A performance by Don Mee Choi, one of the most influential anti-colonial poets and translators internationally, folding family and collective history, photography, drawings, gesture and sound into strategies of resistance. A refusal to be legible that demands to be read, a translation of the unspeakable that must be heard.

Overview

Freely Frayed is a new performance drawing from essays, poems and reflections written while Don Mee was composing her award winning KOR-US trilogy (DMZ Colony, Hardly War, Mirror Nation). Those poems are some of the most influential and profound works of anti-colonial poetry of the last decade. Together, they form a counter-narrative drawn from personal and collective history, her father’s photojournalism during the Korean war, the testimony of orphaned children, drawings, concrete poetry and images taken by her father. In philosophical and deeply personal ways, they work through translation, memory and return from the perspective of a twined self and the doubled language of a nation cut in half by US imperialism and the division of Korea.

In this performance, these strategies are folded together with music, gestures and drawing as a form of generating bodily marks, signs and writing.

Don Mee Choi’s urgent DMZ Colony captures the migratory latticework of those transformed by war and colonization. Homelands present and past share one sky where birds fly, but “during the Korean War cranes had no place to land.” Devastating and vigilant, this bricolage of survivor accounts, drawings, photographs, and hand-written texts unearth the truth between fact and the critical imagination. We are all ‘victims of History’ so Choi compels us to witness, and to resist.

Winner, National Book Award for Poetry, Judges’ Citation

Context

When reading Don Mee’s work, we think of Antonio Gramsci’s method for knowing yourself:  the “historical process to date has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.” Edward Said, writing on Gramsci, reminds us of the vital need to “compile such an inventory.” Don Mee’s poetry is just this: a documentary poetic inventory of the familial, personal, structural, linguistic, world historical traces that have been deposited in her and the Korean people by the neo-colonial rupturing of their homeland.

Where colonialism dismembers (physical and social bodies, histories) her writing embodies a mode of re-membering, assembling fractured and unspoken histories, mirrored selves, colonised language, and strategies of return. Surfacing the despair and grief buried by mistranslations and intentional absences, they refuse the denialism that enables the futuring of colonialism.

Don Mee started out as a translator, and has produced vital translations of Korean feminist poetry, especially Kim Hyesoon. In this work, and her own writing, she moves through a counter-colonial understanding of translation and of language as a gateway to power. Even our own native language is a map of conquered spaces, ideas, and concepts. “As a foreigner, as foreign words myself, I seek incomprehensibility — a mirror image of myself. I seek mirrors through which I can also traverse, in order to map out the neocolonial history of my home, to translate myself.”

Her writing returns to the same events from different angles and multiple perspectives to complexify the neo-colonial imposition of linear time or a memory culture in which only certain things can be mourned, and others must be forgotten.

Memory’s memory. Memory’s child. My memory lives inside my father’s camera, the site where my memory was born, where my retina and my father’s overlap.

I returned in the guise of a translator, which is to say, I returned as a foreigner

Language of return

I remain a daughter of neocolony

Planetary translation

History is ever arriving

— DMZ Colony (Wave Books, 2020)