Another Mode of Writing — Don Mee Choi in Conversation

In this first exclusive extract from Wasafiri 121, author Sohini Basak interviews Korean-American poet and translator, Don Mee Choi. Speaking ahead of the UK/EU release of her book, Mirror Nation, Choi discusses the use of visuals in her poetry, the influence of her father's war photography, and overlaps between writing and translating.

You can download this full piece for free during the month of March, or read it in the print issue of Wasafiri 121, which is now available to preorder.

To read the work of Don Mee Choi is to readjust our vision — not only of the modern world at war and violence sustained at borders, but also of how war and borders shape our language and percolate into the art that we see. Her poetry is one that will not be confined within the margins of a book, but spill into drawings, photographs, videos, and passports. In fact, to really read Don Mee Choi, you’d have to look closely at marginalia – epigraphs, end notes, acknowledgements, her translator’s diaries – all of which provide vital information about the poet’s family, literary influences, background, and dream diaries, without which the reading of her work is incomplete. It is rare to see the different facets of a writer’s life interact so vividly as they do for Don Mee Choi; to read her works as a poet is to also understand her craft as a literary translator, especially of Kim Hyesoon’s poetry (for which they together received the International Griffin Poetry Prize in 2019), as well as her training as a visual artist. No wonder, then, that she is a recipient of fellowships from the MacArthur, Guggenheim, Lannan, and Whiting Foundations, as well as the DAAD [Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst] Artists-in-Berlin Programme.

Sohini Basak I wanted to start our conversation with the photographs you use in your work, especially those taken by your father during the time he spent in the war zones of North and South Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. In your latest book of poetry, Mirror Nation, the photographs form a very important narrative device. When and how did you know that your poetry would be more than text on the page?

Don Mee Choi I knew when I started working on Hardly War, the first book in the KOR–US trilogy. The trigger for Hardly War was a concert, Songs of Wars I Have Seen, which I saw in Seattle in 2010. The music was composed by Heiner Goebbels, and he incorporated text from Gertrude Stein’s memoir Wars I Have Seen (1945). I was entranced by the music as well as Stein’s words, and it was then that I knew what I really needed to work on — books about all the wars my father had photographed and filmed. I’m embarrassed to say that it took me nearly half my life to understand that my father’s photographs – the ones I grew up seeing – were not family photographs, but war photographs. It’s mysterious how this realisation – this needle – finally reached me and pricked me. I also became aware then that photography was my father’s language. I grew up with it, so it felt totally natural to ‘speak’ it in my poetry. This is how I came to open Hardly War with my father’s self-timed photograph from November 1950 of him standing on Taedong Bridge in North Korea with two of his colleagues at the beginning of the Korean War (1950–1953). The ‘Little Glossary’ below the photograph not only signals a glossary of translingual punning, but also signals a glossary of images to come.

I wove more photographs into Mirror Nation because I envisioned it as a film. In the middle of the book, I used several film stills from my father’s news footage of the Gwangju Uprising in May 1980. I juxtaposed the images of military violence with the film stills of students singing and protesting in downtown Seoul. My father had filmed the protests before he went to Gwangju. I wanted these images to unfold without any accompanying text. At the end of the book, I used stills from my own 16 mm film, made as an art student long ago. Other photographs in the book are set up in threes: I followed W G Sebald’s arrangement of photos in threes in Vertigo, especially the triad of Giotto’s lamenting angels. It pierced me, and I couldn’t recover from it. I understood the triad as a syntax for the language of grief.

SB This reminds me of Susan Sontag’s passages on the use of war photographs and grief in her book Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), where she brings up W G Sebald, and writes: ‘Sebald was not just an elegist, he was a militant elegist. Remembering, he wanted the reader to remember, too.…Narratives can make us understand. Photographs do something else: they haunt us.’ Going back to what you’ve just said, and also connecting it with the idea of collective memory (something that Sontag also talks about in her book), could you tell us about your initial feelings or the initial experiences you had when you went back to South Korea in December 2016, after the publication of Hardly War? You had seen the photographs and films from your father, and you had read their histories, but you were now meeting the survivors of the war, including political prisoners in the DMZ Colony. Were the seeds of what would become DMZ Colony and Mirror Nation in your mind already there, or did the trips back to Korea and your interactions there change the route of your poetics?

DMC Sebald haunts us with his hauntings, in all the ways he traces the memories of others and his own memory, and how they make up his inimitable art. This art of his circumvents the usual trappings of collective memory noted by Sontag: ‘this is important, and this is the story about how it happened’. I think what Sebald generates are what Roland Barthes refers to as ‘punctum’, the ‘sensitive points’, in Camera Lucida. I worked on Mirror Nation under the influence of Sebald’s art.

When I visited Seoul in 2016, my plan was to meet with Dr Ahn-Kim Jeong-Ae, who was a lead researcher in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Korea, and also to visit the archives of the Gwangju Uprising. I only had a vague idea about what the book after Hardly War would be. I thought at first that I would focus on the Gwangju Uprising. My meeting with the former political prisoner, Mr Ahn Hak-sŏp, wasn’t planned at all. It only happened after I mentioned to an artist friend that I wanted to visit the archives in Gwangju, who then suggested that I should meet Mr Ahn. My friend came to know Mr Ahn through her father, a doctor who, during the war, provided medical care to anyone in need, regardless of politics. Because he was non-discriminatory, he was suspected of being a North Korean sympathiser. He was under constant surveillance and imprisoned often. I had no idea what Dr Ahn-Kim would share with me, but the investigative research she conducted took me back to the division of Korea and war crimes. Dehumanisation is what makes massacres and acts of torture possible. I had to think about what to do with suppressed memory in poetry. How to return to it? How to create ‘sensitive points’ of memory? One simple and concrete thing that ended up shaping my writing in DMZ Colony was a lined notebook I used when I met with Mr Ahn. I found myself using the same notebook two years later when I was in Marfa, Texas, while I was trying to figure out how to write about the survivors of a massacre.

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Image credit: Mirror Nation. Copyright 2024 by Don Mee Choi. Published by Wave Books. Used with permission.