“While I was growing up in Hong Kong,” writes poet Don Mee Choi in her collection Hardly War, “I saw more of my father’s photographs than of my father because he was always away in various war zones.” This line is central to reading both the rest of this book and Choi’s entire KOR-US trilogy of poetry books: Her selfhood, coming-of-age, and, later, her compulsion to catalogue all directly emerge from her father’s war photography. Her father—who stands in for Korea and for her first home—documented with a sense of compulsion, leaving behind his family in Korea, so as to document US imperial violence in Southeast Asia. So, too, must Choi now perpetually be banished into documentation; she, too, must devote her life in service of deconstructing the US imperial project. Without this impulse, Choi’s self, as she understands it, ceases to exist. “What I am attempting to do with my poems and my father’s photographs is what I used to do as a child when I stared at my father’s photographs and maps. … I am trying to fold race into geopolitics and geopolitics into poetry.”
Thus, by combining photography, type, handwriting, drawing, and collage, Choi is attempting to take impossible relationships and make them coherent. To do so, she herself becomes the mediating object: a child shaped by Korea and Germany and the US, a woman who came of age in relation to three nation-states, these nation-states cannot be reconciled without her poetic impulse. Otherwise, they are just disparate theaters of war.
Moreover, although Choi’s KOR-US trilogy is focused on incoherence and disruption, it also seeks to make visible the path to this disruption. For Choi, disruption is necessary to understand the ways we navigate to the past and future from a moment in time. Photography and text are, for Choi, the two mirror forms of language through which to mediate the self in the world: Without either, Choi cannot make coherent language, nation, parents, or self. This perpetual formal disruption—of text by photograph, of photograph by text—is how Choi narrativizes the interconnected global theaters of war that exist as a direct result of American imperialism abroad. Thus, the American imperial project is ever haunting, and drives Choi forward perpetually, forcing her into an unstoppable momentum.
Choi grew up after the Korean War had ended. Still, her life—like that of so many Koreans—was shaped by the demilitarized zone in the war’s aftermath, as well as by the US neocolonial presence in the Korean Peninsula. What captivates the speaker, however, is not maternal silence; instead, it is the paternal voice, channeled through the camera. The camera, and thereby the photograph, stands in for the nation of Korea; the text, meanwhile, stands in for Choi herself and for the US, her foreignness spliced together with the nation to make coherent a dual unbelonging. Just as her father bore witness to Vietnam, Choi too must bear witness to Korea, not letting it fade into memory, reminding us that the horrors of war continue, for those affected directly by war, into the present day.
In Choi’s work, war is no longer an event of the past, rendered into photograph. Instead, war is an affect of haunting that is constructed over time, understood through the relationships between nations, between language, between media.
Asking what it means to live a life where war haunts everything, Choi’s trilogy answers her question by using both literary rupture and formal rupture. While literary rupture takes the form of epigraphs from other writers and theorists, Choi’s formal rupture uses photography, drawing, and collage. These varied mediums are utilized by Choi throughout the trilogy, so as to understand the geopolitical violence of war that has shaped her life. Against and with the historical context of Asian American docupoetry of war, this aesthetics of incoherence Choi employs allows her to dissect the myth of the nation-state and the ensuing fracture to her selfhood as a diasporic person, shaped by her many exiles.
These formal fractures of the text mirror Choi’s own exiles—from nation, from parent, from form itself. And, in reenacting these fragmentations, Choi can begin to slowly recognize her self in exile.
Choi quotes Barthes among the epigraphs of Hardly War, the first book in the KOR-US trilogy: “The Photograph then becomes a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination: false on the level of perception, true on the level of time: a temporal hallucination, so to speak, a modest, shared hallucination (on the one hand ‘it is not there,’ on the other ‘but it has indeed been’): a mad image, chafed by reality.” Engaging here with perhaps the most famous theoretical work on photography, Choi demonstrates the goal of her project as a whole: to engage with the relationship between photography and reality in relation to war—to create, for her readers, a temporal hallucination that mirrors her own experiences and silences of war. In the incoherence of Choi’s textual work here, she creates her own hallucinatory experience of war for her captive audience. Sontag writes of the photograph, too, in On Photography: “Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible, of making it stand still. Or they enlarge a reality that is felt to be shrunk, hollowed out, perishable, remote.” These two ideas together largely form the framing principles of Hardly War (and more broadly, of the entire KOR-US trilogy): photographs both are hallucinatory and reality, and therefore the only way to read war is both as reality and hallucination.
“The Photograph … represents that very subtle moment when … I am neither subject nor object,” writes Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida, “but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro version of death (of parenthesis): I am truly becoming a specter.” Choi’s work is explicitly in conversation with Barthes, and Camera Lucida in particular. And, indeed, all her poetic techniques are striving to make coherent the many versions of herself who “experience a micro version of death” in each of her exiles.
In the poem “Suicide Parade,” Choi most explicitly examines the father-daughter relationship at the heart of this collection and at the heart of her poetic-photographic project as a whole. In this poem, Choi examines, through linguistic close reading and etymological deconstruction, weapons of war used by the US in the Korean War. The poem opens with the line “Father—Cyanide=” and ends with the line “Daughter—Cyanide=.” On the following page, in the mirror, is a photo broken by white space periodically (at intervals that are not uniform). The right side documents men who are clearly from the US military; the left features two Korean children, who are in turn holding babies. Published in poetry books by a press that notably publishes poetry, we can read the text and image as both part of one poem, “Suicide Parade,” though they are two distinct sections. Read collectively, the poem, with its deconstruction of napalm, removes the violence of biological warfare from abstraction into lived reality. While the American soldiers smoke cigarettes, children carry children. War is a lived reality—the absence of Korean adults in the frame of the image Choi pairs this text with allows us to read the very real questions of orphanhood and loss that haunt Korea in the aftermath of war.
The splitting into pieces of the photo also is significant in how Choi writes the relationship between Korea and the US, mediated for her by her father’s photographs of war. While language for Choi stands in for herself and the US, the photograph represents Korea and her father. Only in the splicing together of image and text can the Korean War and the exiles Choi thereby suffers be understood. Barthes writes in Camera Lucida: “History is hysterical: it is constituted only if we consider it, only if we look at it—and in order to look at it, we must be excluded from it.” Here, we see this principle of photography at work in Choi’s project. Neither Choi nor her father are present, not literally, not symbolically. Unlike many other images in this text, there is no presence of language. There are no letters of the alphabet, there are no words in the image itself; through this exclusion we understand that Choi and her father are on the outside—they can bear witness because, as Barthes notes, they are excluded. The narrative of this historical trauma excludes by necessity Choi’s father, because he is the photographer, and excludes Choi herself, geographically exiled from this landscape and its histories.
In the poem “Operation Punctum,” again a prose poem, Choi once again engages directly with Barthes and his work on photography, reminding us to even read these prose poems through the language of photography. Photography through her father’s documentation of war zones is the first language Choi has to understand the world around her, and it ultimately shapes everything from that point forward. Even English for Choi is mediated through photography. “I sing in English while my father is in Vietnam,” writes Choi. Here, Choi makes a false equivalence that is particularly noteworthy. While her father is framed by spatial location, she herself is framed by utterance, by language, but through positioning them as clauses in this way, she makes them related, equal. Language and space, through this false equivalence, become one for Choi. In the same poem, Choi writes, “My father is nowhere to be seen because he’s behind the camera, behind the lens.” She continues, later: “He’s still nowhere to be seen. Missing in action somewhere in Cambodia, filming carpet bombing, my mother said.”
In these lines, Choi most explicitly engages with her father’s role as a war photographer—the phrase “missing in action” most notably is the only direct phrasing that acknowledges the very real impacts of his job as a war photographer. Sontag writes in On Photography: “A photograph is both a pseudo presence and a token of absence.” His relationship to war is also directly referenced by her to be explicitly about Southeast Asia—violence in Asia mediated by US empire is all interconnected, as Choi’s poetic project repeatedly highlights. To write about US imperialism in one geography is to write about US imperialism in all geographies.
Asking what it means to live a life where war haunts everything, Choi’s trilogy answers her question by using both literary rupture and formal rupture.
DMZ Colony continues Choi’s poetic project of examining US empire in Asia in this formally inventive style that melds image and text together in a collagistic form to make meaning in exile. In comparison to Hardly War, DMZ Colony is more imagistically inventive, not just moving between photograph and poem but moving more fluidly between handwritten letters, drawings, and photographs. Here, image and text acquire a clearer middle ground, speaking to how Choi writes the maturation of the speaker in relation to the fractures and exiles war creates. Choi’s work, in many ways, through its mixed-media form, might even be read as a coming-of-age narrative tracking how this speaker understands and writes war.
The second section of the collection, titled “Wings of Return,” returns to Choi’s “creation myths”; she opens with a photograph taken by neither her father nor herself. In the notes, Choi highlights the history of how this photograph comes to be in the book—a photo of the dictator who took over the government in the 1961 coup, and it is, notably, a photo in which Choi’s father himself appears. That the first photo of DMZ Colony features her father, even if not as the centerpiece of the image, is central to understanding how DMZ Colony builds on Hardly War. Here, Choi’s father moves from being absent to present—just like the photograph, Choi’s father is marked now by both absence and presence. As Sontag says of the photograph, here, the father becomes photograph-like, the mirror of Choi’s reality, the lens through which she sees the world. In the prose narrativizing the photo on the right-hand side, Choi writes a prose poem that takes a historical voice for the first half, and then moves into a lyrical examination of memory. Here, Choi first outlines the environment of General Park Chung-Hee’s military coup, and then writes: “Because I was an infant, I have no memory of this infamous day except through my father’s memory. … My memory lives inside my father’s camera, the site where my memory was born, where my retina and my father’s overlap.” Here Choi returns us to the first project of Hardly War—to examine this interconnectedness of father and daughter. The nation of Korea becomes represented by her father, his memory, and she herself, in exile, can be read as the United States.
Situating the historical and political contexts of her return to Korea in the third section, “Planetary Translation,” Choi highlights a meeting with someone she knew through her work with the International Women’s Network Against Militarism, writing, “She jotted down on scratch paper names and places and mapped out for me unspeakable acts of torture and atrocities.” Here, the act of conveying information, of conversation, takes on an artistic dimension in putting these aftereffects of war onto an everyday means of artistic expression. On the next two pages, Choi includes tracings she did of the drawings—this tracing carries with it the haunting undercurrents of Choi’s project—as she seeks the photograph (the nation), but can only find representations; none of the photographs yet have given her what she is seeking, a kind of belonging that she knows is impossible due to her exile. These drawings are largely incoherent, scribbles and circles on paper, but they remind us yet again that the center of Choi’s project as she began it, with Hardly War, lies in making meaning out of incoherence. Incoherence becomes the most productive way to make sense of the fractures of war, the fractures of nation. History and exile are both incoherent, and therefore the only way Choi can make meaning of either is again through incoherence.
In the sixth section of the book, titled “Interpellation of Return,” Choi utilizes photos again, this time juxtaposed against handwritten pages. Choi opens with, after the epigraph, a set of pages with text handwritten in Korean, visibly from a notebook. Here, Choi includes no contextualizing information for an audience who cannot read Korean—only on the next pages do we receive Choi’s narrativization of these accounts and of this writing. Choi outlines that these pages are from accounts of the Sancheong-Hamyang massacre—the same massacre from which Choi translates the narratives of the eight surviving orphaned girls. Here, we see Choi’s preoccupation with making visible accounts that exist but are not highlighted in history. In the previous sections, too, Choi features first the handwritten text of the girls’ accounts in Korean, and this is then followed by Choi’s translation; she herself is never first, always centering the accounts of those most directly affected. She writes in her narrativization, “The victims of History are permanently exiled from home, within and without. The practitioners of memory are also: we live as foreigners, as translators.”
Choi’s project, as we come to understand here, is a practice of memory; Choi must remember these girls, must remember these histories, because on the outside of the nation, in exile, forced into perpetual translation, she is the only one who can. Her father’s camera is her companion in memory, as it acquires a life and history of its own in this project. The camera, shaped by Barthes’s theoretical work on photography, is reality for Choi, while the poem distorts. The poem through the photograph is the only way to turn this distortion on its head, for prose to also mirror the real world, the mirror being the central image of the penultimate section of DMZ Colony.
In Mirror Nation, still building on the ruptures of nation and self in exile, Choi moves from documentary poetics of the transpacific to affective poetics of the transpacific, situating the materiality of collage, photograph, and art against the affective solidarities formed by the American imperial project across Asia. Here, collage and image and the ruptures of form they lead to become the way to not just document but also understand and negotiate the affective experiences of her life as an exile. Mirror Nation, after its epigraphs, opens with a photograph, again in black and white; Choi, opening here, reminds us of the books that have come before this—photograph before text, Korea before the US, always. The histories of Korea are wider and more varied than US empire can document, and are central to Choi’s relationship to the exiles that these histories force upon her.
In the first section, a set of long prose poems titled “Berlin: 28.06.2019,” Choi writes, “Only the fences remind me of home—the endless barbed wire across the waist of a nation.” Here, from the start of Mirror Nation, Choi is looking back at the separation of Korea, which she critically situates immediately as the inciting incident of her exile; but even as she situates Korea and its separation as the beginning of this history of exile, she has no choice but to go farther, into a longue durée history of the Korean Peninsula. This history begins with the advent of photography, with Choi’s father, with the history of America, with the history of American imperial expansion across the Pacific, both horizontally and vertically. “I’m childless, so I have no choice but to channel into the desert of memory,” writes Choi, emphasizing what her project is. These histories remain unacknowledged, unremembered, and Choi, through this project, must read her personal history of exile through this “desert of memory.” Here, against the Berlin of the title, of the present-day self writing this, the barbed wire and fences remind us of the casual cruelty of the history of imperialism in Korea, not just limited to American imperialism but going further back into the colonial history of Korea under Japanese occupation. The “desert of memory,” through Choi’s positioning of it in conversation with her childlessness, becomes tied intimately to this opposite of that childlessness—Choi’s parents, and the history her father documents through this collection, a project that Choi herself takes on and continues through her assemblage of photo and text.
In Mirror Nation is where Choi’s meditations on her childhood and home are at their most linear, more explored, in long sections of prose rather than merely as photograph and collage. Here, photograph and collage, the languages and mediums assigned to her father so far in this project, give way to Choi’s own memories of home, articulable now in her medium, language. Choi writes of her childhood home, “Our house is no longer there, but it persists in my memory. It speaks to me in a language only the homesick understand.” Contextualized by its spatial location near the Hangang Bridge, this home, even in its absence, is the void Choi writes into—this first space of belonging, a belonging that is then erased by absence and history, which for Choi, are perhaps the same thing. This section in prose is accompanied by photographs on the left, three photos centered: two on either side taken by her father, and one of the Hangang Bridge. Here, again, Korea and the US remain split by medium, united in rupture—the rupture of the page, the rupture of white space, the rupture of reading photograph against and with text, the rupture of reading Choi’s father’s photography with Choi’s prose.
Choi ends Mirror Nation with a set of sections titled “Swan Soliloquy” and “Frankfurt 1984,” bringing her arc of exile to a close. Opening with photograph—one of the letter S and one of a swan—Choi repeats the sentence “Nation is a nation is a nation is a nation” five times. Here, through the false equivalency of nation with itself, its inability to be broken down into anything different, Choi directs us to the idea that has shaped all three books yet—nation is unbreakable and unnatural, impossible to contain in any other form. Even in Choi’s malleability, the nation-state remains a thing of mystery, unknowable. This sentence, in its ceaseless rhythm, its lack of punctuation until the very end, creates a sense of closing in on itself—finally, here, nearly at the end of the collection, nation is understood to have an inability to be anything but itself. Considering this with her earlier articulation that “empire is everywhere,” Choi is ultimately seeking always to articulate the tensions of empire as they relate to the modern nation-state. Following this, Choi takes the sentence “Swan is a swan is a swan” and, over five lines, subtracts letters and words so that the only thing remaining in the fifth line is the letter “s.” Here, in section, we can read the swan and its disappearance over five lines in contrast to the relentlessness of the nation—the swan slowly vanished, but the nation remains, ceaseless against nature. Nation becomes unnatural, something that must be actively transcended, unable to be broken in language.
Hardly War, DMZ Colony, and Mirror Nation all collectively demonstrate Choi’s poetics of photography, which builds on poetry of witness of exile to write a new, materially charged formal rupture that mirrors, for her, the rupture of nation, the rupture of self, the rupture of history. For Choi, there is no other way to document this than through formal rupture, through melding together photograph and text. Photography documents reality in a way that nothing else can for Choi, shaped deeply by her father’s work as a war photographer. Poetry can only come close to reconstruction and not distortion when articulated through the lens of the photograph, when the mirror of the photograph is present to refract back reality for Choi.
In Camera Lucida, Barthes writes of the photograph and the longing it creates: “This longing to inhabit, if I observe it clearly in myself, is neither oneiric … nor empirical; it is fantasmatic, deriving from a kind of second sight which seems to bear me forward to a utopian time, or to carry me back to somewhere in myself.” For Choi, the photograph and poem together carry this sense, returning her to an unnostalgic memory of her youth, or her desire for “mirror words.” “Mirror words” and her father’s photographs are for Choi the two ends of the spectrum Barthes theorizes—she is always seeking one of the two—the utopic language of mirror words, or the truth of history, neither of which is ever possible. Formal rupture is the only thing that comes close to mirroring her exiles, the cause of her nostalgia for her father’s photographs, or her desire for “mirror words,” allowing Choi to imagine here a space for her fractured histories and selfhoods and languages. 
Featured image: A road that leads to the southern boundary of the De-Militarized Zone between North and South Korea / Wikimedia Commons