How Don Mee Choi uses docupoetics to explore the Korean War and how it overshadowed South Korea’s own struggle with authoritarianism.
War is a paradox. It is incomprehensible, yet the little understanding the general public has of it is that it is the most disastrous and depraved of all human interactions. As civilians, we’ve adopted platitudes to placate pesky, nuanced inquiries: War is the worst thing. War takes place between two opposing parties. In war, everyone loses. What none of this “understanding” allows for is that war can overshadow other war. In DMZ Colony, Don Mee Choi uses a comprehensive mode of docupoetics to shed light on the horrors of South Korea’s struggle for democracy. The horrors that were ignored and overshadowed by the Korean War.
In DMZ Colony, Choi seizes upon a gap in common historical knowledge and fills it with black and white photographs, handwritten notes, sketches, collages, interviews, and poems. By radically embracing multimedia, readers leave the book with a charcoal outline of something that wasn’t there before.
High contrast black and white is essential to Choi’s approach to this project. The inky black pages interspersed throughout, the contrast of black text on white paper, the black and white photographs are all strong visual indicators of the dichotomies that Choi is announcing to us. We tend to see conflict in black and white: war/peace, left/right, winner/loser, good/evil, native-born/foreign invaders. Through her use of contrast, Choi brings our attention to the dichotomies that we never knew we held so close. The central relationship Choi is helping us interrogate is our conception of North Korea and South Korea as ‘bad’ Korea and ‘good’ Korea, respectively. She does this by digging deep into South Korea’s history, evoking yet another competing relationship between past and present.
In DMZ Colony, the first voice Choi centers is that of a North Korean sympathizer. We may briefly ask ourselves, “How could anyone sympathize with that regime?” but by the end of that question, we are already sympathizing with the sympathizer. The bolded, ellipses-heavy transcriptions of Choi’s interviews with Ahn Hak-sop use a halting voice that is a continuous reminder of the contrast between known and unknown, and how this dichotomy materializes in times of war. The captivity Ahn describes is full of dark recesses no light could ever reach; Choi strews us constantly between understanding and ignorance, numbness and pain, just as Ahn felt.
Another false dichotomy Choi makes us aware of is through a suite of poems in the voice of children in the section “The Orphans.” Through these ten poems, Choi first shocks us and then reminds us repeatedly that the lines between child and adult, innocent and guilty, civilian and soldier, and common-sense and madness are mirages we employ so that we may sleep at night.
While the majority of Choi’s own work in this book is spent staring into the mouth of hell, she uses the quotes of various artists and theorists to accompany and comfort us along the way. Her extensive use of epigraphs and notes demonstrates a level of care for the reader’s well-being; she does not simply drop this information on us and turn her back, but stays around to answer questions and finish the conversation with the reader. In DMZ Colony, Choi has created a multifaceted entity that is capable of both teaching and listening, an immense achievement.
Image courtesy of donmeechoi.com.