Memory’s Children in DMZ Colony
This essay reads a series of conceptual translations in poetry and the short story form through Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony and Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” as a way to interrogate and reiterate how the self-reflexive power of genre in the Asian American imaginary plays for and against itself in response to the brutality and banality of its material history. The reading will also turn to concepts of language in Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior to consider how Asian American literature speaks a sameness across the diasporas that contain, preserve, and consume historical identities developed through opposing political forces. One may desire to escape a certain language of identity in order to be with the language, and yet, to be with a language one comes into relation with being contained by its histories and the histories it embodies through writing and evolving hermeneutics. One may know that to be with the language one is necessarily already in the language of identity, and yet identity may be located in the making of language prior to the visibility of identities in the language, as often as making occurs through or in spite of identity behind the scenes and as a scene of language.
Different necessities of language develop from different realities and modes of containment. Literature may be a condition of history-making if one were to extend the tradition of Saidiya Hartman’s historical methodology “critical fabulation,” yet this essay, as an example of its own intention, runs a risk in its desire to name, host, and compose relationships across differences through the chimerical support of a collective consciousness. The risk may be to elide the reality of difference, or the element of difference that is originally irreconcilable, haunting the sameness it may later convey in its critical subordination to a mode of discourse. The reward associated with the risk may be ambivalent in the very hope that one may discover through an act of language in the mind an antidote to the effects of elision, a consummation of the elision through the care of imagination, or the elisions of elision. The discovery may simultaneously be a reaction to reading, and the salvaging of a voice from the self-inflicted force of acquiring the language. Thus, there runs the risk of salvaging as mere reaction, or reaction identified as a kind of salvaging, each comparison or simultaneity eliding the respective possibilities of each mode as the periphery or center of writing. Reducing the scale of historical materialism to the written word may allow for further speculations on how the minor character of recurrences in everyday life theorized by Yoon Sun Lee inform the act of writing and the experience of reading word by word, one page after another, as versos and rectos repeat one another in becoming the last of the other, faithful to the way day after day we live in days (Lee, 18-19). Words are the identity as difference through the repetition in difference of historical materialism. A page both materializes the consciousness of a day, and the collective participation of a body sharing the language of absence another body becomes through writing, as a writer among misremembered bodies, living and dead, real and unreal, conceived through words in the written act of salvaging a history. Invention as a form of reincarnation becomes uncanny in its parody of the Marxist theory of labor: what one writes is alienated from oneself, yet writing also anticipates its alienation through asserting or diminishing a relation to its genre. The act of choosing words complicates the notion of having a command over the language, or how language may serve as a conduit for arriving at a state of possession within oneself, whether that is to possess a fact, a belief, a ritual, a conversation, a scene, an authority, a method of epistemology, a theory of history, a definition of self, an Ars poetica, a meaning.
Xiaolu Guo cites in a preface to The Woman Warrior a sentence by Roland Barthes: “Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other” (Guo, vii). Reading animates the copula as an experience of words, which endow the copula with its power such that language “is” a skin. Perhaps the memory of a word articulates language as to have been a skin, yet one finds certainty in only an aspect of articulation through the nature of what has been articulated in the present tense, which subsumes the skin that is language as a completed action before another point in time, past or present, while the skin is present through every act of completion. The phenomenon of “otherness” shifts between a presence and absence in a duration of otherness before and after the written words of what is “other” (Hegel, 60). Guo contextualizes Kingston’s writing as an “American linguistic skin” rubbing against her “Chinese tribe,” a self rubbing against its identity, an act of the English language rubbing against its speaker’s interior of otherness, but the other inward “skin,” which may not necessarily be a synecdoche for otherness, even as it is the “inner Chinese one,” exists also between the word and the page, the word and the eye, words within what occurs and recurs between the page and the eye, and within the span of a word itself, between vowels and consonants, and the life of the mind as signs from one language become the signs of another in the privacy and communal phantoms of transliteration.
In Choi’s “Notes,” which serve both as an appendage to the collection of poems, and as a collection onto themselves,[1] she narrates her process of writing the transliteration of terror in Korean, which in her judgement of her handwriting as “messy,” establishes—or in her word “enables,” as if to suggest messiness allows one to access a freedom of expression between the Scylla and Charybdis of Korean and English— a similarity between the first Korean consonant and vowel, and the English letters G and H, translating the remaining Korean “[ro]” as “to/towards” (Choi, 126). In her translation of the Korean, which is read horizontally from left to right, she maintains the succession of meaning from left to right in English, written and read also from left to right. Korean and English share the same orientation of time in reading, but space discerned within the reading may be interrupted by the eye in different ways. Thus, in the orientation of the two languages lies a repetition as difference. Her writing of “mirror words” as a form of disobedience through which “translation is an anti-neocolonial mode” complicate the shared orientation of the two languages (Choi, 99). When English words are “mirrored,” the mirror occurs within the word, such that the letters spell the word backward, but each word in the sentence still follows one after the other grammatically left to right. Thus, the eye must begin at the end of each word as a nonword and move right to left, yet in the time of pronunciation, each letter still comes into the act of pronunciation progressing forward in sound through the backward trace of the eye. Each succession of reading readjusts itself to the last letter of the next word because it is supposed to be the first. Pronunciation in the mind results in a silent contortion. One must begin where one would desire to end in order to see through the initial reason for beginning, and to maintain the source of the end’s value that already had to locate its beginning at an end within a succession of mixed beginnings and ends. Choi’s enforcement of reading on the reader to access the meaning of the word resembles Lee’s conceptualization of Asian American realism through modernity as “more a structure of feeling than an object of mimesis” (Choi, 99-101, Lee, 12). The mirror within the word imitates the structure of feeling such that the object of mimesis is not modernity as the racialized condition of feeling, but the structure of feeling itself, imitated by the adjusted movement of the eye for the act of reading to be a mirror; Lee cites the structure of feeling through Raymond William’s definition as: “characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone…defining a social experience which is still in process” (Lee, 12). Choi’s placement of the letters backward resemble the Hegelian concretization of the abstract referred to by Lee; letters in the right place are sublimated into a word for the word to be itself, yet in the reversal of their positions, they become more of themselves as letters, while the word becomes abstract as a series of letters. What Lee discerns in the figure of repetition throughout Asian American narratives as a response to “disconnected things [losing] their identities in a greater whole” also describes the act of spelling a word (Lee, 21). “Words, too, become material shapes to be numbered and manipulated. They fail to adhere to each other or to lead anywhere,” Lee writes (Lee, 13). Choi writes a desire apart from what would be appraised as a mere reaction to the condition of writing into her language of disobedience. Within each sentence the process of reading backwards reiterates itself in order to complete the act of reading. The sentence in general is a social experience still in process; the mirror word concretizes the abstraction of letters into meaning through the reversal of their placement within the time of each word. When she finds English in her own handwriting of Korean within the same succession of left to right, one might discern the language as a skin rubbing against the other that is also the language itself. The other is not the other but the same, and yet the reality of difference lies within the reversal that creates a series of discrete units in the progression of sameness much like the condition of an Asian American consciousness. The figure of repetition exists in the writer and the reader through this relationship between vowels and consonants across languages, and within one language as language becomes a hinge for materializing history, a receptacle of successive salvages mirroring the effect of historical materialism on a consciousness aware of its particular literacy, preserving that mirror as the act of reading for a future reader. The similarity between an individual messiness in one language and the standard mark of another offers a counterpoint to the phenomenon of translation as a mode in the everydayness of a word. The Korean vowel and consonant in their physical similarity to English letters through her hand are synecdoches for the English words “global” and “humanity,” and the English words then become metonymies for the vowel and consonant contained in the “first” syllable block as they appeared in her handwriting, which come after the remaining Korean translated as “to/towards,” and as the Korean narrated by her in the English translation from left to right. The narration of Korean in English reads like a stereoscopy—two photographs of the same word, for instance— which begets a poem (Choi, 26-8, 126). The skin of Korean rubs against the skin of English as vowels and consonants become one another, and yet a puncture of the skin might occur as a word replaces the letter (as the word’s first letter) retrieved from the rub of similarity. Choi writes in a vertical axis between the hand and eye for the horizontal axis of reversed letters by narrating the situational resemblance of English letters to Korean.
The particular future of Korean vowels and consonants discovered in the English letters G and H is a product of Choi’s personal history as a poet and artist born in “South Korea during the U.S.-backed military dictatorship” (Choi, 15). Why put facts in quotes? Why do historical facts and autobiographical facts share the same order of words? The question is familiar because of the repetition in difference wherein the personal and collective consciousness exist together as one utterance, yet the fact lives not only in the plainness of language, but in the body of poetry from where Choi returns to her history. She quotes Deleuze from “What is the Creative Act?” to contextualize her reordering of words given how forms of power write history through the order of words: “Information is a controlled system of order words. Order words that are given in our society” (Choi, 97). In the following note to “Ahn Hak-sop #4,” Choi narrates her juxtaposition of consonants and question marks as “clusters” (Choi, 31, 128). The poem refers to the history of water torture, which was a technique that depended on the repetition of water droplets hitting the forehead of a captured individual until their mind collapsed. As water in separate anticipations through a duration of terror may erode the human will, consonants act as the edges of an amorphous whole producing a spoken or written word. To contextualize the extraction of consonants from the words “convert,” “change,” and “view,” or the erasure of their vowels, we may turn to a source outside the discourse of Asian American literature (Choi, 31). Anne Carson examines in Eros the Bittersweet a similarity between Eros as dependent upon an act of the imagination to dissolve the edges between lovers, and the ancient conception of the Greek alphabet as a “system of outlines or edges” through which the existence of vowels depends on the invention of consonants as an imaginative abstraction in the mind (Carson, 60). She writes of the components in a “linguistic noise”: “(1) a sound (made by vibration of a column of air in the larynx or nasal cavity as it is expelled past the vocal chords); (2) the starting and stopping of the sound (by interaction of the tongue, teeth, palate, lips, and nose). The actions that start and stop sounds, which we think of as ‘consonants,’ can by themselves produce no sound. They are nonsounds having, as Plato said, “no voice.” (Carson, 54, my emphasis). The disorder of letters composing a word as a nonword resemble in their enforcement of each backward trace the start and stop effect of consonants. English and Korean are not strictly phonetic languages operating like the phonetic system of Greek, and yet the concept of a consonant as “a theoretical element, an abstraction” returns us to the primary characterization of abstraction as a negation in Lee’s writings between the problems of epistemology and ethics; abstraction is both a symptomatic tendency and a politicized obstruction in the process of self-consciousness conditioning “the unavailability of an immediate sense of wholeness” (Carson, 61, Lee, 16). Consonants and question marks placed together offer a homology between word and sentence as the presence of the question mark changes the “order” of words even if the “ordering” of words is the same. “Order” refers to whether the words ask for words, or answer words as words. If only the nonsounds remain present as the essential elements carving the sound of absent vowels, a doubled silence occurs as the mind imagines or fills in the vowels of “convert,” “change,” and “view” moving from imagined sounds of abstraction to abstraction. Choi’s consonants then partake in Carson’s idea of “an activity of symbolization” as symbols of silence which are also the edges left over by a figure that does not exist even if the word may be imagined from the isolation of its “edges” (Carson, 61). Thus, Lee writes: “The empty forms of the everyday are placed next to one another in a paratactic relation. A formal equivalence predicated on a loss of depth, specificity, location, and substance makes itself felt. What results is more of an array than a narrative” (Lee, 5).
To reverse the order of a word may be an act of disobedience, but it is also a reversal of time that contains a concession to the reality of each letter as moments of time which any subordination of language to power necessarily elides. DMZ asks us to see the word differently, both as disordered inscriptions within the body of a sentence, and words which cannot “see” themselves. The word needs a mirror, either a physical mirror, or an alternative method of reading enforced by the will of the reader. The writer cannot force the reader to read, but a desire to understand drives the mirrored reading demanded by the mirror word in which lies the desire of the writer (“Now look at your words in a mirror. Trans-late, translate! Did you? Do it again, do it!”) (Choi, 99). The words are the reader’s words. If it is a physical mirror called to the task, then light reflected back by the mirror returns the letters to their original order as a word. The mirror word needs a correction through reflected light that would, in an instant, remove the mark of disobedience made evident by the order of a word. A photograph is the writing of light. An image essentially traps light to retain itself. The light must be still in the image, a stillness in order like “order words,” to maintain the visibility of the image. Likewise, the blood drawn from the scene of the parents carving “revenge” on the daughter’s back in The Woman Warrior share a conceptual disordering of freedom in the associations she makes when she smells blood (Kingston, 41-3). Kingston writes, “Forebodingly I caught a smell—metallic, the iron smell of blood, as when a woman gives birth, as at the sacrifice of a large animal, as when I menstruated and dreamed red dreams” (Kingston, 41). Such associations function like individual letters in a word solicited by the smell of blood producing an equivalence between birth, sacrifice, and menstruation, between different kinds of holiness: the newborn child and the death of an animal, the recurrence of blood as a life-giving proof and the red substance of dream. Imagination and reproduction maintain the brutality of their likeness through the condition of writing. The Chinese characters are “oaths and names” subtracting flesh from the daughter’s body, drawing out blood, letting the blood flow, perhaps even freeing the blood from the body in contradistinction to the stillness of light fixed in the photograph, or a stillness of blood in the legible character once the wound has been cleaned, such that “if an enemy should flay me, the light would shine through my skin like lace”; the literal translation of the verb in Chinese personifies the blood as “walking” out from her body, “caught” then by her mother after her father has finished cutting her skin (Kingston, 41-2). To maintain theoretical differences arising from phonetic languages like English or Korean and a logographic language like Chinese is to maintain the integrity of a reading, but in the scene of carving characters the erotic placement of mother, father, and daughter resemble the Carsonian relationship between Greek vowels and consonants: “I kneeled with my back to my parents so none of us felt embarrassed. My mother washed my back as if I had left for only a day and were her baby yet” (Kingston, 41-2). The daughter remains an infant within the gestures between mother and daughter while she kneels to conceal the evidence of her matured body, her likeness to her mother. Carson likens the imaginative act of Eros to the ancient perception of consonants. A consonant simultaneously carves a vowel into sound and conceals the vowel in the sound produced by the erotic binding that becomes a word. The word is both the infant produced by the erotic relationship between vowels and consonants and a shape of “finite-contiguous-continuous-unlimited” meaning cut into language, which is a skin, like characters cut into the skin of the daughter’s back, washed, written, and read in the eyes of its authors as if on a page that “had left for only a day,” and were still newborn (Lee, 19, Kingston, 41-2). The violent passage of intergenerational knowledge shares its form in Kafka’s penal colony through the apparatus of punishment between a nation and its subjects. Within the structure of feeling in the family of Kingston’s fiction and the structure of feeling between the characters that revolve around the apparatus in Kafka’s short story, one may reread Choi’s section titled “The Apparatus” (Kingston, 41-2, Choi, 73). Choi writes:
IN THE PENAL COLONY: “Does he know his sentence?” “(the explorer)”
“No” “(the officer)”
“He doesn’t know the sentence that has been passed on him?” (the explorer)
“No” “(the officer)”
“Whatever commandment the prisoner has disobeyed is written upon his body by the Harrow” “(the officer)”
“HONOR THEY SUPERIORS!” “(the Harrow)”
IN THE NEOCOLONY: (HONOR THY SKY!) “the old wisdom” (Choi, 77).
The sentence in the short story is the law which the condemned man violated, a parallel form of revenge in oaths and names carved on the daughter’s back. Choi quotes Aimé Césaire from “The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land,” in the first section of DMZ Colony titled “Sky Translation”: “I follow you who are imprinted on my ancestral white cornea” (Choi, 3). Words scratch the white cornea of reading as the presence of the superior lies in the wound. Choi writes over the snow geese flying in formation the repetition of consonants “D” “M” and “Z,” consonants overlapping the present wings in flight caught in her vision. We may read of the photographs in DMZ Colony and “Memory’s child” in light of the carving scene from The Woman Warrior and Carson’s equivalence of Eros and the Greek alphabet:
Because I was an infant, I have no memory of this infamous day except through my father’s memory. 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. When I was old enough, I always accompanied my mother to the airport to greet my father, who returned home every three to five months from Vietnam. Overlapping memory always longs for return, the return of memory (Choi, 15).
Words are infants living the autobiography of the poet who has no memory of where she writes from even while she returns there through writing. Memory’s memory is the self-consciousness of words in the mirror of reading, the cohesion between the distinct letters placed beside one another through a violence of comprehension, and the vision between two generations. Memory living inside the apparatus which produces the photograph fixing memory into light offers an alternative to the apparatus in Kafka’s penal colony carrying out the sentence. Choi writes: “Our vowels are incomprehensible. Only the consonants pass from hand to hand, colony to colony” (Choi, 123). Words become colonies, one mirrored word after another in a history of colonies composed as a sentence, which is itself the form of knowledge passed from one body to another, from mother and father to daughter, from nation to nation, from nation to subject, from one language to another within the same eye. Letters in words like the diasporas of Asian America have carved traditions of consciousness into the shapes of their others the way consonants and vowels produce a child of meaning. Memory’s children live like the consonants of a remembered word. The poet returns through their winged lives.
Bibliography
Carson, Anne. Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay. Princeton University Press, 1982.
Choi, Don Mee. DMZ Colony. Waves Books, 2020.
Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford University Press, 1977.
Kafka, Franz. “The Penal Colony.” Franz Kafka online. https://www.kafka-online.info/in-the-penal-colony-page20.html, 10 December, 2025.
Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior. Picador Classic, 2015.
Lee, Yoon Sun. “Asian American Realism and the Forms of Everyday Minorness.” Modern Minority: Asian American Literature and Everyday Life. Oxford University Press, 2013.
[1] Thanks to a remark by Professor Nadal!