DMZ Colony
Don Mee Choi
Reviewed by Madeline Vardell
A record and a nexus, Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony is a “flood of sound, seemingly from nowhere and everywhere.” It makes a theatre for her astounding range where she navigates the militarized borders of Korea, United Statesian aggression, the family scattered, and the translator returned. Sometimes her approach feels distant and journalistic, translating and reporting the cruelty of empire. At other times, the translator becomes immediate, imagining and breathing life into the subaltern child. Choi’s able to capture enmeshed political and personal histories by reflecting their entanglement through her many forms and scopes—poetry and prose, documentary and autobiography, drawings and photography, translation and invention—across her eight acts.
Though this book is numerous and spans mediums, Choi leaves much up for the reader to see and decide: “I’ll leave it up to the imagination what a DMZ village looks like” and this pushes the reader into the role of the translator—a role which is not always clear: “[the translator] could only helplessly flutter her / ears.” One’s impulse might be to hide imprecise translations, instead Choi magnifies them—revels in them. “Translation as an anti-neocolonial mode can create other words. I call mine mirror words . . . meant to compel disobedience . . . defy neocolonial borders.” In these pages, the once silent, invisible, translator sparks with transgressive power. In her “Notes,” she even points out the variations in her Korean to English translations: they “aren’t identical, as no translations are. It’s just that there are always two of us—the eternal twoness.” That is the gut of this collection: inexact interchanges that allow the translator their defiant mirror words. DMZ Colony is a gestalt project from Don Mee Choi, structured yet tangled, leading the reader forward while speaking from all sides.