how far
Do voices carry
What we might have explored, already discovered
Falling down falling down
Callback fallback whip whippoorwill
Not the one song to rivet us trundle rondo
Not a singular song trundle rondo
What once came to us whole
In this we are again about to do
In the times it take to dead dead dead la la la
Trundle rondo for a long time it stood marker and marked
Mostly, we cross bridges we did not see being built (Under Flag
14 -15)
With what used
to be familiar noises of prattle in the kitchen displaced, "we"
find the songs we hear no longer identifiable with a common ancestry
or language, as we realize we are not the pioneers in the land where
we live now. The singing of London Bridge (or perhaps some other structure)
"falling down falling down" is interrupted by a different
song with a disparate rhythm and cadence: "Callback fallback whip
whippoorwill." Both are intersected by yet another song of a different
music, "trundle rondo." This singular music "trundle
rondo" has become part of a heterogeneous assemblage of songs,
in which each maintains its distinctiveness. These songs are markers
of time, diaspora, and duration of memories, not traceable to a single
source of nation or ethnicity. As immigrants' cultural identities lose
their traceable origins in a land where they can claim no "natural"
bond through lineage, their otherness contaminates the dominant language
and disturbs the cultural homogeneity of the U.S. nation-space. Refusing
to be defined as the opposite of the norm by Orientalist discourse,
or reduced to the Same by assimilationist ideology, the alterity of
diaspora subjects in Kim's poems at once resists and intervenes in the
dominant culture even as immigrants themselves are being transformed
in the process of becoming.
Kim's poems also
break away from linear, chronological time in expressing immigrants'
experience of dislocation and becoming with regards to collective and
individual identities. In her collage composition, time as duration
of articulation and memory is intersected by national history and the
history of colonialism and imperialism. Kim interweaves markings of
time as geographical and cultural displacements through polyphonic articulation
that resists any "regularizing, maintainable 'pattern', "
to borrow Kim's own words ( "Anacrusis" par. 2). Like the
other-sounding English, the multidimensional time and disjunctive simultaneity
in Kim's poetry open up the textual space not simply to the social,
historical, and political, but also to the unutterable, the silenced
and erased. In "Food, Shelter, Clothing," the speaking voices
follow the trajectory of refugees' and immigrants' diaspora, while shifting
from one historical moment to another. Using blank spaces on the page
and fragmentary utterances, Kim creates a sense of disruption, isolation,
and exile, which is intertwined with Korean history, including the Korean
War, the Japanese invasion, and Korean resistance. This method enables
Kim to bring into her poem a remarkable range of geographical locations
and historical moments as well. Take for example, the arrangement of
these lines on one page, and their juxtaposition with the lines on the
opposite page:
They had oared
to cross the ocean
And where had they come to
These bearers of a homeland (Under Flag 22)
Leaving the rest
of the page blank, Kim uses incomplete sentences on the opposite page
to evoke two historical events-the landing of the amphibious tanks of
U.S. military in South Korea on September 28, 1950 at the "same
spot" where Japanese invading armies had landed before. The arrival
of the U.S. amphibious tanks marks the beginning of the Korean War and
an unequal relationship between U.S. and South Korea; the landing of
the Japanese invading armies in Korea led to the brutal colonization
of Korea by Japan from 1910 to 1945. Although the U.S. military presence
in Korea was motivated by purposes vastly different from those of the
Japanese military campaigns, it also brought massive destruction and
countless deaths to Korea:
Those landing
amphibious (under cover of night)
In a gangplank
thud and amplification take
Spot of ground.
Fended it might remain
Republic and
anthem, spot and same spot
How little
space they take up given the land's reach
All those
whose feet had resounded
Smear fear
tyranny of attack
Already the
villages already the cities receding (Under Flag 23)
Taking "flight"
in her use of language that breaks open the poetic form produced and
maintained by prosodic structure or syntactical closure, or by sequential
development of argument, Kim is able to incorporate into the poem through
a few fragmentary lines the aftermaths of both the Japanese invasion
and the Korean war, as well as Koreans' struggle for freedom and democracy:
A face hauled
away and a small flag of the country nearby
They were
stripped
They were
made to roll in one direction then the other
If they didn't
do it right, they were kicked
An ambulance on which the words "blood bank car"
Had been written
in blood (Under Flag 24)
Shifting from
the geographical locations of Korean history from Korea to indeterminate
time-spaces of Korean immigrants' experience of diaspora, Kim's use
of language becomes further "deterritorialized," breaking
further away from metaphoric or symbolic signification. Her lines become
more fragmented as the utterances resist centrality of the self and
the privilege of the lyric I/eye:
"In my country" preface to the immigrant's fallow
Field my country ash in water follow
Descent slur vowel
Stricken buoys
Span no tongue and mouth
Scripting, hand flat against the mouth (Under Flag 26)
With these departures
in her use of language and form, Kim is able to investigate "what
it means to find a connection between poetry and the world," as
she says in an interview with Yedda Morrison (Morrison 77). Finding
this connection, for Kim, means not simply a matter of what to tell
but how to tell in her poetry. "Part of the meaning of being a
historical subject," Kim says, "is to engage in how to tell.
[. . .] How to refigure and reinvent and reoccupy the manner of telling"
(Morrison 80).
The last two pages
of this poem illustrate well the ways in which Kim refigures, reinvents,
and reoccupies the manner of telling Korean diaspora through radically
fragmented utterances:
Up against bounty and figured human
allaying surge
neighboring
Geographical trodden shelter
Locate deciphering
by force
As contour
Hurls
ga ga ga ga (Under Flag 27)
* * * *
Will be plain foil credo
Figures pervious arboretum
ave mella ferro (Under Flag 28)
These scattered
words and phrases, and the visual and aural effects they create translate
the seemingly untranslatable experiences of violence and destruction,
separation and loss, endurance and hope. Kim's use of language in such
a way so as to foreground the sound patterns of words is similar to
what Deleuze and Guattari call "pull[ing] from the language tonalities
lacking in signification," thus "open[ning] the word onto
unexpected internal intensities [. . .]"(Kafka 22). Paradoxically,
these internal intensities of the word in Kim's poem are brought out
by her engagement with historical events of war, colonization, and diaspora,
which are external, though not unconnected, to language and poetry.
It is precisely through her engagement with the world and historical
moments by pushing the limits or extremities of language that Kim finds
new creative possibilities for articulating what seems impossible to
articulate.
Speaking of the
writings by Paul Celan and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Kim notes that the
space where the "collaboration between the impossibility of utterance
and finding the means by which to utter" is in "constant motion,
and constant reshaping of itself" (Morrison 81-82). She adds, "any
poem is always on the cusp of coming into legibility-formally, psychically,
politically. For me those works that keep re-invigorating that space
of silence and erasure, the space of the seemingly untranslatable, are
the ones in which you connect to a source of endurance and power"
(Morrison 82). The empty spaces left on the page, and the spaces among
words, sentences, and images in this and other poems by Kim are spaces
which articulate silence and erasure resulting from massacre-"An
ambulance on which the words 'blood bank car' / Had been written in
blood"- and from oppression by patriarchy and colonization-"She
could not talk without first looking at others' mouths (which language?)
/ (pushed into ) crevice a bluegill might lodge in" (Under Flag
24, 21). These spaces also mark the process in which this poem, "Food,
Shelter, Clothing," is coming into legibility, moving from one
fragmented image to another, from interrupted utterances to silence,
from silence to utterances, as fragmentary evocations of home and national
history give way to experiences of exile and diaspora. By re-invigorating
those spaces, Kim connects to "a source of endurance and power"
such as that found in the writings of Celan, Cha, Kafka, and Beckett,
as well as in the collective memory of Koreans' resistance to Japanese
invasion and colonization: "These men these women are throwing
stones / These men these women chant and chant" (Under Flag
25).
In her other poems
collected in Under Flag such as "Body As One As History,"
"Demarcation," "These Fishing," and "From The
Sea On To the Land," cadences of deterritorialized words and deformations
of sentences engage with historical moments of violence, destruction,
and mass migration. Lyric utterances in these poems are intertwined
with experiences of diaspora and moments in Korean history. Kim's disjunctive
poetics denaturalizes national and ethnic identities, particularly Asian
Americans' essentialized bodily and cultural differences which were
used to justify their prohibition by law from becoming naturalized U.S.
citizens. In another poem, "Into Such Assembly," for example,
Kim employs collage juxtaposition to expose the contradictions in the
process of being "naturalized" as a U.S. citizen, and to articulate
an alternative concept of belonging, which does not seek to erase difference
or reduce otherness. While relating the acquisition and usage of English
to state power in the process of assimilating the "Other,"
the first part of the poem simultaneously enacts and undermines the
official procedure of naturalizing aliens:
Can you read and write English? Yes______. No______.
Write down the following sentences in English as I dictate them.
There is a dog in the road.
It is raining.
Do you renounce allegiance to any other country but this?
[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .] (Under Flag 29)
In juxtaposition to this process of naturalization, Kim introduces a
passage of apparently Korean immigrants' nostalgic memories of home,
including a line of Korean song in Korean.
Cable car rides over swan flecked ponds
Red lacquer chests in our slateblue house
Chrysanthemums trailing bloom after bloom
Ivory, russet, pale yellow petals crushed
Between fingers the green smell, if jade would smell
[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .]
The other, the pine wet green side of the mountain
Hides a lush clearing where we picnic and sing:
Sunn-Bul-Sah, geep eun bahm ae (Under Flag 29).
However, the images
of this home seem to be a typical Orientalist depiction of the East
frozen in time and space. The line from the Korean song-Sunn-Bul-Sah,
geep eun bahm ae (Deep into the night at the Temple of Becoming
the Buddha)-highlights this romanticized description of Korea isolated
from history. In contrast to this Orientalist construct of Korea, Kim's
references to Korea's colonization by Japan and to U.S. military and
political interventions in Korea, as well as Korean citizens' protests
against Japanese colonialism and American imperialism in the proceeding
poems, particularly the title poem, "Under Flag," indicate
the impossibility for Korean immigrants to claim a stable, singular
identity of nation or culture. Kim foregrounds the ambivalence of Korean
immigrants' national and cultural identities in the provocative ending
lines of the first part of this poem:
Neither, neither
Who is mother tongue, who is father country? (Under Flag
29)
The double negative
and the questions refuse the binarized choice of either this or that
category of national or cultural identification.
In the second part
of this poem, Kim shows that a binary, hierarchical scheme of identity
construct of the American self and the Oriental Other is formulated
and maintained in terms of geographical locations. Using collage to
juxtapose different voices, Kim at once reveals and subverts such reductive
binary identity constructions:
Do they have
trees in Korea? Do the children eat out of garbage cans?
We had a dalmation
We rode the train on weekends from Seoul to So-Sah where we grew
grapes
We ate on
the patio surrounded by dahlias
Over there,
ass is cheap-those girls live to make you happy
Over there,
we had a slateblue house with a flat roof where
I made many snowmen, over there (Under Flag 30)
The emphasis on
geographical locations for defining ethnic and national identities in
these lines evokes the question raised in the opening poem of Under
Flag, "And Sing We": "Once we leave a place is it
there" (14). While the dialogically juxtaposed questions and statements
suggest a mode of identity construction out of historical contexts,
but contained in an ethnically designated space fixed by geographical
boundaries. Kim challenges such spatially bounded and dichotomized identities
by introducing a passage of instructions for how to pronounce certain
English words: "No, 'th', 'th', put your tongue against the roof
of your mouth, [. . .] that's better" (Under Flag 30). This
passage reveals a power relation and identity reconstruction embedded
in the immigrants' relationship to the English language, indicating
a process of Korean immigrants' identity transformation in part through
learning a new language, a process which destabilizes spatially defined
identities of nation or culture.
Further exploring
Korean immigrants' experience of exile, dislocation, and becoming otherwise
than what they used to be or are supposed to be, Kim raises questions
about immigrants' relationships to mother tongue and dominant language.
As the speaker asks in the closing lines of Part Two of "Into Such
Assembly" :
And with distance
traveled, as part of it
How often when it rains here does it rain there?
One gives over to a language and then
What was given, given over? (Under Flag 30)
These questions
are central to Kim's exploration of the relations between diaspora and
national, cultural identities. Rather than offering any direct answers
to the questions, Kim moves beyond Korean immigrants' experience to
suggest an alternative view of who "we" are as historical
subjects in Part Three of this poem.
Evoking the indiscriminate
nature of the rain, Kim articulates an inclusive vision of "our"
identity that encompasses all of us across ethnic, national, and geographical
boundaries:
This rain eats into most anything
And when we had been scattered over the face of earth
We could not speak to one another
The creak rises, the rain-fed current rises
Color given up, sap given up
Weeds branches groves what they make as one
[. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .]
What gives way losing gulch, mesa, peak, state, nation
Land, ocean dissolving
The continent and the peninsula, the peninsula and the continent
Of one piece sweeping
One table laden with one crumb
Every mouthful off a spoon whole
Each drop strewn into such assembly (Under Flag 31)
This "assembly"
of us-all of us from all corners of the world-undermines the insistence
on a monolingual, uniform ethnic or national identity, and subverts
the hierarchical binary constructs of "us" over here and "them"
over there, as alluded to in the first two parts of the poem. In this
assembly there is no hierarchy of race, culture, or nationality, no
preordained binary social order, no established center to which the
new, the different must conform. Indeed, this assembly consists of what
Deleuze might call "differences within multiplicities," which
"replace schematic and crude oppositions" (Difference
182). It is an assembly constituted by "an internal multiplicity"
which is "non-localisable," thus having an "indetermination
[that] renders possible the manifestation of difference freed from all
subordination" (Difference 183). As the title "Into
Such Assembly" suggests, Kim's poems of diaspora call into question
naturalized singular, homogeneous, or hierarchical national and cultural
identities, which are often maintained by binary categorizations of
peoples and cultures.
Asserting an unassimilable
otherness that suggests "an internal multiplicity," Kim's
poetry disrupts binary relations between majority and minority cultures.
In doing so, her poetry carries out the task David Palumbo-Liu proposes
for minority discourse: "It is a specific task for minority discourse
to ascertain the interpenetration of minor and dominant cultures, and
to see that reconfiguration as a site of a politicized aesthetics"
(202). Keenly aware of the agency of her poetics as a site of politicized
aesthetics, Kim regards her writing of poems as a way of interrogating
"questions of national narratives, transcultural narratives, narratives
of cultural and political diaspora, and concepts or perhaps more accurately,
hybridizations of human community" (Morrison 84). Speaking as the
other in the U.S. nation-space, bringing into English and American poetry
an irreducible difference, Myung Mi Kim, like other minority American
poets, is transforming the once Eurocentric American poetry, while inscribing
histories of other times and places across national borders. The hybrid
music of Kim's poetry is the sound of history. As those lines from the
opening poem of Under Flag state: "What sound do we make,
"n", "h", "g" / Speak and it is sound
in time" (13). The "sound in time" in Kim's poetry is
duration of memory, of history, and of the process of becoming, materialized
in contaminated English.