Today we tend to think of South Korea as a technological and democratic paradise, the good versus the evil that an oppression-based North Korea can represent. In Colonia DMZ (Rayo Verde / Raig Verd in Catalan), Don Mee Choi (Seoul, 1962) wanted to go back to the moment when he was separated into two states and anyone could be an enemy. It is a book of poetry in the broad sense, with a mixture of verse, prose, photography, drawings seasoned with its Korean calligraphy, and without sticking to non-fiction, but allows itself to recreate some of the episodes it deals with. The book won the US National Book Award.
There are many photographs taken by his father, a photojournalist: "I explore his memory with mine, and by incorporating them I incorporate his language into mine, one of the ways to create this memory made of superimpositions."
Regarding the verse, he assures that it is not "good at normal poetry, I don't find it interesting, I try to explore what poetry can do with various forms of language and expression." “I am interested in formal innovation, but only if it is connected to what I am trying to express, here the history of Korea and the memory that has been erased. I have also tried to understand why the military dictatorship in Korea lasted for so many decades, and I think the justification is that with the division of Korea we had an enemy”, he says.
And it is that despite the division, Choi does not believe that they are two countries: "We are the same people, how do we create an enemy with the same language and culture?" “The division – he adds – shaped how we Koreans saw each other and we were no longer divided geographically but also ideologically and physically, and this division was what allowed us to kill each other”. The propaganda was very intense: “When I was little, at school they told us that the communists were terrible, that they were red. And I thought that they really had red skin, and I would go out into the street and look for anyone with red skin, because they asked us to look for North Korean spies…”.
The role of the United States as support for the dictatorship is also very present, in the book and in its history: "We believed that they had saved us from the enemy, and we knew nothing about war crimes, that hundreds of people had been assassinated accused of being communists before the Korean War,” he explains.
She got involved with the story when she was beginning to translate contemporary Korean poets, and then she also got involved in the International Network of Women Against Militarism. There he learned "our shared history, the history of the United States is also that of Korea and that of Latin America, Asia, the Middle East...", and that is also why he believes that his work is about his country of origin, but also about everything. the world.
In his book, translated into Spanish by Rubén Martín Giráldez and into Catalan by Anton Pujol –who when he read it he proposed it to the editor Laura Huerga– and Joan-Elies Adell, there are also autobiographical texts, from when he traveled to Korea in 2016, where he interviewed, among others, a former political prisoner, whose torture – for more than forty years – he transmits, or with a feminist activist who was part of investigations into abuses. From this he extracts the orphans, the terrifying stories of eight surviving girls of the Sancheong-Hamyang massacre. Or the woman who, before being released, went to wash in the river and discovered her entire body blue, from the blows... like the three hundred women she had around her.
Choi, currently a US citizen, lives in Berlin. Where is her house though? "Writing for me is recreating the feeling of home, the space where I can go and explore the sense of longing."
