Dura
Myung Mi Kim
publisher: Sun & Moon, 1998
isbn: 1-557132-92-5
price: $11.95
Kim's third collection -- Under Flag (1992) and The Bounty (1996) are her previous two -- continues her passionate, formally investigative cataloguing of the pervasive effects of colonialism, war, and rampant capital in the domestic and public spheres.
While foregoing the genres of fiction and journalism to record this morally arid landscape, she engages the reader in the act of re-witnessing these chains of insights that render one without a narrative of rebellion, but which create a forum in which meaning, being reformed by the reader him- or herself, empowers and doesn't -- like television or the newspaper with its stylized narratives -- distract.
The long middle section, "Thirty and Five Books," composed of short paragraphs of no longer than a few sentences each, is the most forceful in this engagement: gleanings of horror ("And the unremarkable become the stuff of dust."), of theorized imaginings of the interconnectivity of politics and economy ("Deployments to the assigned parallel. Sheer volume of river traffic. Ascension, declination and distance of the measured body"), of subverted pastoral lyricism ("When we stayed together working the fields and went home at dusk and ate together. Mangy birds sing ornate songs"), even extending its reach to a brief liturgy based on a death in the Los Angeles riots of 1993:
Percussive
In the LA Times the picture was in color
Body moving in circle be fire
What looked like black in the Korean newspaper was my son's blood
Body moving in circle be fire
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Each sentence resonates with a story: "Unrecognized she went about the city", a complete paragraph, suggests the alienation themes of early modernism, but it is revised for postcolonial content in the later "______ arrived in America. Bare to trouble and foresworn. Aliens aboard three ships off the coast. ______ and ______ clash. Police move in."
Though her work seems utterly devoid of anything that could be called "humor," Kim has a panoptic generosity, so that she finds a way to extend her very personal relationship to issues of immigration and cultural severing to include and address all who have correlative experiences. As she writes in a later section of the book, inspecting the canvas on which she works:
Call ancestry lost
Collapse and valence
Brevity and gesture
House with rooms cut of various sizes
An America as big it is
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