Disperse the Nation: Don Mee Choi’s Poetry Trilogy

At the Potsdam Conference held in July and August 1945 outside of Berlin in the Soviet Red Army–occupied zone, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain discussed how to divvy up the recently and soon-to-be liberated—or conquered—countries and regions held by the former Axis Powers. Along with the fate of Middle and Eastern Europe, the future of Korea was briefly considered, as it had been brutally occupied by Japan since 1910, although that nation was now weeks away from surrender. Historians continue to debate exactly how Korea’s postwar administration was ultimately decided and the degree to which the Soviet Union or the United States planned to occupy the entire Korean peninsula, but the result was a country divided in half at the 38th parallel by the new Cold War powers. It was the crossing of this arbitrary border by North Korean troops in June 1950 that initiated the Korean War, which left more than three million dead and a larger percentage of overall civilian casualties than occurred during World War II. Yet this was only one of several new borders created during the postwar arrangement that resulted in ongoing war, slaughter, and genocide across East Asia, South Asia (one million killed in sectarian violence as a result of the partition of British India in 1947), Africa, and the Middle East—a legacy lasting into the present, as currently witnessed in Palestine.

Left to right: British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, US President Harry S. Truman, and Soviet leader Josef Stalin in the garden of Cecilienhof Palace before meeting for the Potsdam Conference in Potsdam, Germany, July 25, 1945. License: Public domain.

Forty-one years later, in 1986, the photojournalist In-Jip Choi was standing on a bridge near Potsdam outside of Berlin documenting a spy swap between increasingly friendly West and East Germany. A photojournalist for Asian newspapers and eventually Western outlets as well, In-Jip Choi reported from the 38th parallel in the 1950s during the Korean War and covered the Vietnam War and its spillover into Cambodia. His work captured in photos and newsreel films the consequences of geopolitical decisions made thousands of miles away at conferences and diplomatic meetings with no representatives from the countries involved. His daughter, the award-winning poet and translator Don Mee Choi, was born in South Korea and moved to Hong Kong at the age of twelve before resettling in the United States as a young adult, and now currently lives in Berlin. Her recently completed poetry trilogy consisting of Hardly War, DMZ Colony, and Mirror Nation1 locates itself in South Korea, the United States, and Berlin, only to constantly cross geographic, linguistic, and cultural borders to chase after and be chased by the historical effects of colonial power—although it might be more accurate to say that Choi’s trilogy pursues and is pursued not by history but by its ghosts that linger in textual and photographic archives and personal memory. They are ghosts because Choi is concerned as much with the dead as with the living. As she writes in Hardly War: “What are world memories? It turns out that they are war memories. And what are war memories? They are orphan memories” (36). Whereas her father traveled to battlefields in Korea, Vietnam, and Cambodia, including student-led popular uprisings in Seoul (in 1960) and Gwangju (in 1980), to report on the extremities of the living, Choi sifts through language, memory, and archives to reanimate absences and the deceased.

Hardly War opens with a set of adverbs, including in its title, such as “partly history,” “naturally convincing” (referring to the BBC News), and section titles like “purely illustrative” and “hardly opera.” The strategy—including the irony in certain of these phrases—is against anything standing inherently for itself, which makes sense given Choi’s experience as an immigrant, as a poet working in hybrid modes, and as a translator (of renowned South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon and others). For Choi, translation necessarily has an anti-colonial component; so, too, does not translating as an act of resisting cultural and political assimilation. “I refuse to translate” (10) is repeated five times at the beginning of Hardly War. This tension between writing and translation as transmission and defiance creates the weave for Choi’s trilogy and extends from individual words to autobiography. Nothing is resolved, and Choi’s books brilliantly display a wide variety of textual and visual experimental forms. The larger structure is montage, and Choi works with photographs and archival documents in the same way she does with personal and historical narratives or the word “swan”: she disassembles in order to reassemble via a process whereby wholeness—of a nation and a self—is continually deferred by mourning and absence, if in fact this unison ever truly existed. This refusal of closure is simultaneously a “right to opacity” in Édouard Glissant’s formulation, a right to not be judged according to Western criteria, which colonialism exposed—and continues to expose—as epistemologically and politically bankrupt.2

However, each book in the trilogy also contains an extensive and detailed set of author endnotes explaining the processes for, and many of the references in, every poem. It’s the translator providing another layer of translation of work that is in some ways a version of a translation, thereby compounding a sense of exile, migration, and of living within and between the worlds created by geopolitics, language, and culture. Space and time are collapsed or distended; halfway through Mirror Nation, Walter Benjamin’s notion of “temporal magic” is quoted as a way of explaining the fusion and confusion of past and future in the present. It allows Choi to connect protest and repression at various moments and locations from around the globe. “Empire is everywhere” (66), she writes in Mirror Nation; and on the same page: “In the future, every hour is grievable.” Benjamin’s much-discussed “angel of history” looks backward while being blown forward, but an angel also represents a rupture in human temporalities by signaling apocalypse, utopia, redemption, or ruin. For Benjamin, even hope is tinged with mourning, and in Choi’s trilogy disintegration is inseparable from integration, and repetition is as close as the work gets to reconciliation.

For Choi, time becomes fused and stuck around trauma. To experience profound grief is to be taken out of the flow of time, yet “temporal magic” is what allows for an escape from the inexorable and crushing movement of history: grief as resistance and resistance as grief. There are very good reasons to lose one’s narratives, both as individuals and as nations. One of the goals of experimental writing like Choi’s is to disrupt official narratives, histories, and images along with, more importantly, their meanings—although they’re more like presumptions and predispositions—because narrative is a prime vehicle in which to smoothly embed them. War is the story that Choi’s trilogy confronts, and it does so at the level of personal experience and in connection with twentieth-century geopolitics: the colonization of Korea by Japan from 1910 to 1945 leads into the Korean War and then a series of US-supported dictatorships, or a “neocolony” as Choi phrases it in DMZ Colony: “I remain a daughter of neocolony” (19). The family structure serves as the colonized space for the reproduction of the colonizing nation-state, and the human subject is itself a colonized space for everything from bacteria in the guts, to microplastics in the bloodstream, to the ideologies passed down via education, family, religion, the legal system, and more.

Japanese marines landing from the gunboat Un’yō at Yeongjong Island, which is near Ganghwa, South Korea. Unknown author, 1876. License: Public domain.

As a poet and translator like Choi knows, language colonizes as much as armies do. An epigraph to a section in DMZ Colony (97) quotes Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus: “Language is made not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience.” The book then precedes to print words backward as if read in a mirror, thereby scrambling immediate visual and semantic recognition. A note to the poem “Sky Similes for Snow Geese” in the same section states: “I separated out the Korean consonants and vowels sequentially. They make up the phrase: ‘Your excellency, is it martial law?’” (128). Choi’s trilogy repeatedly breaks the language of command and hierarchy; Hardly War is filled with muddled military language. A few of the consonants and vowels in “Sky Similes for Snow Geese” float untethered through Mirror Nation as well, like the ghosts of words and the dead civilians and soldiers of (neo)colonialism. Choi’s snow geese are themselves the living memory of exile when in the opening pages of DMZ Colony she sees a flock of them migrating at the 38th parallel where it crosses St. Louis, Missouri. Choi then turns this literal and figurative image of snow geese into a drawing of the letters D, M, and Z via a process of tracing a sketch she made of them flying (all three books contain drawings by Choi, which augments their hybrid and mixed-media quality). A trace of a trace. “Memory’s memory” (15). But then, geese are closely connected to swans, which in the trilogy are related to family, but this is a family recorded in fragments and absences, in broken and ended lives, and yet continuing to imagine a nonidentitarian world. It’s not at all a spoiler to say that Choi’s unchronological trilogy unexpectedly ends in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1984.

For this reason, while of course it’s best to read the three books in order, Choi’s trilogy can be read front to back, back to front, or started somewhere in the middle; it creates less of a sequence than a tapestry. Choi’s experiments seek to elude the nation-state and reformulate it from the perspective of exile. The nonlinear crossing of space and time is both the literal experience of the immigrant and the symbolic structure of poetry. A note to DMZ Colony reads: “Consistency not only applies to the rules of grammar, but also to the rules of border crossing and immigration. Consistency can signal legitimacy whether one is legitimate or not” (127). Conversely, failure can be a language of resistance. Thus, “official” histories and the language and images used to transmit them are literally cut up by Choi in a formal strategy with precedents in Dadaist treatments of the newspaper, William Burroughs’s text and audio collage experiments, and M. NourbeSe Philip’s rearrangements in Zong!—also at the level of vowels and consonants—of the 1783 Gregson v. Gilbert legal decision confirming African slaves as property and not endowed with human rights (in other words, as not human). For Choi and these authors, part of creating counternarratives involves examining the concept of narrative itself because the future that its very structure assumes is a perpetuation of the past and present, with their structural inequalities, their silencings and marginalizations, their unacknowledged traumas.

As part of speaking this trauma, Mirror Nation contains reproductions of redacted United States Department of Defense unclassified documents that reveal US complicity in the Gwangju Massacre of 1980, in which the South Korean army killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people protesting the military dictatorship of Chun Doo-hwan. As Choi shows in Hardly War, the South Korean army also fought for, and carried out massacres on behalf of, the US military during the Vietnam War (more than three hundred thousand South Korean army troops fought in Vietnam). Neocolonies proliferate internally and externally everywhere. From 1954 to 1960, the United States gave almost two billion dollars in financial assistance to South Korea both directly and through the United Nations Korean Reconstruction Agency (UNKRA), which helped to fund the vast majority of South Korea’s import economy throughout the decade, yet South Korea wasn’t one of the five nations on the UNKRA advisory committee. With seventy-three US military bases, South Korea currently houses the third-largest number of US troops in the world (only Japan and Germany have more US bases and soldiers) and is home to the largest US foreign military installation, Camp Humphreys. Yet according to a recent Pew Research Center report, South Koreans have more favorable views of the United States than almost any other nation. Ideology may institutionally sustain oppressive systems, but colonization is first and foremost imposed by brute force and capital.

US Army Garrison Humphreys, South Korea, 2011. License: Public domain.

Hardly War may begin with adverbs, but it ends with a “hardly opera,” which is assembled from interviews Choi conducted with her father about his work as an award-winning war photographer. The result—also inspired by German composer Heiner Goebbels’s adaptation of Gertrude Stein’s Wars I Have Seen—is a hallucinatory text (libretto?) featuring characters named Camera Elmar, Crazies, Swaying Hydrangeas, American Army Major, and more. It’s the longest sustained piece in the entire trilogy and sets up its two intertwined documentary modes: the journalistic, truth-revealing approach of Choi’s father as conveyed in photo and film images (a snippet of the latter even made it into Michael Cimino’s Vietnam War film, The Deer Hunter) and Choi’s deconstructive method applied to textual evidence and document. Choi’s father is a direct witness to military and police violence, while she engages with the machinations of dominant ideologies and representations, which—like the BBC News—aim to appear “naturally convincing” so as to lodge themselves in everyday life and receive an easy embrace. It’s how the ruling powers thwart the imagining of alternative worlds (with the police and military ready at a moment’s notice to enforce this status quo). Hegemonic messages are at their most powerful when they appear as commonsensical expressions of a seemingly natural order. In turn, applying defamiliarization techniques is what certain strands of experimental writing aim to do, whether the strangeness of the surrealism in Hyesoon’s poetry, or Stein’s category- and linear-syntax-shattering compositions. Like these, Choi’s books aim to make the world dissimilar from what exists.

Yet Choi’s trilogy continues to show the necessity of more conventional reportage, specifically by incorporating her father’s photos, while her explanatory notes are also a form of documentation. The initial two photographs in Hardly War are from November and December of 1950: the first features a self-portrait of Choi’s father standing in front of a bridge in Pyongyang, North Korea; the second is of the same bridge having since been bombed and now filled with refugees precariously climbing across its mangled trellis. During the war, more than a half-million Koreans fled from the north to the south; hundreds of thousands moved or were deported from the south to the north. Another three million—or nearly ten percent of the population—left the country entirely. Thus, it’s not a surprise that bridges and birds are material and metaphorical motifs running throughout Choi’s trilogy; once the 38th parallel was sealed, the only ways to leave the South Korean peninsula were via water and air. In a poem titled “A Little Confession” that appears early in Hardly War, Choi writes:

I used to think that my father was a foreigner
I wanted to grow up to be a foreigner like my father
I eventually became a foreigner
I no longer pretend to write in English
Because English is a foreigner like me. (22)

Nation, father, and English have each partly failed the me, which in Choi’s trilogy isn’t necessarily a bad thing. What remains is a shifting sense of foreigner. The centered lines in “A Little Confession,” which are used throughout Hardly War and mostly disappear in the next two books, are an attempt to find ground—a wobbling pivot?—in the unstable conditions of exile, while the repetition of “foreigner” multiplies and simultaneously displaces the same. Both father and daughter have become foreigners to the land in which they were born, but to become a foreigner is partly not to be, at least according to the dictates of the nation-state. As Choi shows, this carries over into language in a process that others it from itself. There is both a politics and an ethics at play here—both because politics and ethics aren’t synonymous.

In Dialogues (with Claire Parnet), Gilles Deleuze says: “We must be bilingual even in a single language, we must have a minor language inside our own language, we must create a minor use of our own language … It is primarily the line of flight or of variation which affects each system by stopping it from being homogeneous. Not speaking … in a language other than one’s own, but on the contrary speaking in one’s own language like a foreigner.”3 Modern nation-states are both formed around and impose a major language, and Choi’s extensive experiments with English and Korean generate bilingualisms within these languages as well as between them. Choi then extends this to genre by writing hybrid works that elude literary categories. These hybrid creations, in turn, are minor to the category of literature, disrupting its commercially oriented homogeneities of genre and style. This proliferation of multiplicities extends to a sense of self, facilitating imaginative possibilities, not the preexisting ones by which the subject is produced. Instead, the I is dislodged from a place of command (subject, verb, object: I do this to that) and turned into unfolding interrelations, as interdependencies are substituted in its place. Choi frequently calls herself by other names, describes herself as a bird, designates herself with a mark or drawing. These references aren’t always positive: “I see Ugly=Translators / Yes, Ma’am / Me=Gook” (19) declares Hardly War. The struggle—but also the generative challenge—throughout the trilogy is to remake languages and narratives, with their embedded meanings that form the subject and history—and that, in the context of twentieth-century histories of South Korea and the United States (and most everywhere else), structure these subjects and histories for war.

The relation between her father’s journalistic, image-based documentary approach and her own experimental textual version appears perhaps most dramatically when Choi travels to South Korea in DMZ Colony to interview Ahn Hak-sŏp, a North Korean who was captured during the war and spent more than forty years in a South Korean prison, where he was subjected to severe torture. Choi writes in her acknowledgments to DMZ Colony: “Even though his friends hoped that I would write an article about Mr. Ahn for prominent newspapers, I believe that poetry is more effective as a language of resistance. Poetry can defy erasure” (131–32). One of the more extended series in the trilogy (which contains few standalone poems), “Wings of Return” also begins with one of its most direct narrations as Choi describes being a child in South Korea during the US-supported military dictatorship of General Park Chung Hee. An image of Choi’s father photographing a ceremony involving Park soon after the 1961 coup that brought him to power appears later in DMZ Colony. Her family left South Korea for good after Park decreed martial law in 1972. She writes: “My memory lives inside my father’s camera, the site where my memory was born, where my retina and my father’s overlap” (15). Yet Choi’s “retina” is filled with the afterimages of war, not their direct representations; other images appear only in the imagination, but that doesn’t make them any less real. These afterimages mean that visual and linguistic translations are always involved, and Choi ingeniously transforms them into multiple modes of expression throughout the trilogy.

After this opening description, the five following sections in “Wings of Return” devoted to Ahn’s imprisonment and torture are increasingly fractured by ellipses, single letters from both Korean and English, lists, lines (of flight and containment), and drawings. If words are material (as Stein knew so well), then Choi’s dismantling of them augments their visceral quality. There is no single story that describes the trauma of either an individual or a nation. As she writes elsewhere in DMZ Colony while staying in Marfa, Texas, near another militarized and contested border: “The language of capture, torture, and massacre is difficult to decipher. It’s practically a foreign language” (43). Choi does tell part of Ahn’s horrifying experience, but what is depicted is the power of violence and confinement over human subjects.

… the torturer asked
… what if I smash your head to bits?
… I said
… e e e
… ideology (36)

Whether in her father’s photos or her textual interventions, this brutality pervades Choi’s trilogy. The domestic concerns of a family and a nation in Hardly War explode onto a global stage in the two books that follow, as DMZ Colony and Mirror Nation travel between East Asia, the United States, and Europe, which is only appropriate given post-World War II global economic and political enmeshment. What does it mean to be assimilated within a geopolitical system built on oppression and exploitation? At the same time, how much is language—and its modes of expression—complicit? These are the larger questions that Choi’s project asks while responding not with answers but with an ongoing process of taking apart hardened categories and borders; and it asks them from specific geographical locations, subject positions, and historical moments.

A note to the Ahn Hak-sŏp series states: “The Korean word 이 sounds the same as the letter e/E. 이 is a homonym for this, teeth, lice, and two. And e is for ideology, empire, torture, and yet it has other possibilities such as Earth, Equality, Internationality, etc.” (126). The other side of globalization is internationalism; fragmented subjectivities are the seeds for new ones; the exile might be an alternative to the settler; the self can become no longer synonymous with property rights, as it is and has been in the US-European legal system. This is a sense of identity that is fragmented and in flux while longing for a place to which it can never truly return; the home and dream of South Korea that Choi’s writing evoke seem never to have fully existed, which in turn orients her longing toward the future. Outside of a recognition of various modes of resistance to authoritarianism, which are embedded in the very formal structure and style of Choi’s writing, there is little from the past that is presented positively in these books; even childhood is tinged with deep loss. For a project that spends so much time looking back—and toward the father—there’s almost no nostalgia in Choi’s writing; rather, the past serves to illuminate violence in the present that ongoing colonialisms precipitate and perpetuate. After all, the irony of designating the border between North and South Korea a demilitarized zone when in fact it is one of the most militarized areas in the world is matched by the notion of colony as a demarcated space when in actuality it exists everywhere, first and foremost in consciousness and in so-called democracies. Previous colonialisms are the seeds for neocolonies.

Korean Demilitarized Zone, a view from South Korea towards North Korea in the Joint Security Area at Panmunjom. License: CC BY 2.5.

Of course, it’s essential not to romanticize in any way the exiled or displaced, the refugee, or the involuntary migrant, which is another reason why Choi’s trilogy is in constant mourning. If DMZ Colony implies space and geography, Mirror Nation is obsessed with temporalities and filled with images of clocks, some hand-drawn. Time is a mirror here. Unlike Hardly War or DMZ Colony, the book doesn’t contain sections or even a table of contents but instead is composed as a mirroring montage of text and image. Its middle part features a series of blurry stills taken from film footage shot by Choi’s father of student revolts in Gwangju and Seoul in May 1980; a visual and textual echo appears a few pages later with the uprising that took place that same month in Miami, Florida, after police officers beat to death a handcuffed Black man, and Choi includes two newspaper photographs from the resulting insurrection. Pyongyang and Berlin are both described as having been bombed into rubble. Mirror Nation is further framed by Choi in Berlin on an artist fellowship and her father’s time there in 1986, as well as Choi’s discovery of a YouTube video of him standing on the bridge near Potsdam awaiting the exchange of Cold War spies. The angels Choi and her sister imagined seeing as children in South Korea appear again as the angels in the 1980s Berlin of Wim Wenders’s film Wings of Desire. The bridges in Berlin remind her of the bridge she grew up next to in Seoul, the one that the retreating South Korean army blew up in 1950 to halt the advance of North Korean troops, but which also killed hundreds of refugees who were using it to cross. Relatively straightforward prose in the first part of Mirror Nation transcribed from her father’s firsthand accounts of the Gwangju Massacre is reflected later in the book by Choi’s collaged version of secondary texts about the event.

Time and place circle and swirl under the rule of global capitalism and its imperial powers, and “trauma has a tendency to creative havoc on memory” (8). Yet if trauma collapses past and present, “the future juxtaposes” (13), possibly—hopefully?—in a way that isn’t always grievable. The little hope that gets expressed in Choi’s trilogy tends to take the metaphor of birds flying away, traveling like free and borderless migrants. While the emotional and material deprivations of displacement form the shifting and unstable ground of Choi’s trilogy, her writing also takes delight in the indeterminacy of liminal spaces between geographies, cultures, languages, genres, and mediums, and it gleefully mocks authority. Choi’s transnational puns are the funhouse mirror to the multinational Mercedes-Benz corporation’s rotating logo at the top of the Europa Center in Berlin, which she sees illuminated at dawn from her window. Play is rooted in association:

= Damiel = Homer = Albert Camus = Frantz Fanon = W. E. B. Du Bois = Enola Gay = Little Boy = Tarzon bomb = the hollow world = the swan = my mother = my father = napalm = Mekong Delta = Miami = Gwangju = my sister = the departing angels = the identical sneakers = the eyes of a sparrow = my Berlin apartment = the ring of Benz = the boy = the funnel of light = the horizontal world = the heartache = the rising moon = (14)

In a note to a poem collaging found text, photographs, the letter o both hand-drawn and printed, and the Korean word for zero, Choi writes, “= is also a syntax, a syntax that enables multiple places and times to coexist simultaneously. I inherited = from Aimé Césaire and Gertrude Stein. = has a double function. It also functions as an anti-colonial sign, which is to say translation is an anti-neocolonial mode” (101). An equal sign always crosses a border; in that way, it serves as a syntactical bridge (Mirror Nation contains a first-person narrative titled “Bridges of =”). An equal sign indicates an intermixing, a commingling, a danger to purity as well as to consistency. As in the excerpt above, where does the string of associations end?

The Korean Demilitarized Zone is visible at night from space because of a noticeable lack of lighting in the northern half of the Korean Peninsula. Image: NASA, 2024. License: Public domain.

Minor languages are devised by minority groups within a larger nation or empire, partly out of necessity and partly as subversion. They are acts of translation within a language that unsettle homogeneity and make borders less rigid, which also makes them more likely to be subjected to the pressures of assimilation and direct repression. It’s not a coincidence that refugees increase where nationalist ideologies become increasingly fanatical and the criterion for citizenship is made stricter; the countervailing pressure is neoliberalism’s desire to turn citizens into consumers. The goal and the result of both are a diminishment of rights alongside the power to ignore them. But as colonialism so clearly shows, the idea of human rights (whether post-1789 or post-1945) was only intended to apply to a portion of the global population and to always be overruled by profit and property, including human beings as property. Thus, it isn’t an entirely personal emotion Choi expresses when she writes, “Grief has a tendency to migrate from clock to clock, war to war, massacre to massacre, colony to neocolony” (42), giving another clue to Mirror Nation’s title. Grief as an equal sign isn’t empathy but solidarity, and Choi’s trilogy is a work of global perspective and connection, yet one that doesn’t seek to speak for a group of people, just as it complicates how to formulate a self.

The trilogy also explores the notion of document and witness, and therefore the ways in which history—individual, familial, local, and national—is written. It does so as an associative montage of texts and images that gives voices—and poetic form—to displacements. Everything is plural, even the self. Subjects are more processes than products, as are the circumstances through which they move. Writing in Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Poetics about Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee—with which Choi’s trilogy has strong affinities with its formal experiments, its mix of English and Korean and image and text, its fragmented memories, its return to a transformed South Korea, and its examination of colonialism—Lisa Lowe argues: “In rearticulating the immigrant subject’s displacement from the various national fictions of identity and development, it [Dictee] ‘performs’ and imagines a new subject, for whom the ‘disidentification’ from national forms of identity is crucial to the construction of new forms of solidarity.”4 The modern nation-state (and its national literatures and art histories) was a nineteenth-century European invention dependent on colonial slavery and resource extraction. In other words, like any historical phenomenon it is not a natural order, and Choi’s trilogy aims to denaturalize the conditions of the nation-state as an ideological and political project. As Choi and Lowe both show, this involves disengaging from the subject positions produced—interpellated—to be at war.

Yet for all of Choi’s emphasis on memory and the past, her juxtapositions might lead to a future in which—almost as unexpectedly as the declaration appears in Choi’s notes to Mirror Nation—“Peace is possible” (104). That this moment in the book follows the description of an imagined line (of flight?) is not a coincidence. Choi’s trilogy is constantly on the move, and, again, this is a question of form as much as content. It is, as she says in the opening pages of Hardly War, a “geopolitical poetics” (4). During the decade in which these books were being written and published, anti-immigrant and xenophobic politics have motivated a surge of right-wing populism and fascism around the globe, and especially in the West. But if “History is ever arriving” (49), as she writes in DMZ Colony, then other possibilities both remain and are still to be. This is a historiographical method that necessitates translating the given by creating other realities next to the one that exists. As Choi’s trilogy displays, this involves a combination of imagination and research, with the latter defined widely to include personal memory, while understanding that the personal is the result of history and its material conditions. This also entails the invention of new forms of expression to accompany the older ones in order to expand the range of what can be made visible and heard. Conversely, these innovative modes can be used to elude and become imperceptible to the modern nation-state’s endless classifications and categories according to race, gender, class, sexual orientation, and, in the colonies and neocolonies, human and not human. This isn’t a thought or aesthetic experiment; it’s a means of survival and thriving.