RETURN TO FIRST IMPRESSIONS
RETURN TO CHA REVIEW OF BOOKS AND FILMS
Kim Hyesoon (author), Don Mee Choi (translator), Phantom Pain Wings, New Directions, 2023. 208 pgs.
Reading Kim Hyesoon’s Phantom Pain Wings is an uncanny experience of growing wings and evolving into a bird. In Korean, “birds” 새 (sae) is a homonym for the word “new” and the contraction of “in between” 사이 (sai), which designates the gap between places or temporalities. And such is the space our new pair of wings brings us to—an uncharted ghostly realm opened up by Kim, wherein the living meld with the dead, the personal mixes with the collective, and the corporeal merges with the spiritual.
Internationally known as one of the most prominent and ground-breaking contemporary female poets from South Korea, Kim Hyesoon might have received her poetic call to the liminal space as early as the 1980s. Following President Park Chung-hee’s assassination in 1979, General Chun Doo-hwan began his iron-fisted military rule and tightened the censorship of publications in South Korea over the next eight years. Having just graduated and started working as an editor at that time, Kim brought the manuscript of Lee Kang-baek’s play The Doghorn to the military censors for review. The manuscript, however, was returned to her all blacked out in ink except for the play’s title and the playwright’s name. Kim’s long-time translator Don Mee Choi noted this incident in the writer’s earlier book I’m OK, I’m Pig!, suggesting that “it is from such blackened space that … Kim Hyesoon’s poetry emerges” (Choi 158). As such, the blackened space isn’t only a site where unexpressed taboos hide, it is also a lacuna that seeks to be exposed and amplified by Kim—a ventriloquist uniquely drawn to the expelled and erased, and is more than ready to exhume it and bring it into view.
Phantom Pain Wings is to me one of Kim’s most wildly grotesque yet enthralling poetry collections to date. In it, Kim does more than conjure up the people and things that have slipped into the crevices of oppression, oblivion, and death, both in her personal life and broadly in Korea’s contemporary history. Using poetry as a medium, Kim registers the process of “I-do-bird”, or doing bird, to illustrate the drastic somatic changes induced by traumatic loss and structural violence. In the book’s first poem “Bird’s Poetry Book”, she prepares the ground for this peculiar process of turning into “bird”:
This book is not really a book
It’s an I-do-bird sequence
a record of the sequence (Phantom Pain Wings 11)
On one level, birds are pertinent to this body of work because their appearance in Kim’s dream portends the death of her father and paves the way for the birth of this book[1]; but on another level, birds are the embodiment of Kim’s writerly commitment to the dead since the 2014 Sewol Ferry Tragedy in South Korea. In an interview with Don Mee Choi in 2017, Kim Hyesoon recounted how the horrendous incident had not only compelled her to compose Autobiography of Death, but had since given her the desire to write about death:
The sea was in agony … Really, it felt as if the ink inside a bottle as big as the Pacific Ocean was oscillating. I wept, wondering how I would ever use up all that ink, writing about all the unjust deaths, with my tiny pen as skinny as a butterfly’s hind legs? I think the wings in my poems were probably my pen’s metaphors. If my wings were as big as the Pacific Ocean, I could embrace the sunken ferry. (“An Interview” 100)
Nevertheless, the ocean of ink never seems to run out. I imagine the butterfly that restlessly pens the tragic deaths has now grown into the bird in Phantom Pain Wings, as Kim describes her work as a “bird-flies-out-of-water-shaking-its-wings poetry book” (Phantom Pain Wings 12). The poetry collection focuses largely on the process of turning into “bird” which, like the butterfly from her previous work, dutifully dips its small legs and wings into the bottomless sea to excavate the sufferings submerged therein.
More specifically, the “I-do-bird” process manifests itself as a gradual amalgamation of the bodily experience of humans and birds. By breaking the physical boundaries between the two, Kim alludes to the same way piercing pain from deaths and losses rupture the human mind and percolate into our soul. As the lingering agony gnaws at the speaker of the poems, she begins to “shed” her human body parts and simultaneously, acquire the physical attributes of “bird”. In “Bird’s Poetry Book”, Kim introduces us to the formation of such being as a bird-human:
When I take off my shoes, stand on the railing
and spread my arms with eyes closed
feathers poke out of my sleeves
Bird-cries-out-from-me-day record
I-do-bird-day record
as I caress bird’s cheeks (Phantom Pain Wings 11)
While this “I-do-bird” record starts off with a human speaker, “bird” within “I” soon takes over the human body, enabling her to stand on a railing and grow feathers like a bird. The speaker goes on to depict more dramatic bodily changes she experiences:
Bird with dark eyes has shrunken
Bird has shrunken enough to be cupped in my hands
Bird mumbles something incomprehensible even when my lips touch its
……..beak
Bird’s tongue is as delicate as a bud
as thin as the tongue of a fetus (Phantom Pain Wings 12)
From the abrupt pause interrupting the description, we visualise the shock and confusion the speaker feels upon discovering her new beak. But what is worth noting about this transformation isn’t simply the gaining of a bird’s features. Given the shrunken body of the bird-human and her delicate new tongue, we notice, crucially, how the speaker’s body is becoming frailer and more miniscule as the “I-do-bird” process continues.
Portrayals of the bird-human’s physical frailty, however, function more than an allusion to the powerful after-effects of painful losses. In fact, Kim’s emphasis on sickness and physical pain in Phantom Pain Wings orients us towards thinking about spirit illness in shamanism, which has a huge influence on the South Korean context she writes from, and most certainly, on Kim’s writing. In the book’s afterword, “Bird Rider: An Essay”, the poet remarks that the “I-do-bird” sequence—or what she also called “I-do-somatisation”—“triggers chronic illness like the shaman spirit-illness”, particularly when one is “at the height of grief” (“Bird Rider” 168). We are able to catch a glimpse of the frightening illness in the poem “Bird Sickness”:
I can hear, but I can no longer speak. My throat only makes screechy
screams. It’s written in the manual that when this happens, I’m almost at the
end.
…………………………………………………………….
Like the heart that jumped out alone from its body
I’m bird in critical condition (Phantom Pain Wings 100-101)
In fact, the “bird sickness” begins to develop in the speaker soon after Daddy passes away. As her physical ailment worsens, it culminates in a near-death experience—one that situates her “almost at the end” of herself and prepares her to take on her other identity as “bird” (100). It is also through this disfiguring and fundamentally shamanic sickness that the speaker gains access to the spiritual realm. Crossing the borders of the physical, “I” end up in the terrain Kim wishes to direct our attention to—the borderless place of life and death” frequented by shamans (“Bird Rider” 168).
Unlike other rituals and traditional ceremonies performed mostly by men, Korean shamanism calls exclusively upon women to traverse between the physical and the spiritual, and to take up the distinctive role as a ventriloquist. If ventriloquy in shamanism helps deliver overwhelming feelings of sorrow, anger, injustice, and loss that are difficult to articulate in words, I sense that Kim’s poetry embodies the same power in bringing to the fore inexpressible emotions that easily go underrepresented or even dismissed in writings. Therefore, as Kim describes her work as a kind of “literary ventriloquy” that is “not about imitation, but entanglement, impregnation of one another”, I have come to the realisation that shamanism is more than a spiritual practice she writes about, but an element central to her poetry (“Bird Rider” 168).
Essentially, Kim’s poetic style resembles shamanic practice in the way she places front and centre visceral and somatic experiences of pain and remorse. By positing her poetry as a new terrain for such experiences to be freely expressed, felt, or even multiplied, Kim speaks of the enduring presence of agony and sorrow residing in the human mind, and oftentimes, manifested in the body. More significantly, the new space opened up by Kim’s work serves to prevent persistent feelings of pain and loss from being effaced by factual accounts of traumatic events and violent histories—most of which focus on what these incidents are about, rather than how they remain within us. In “Little Poem”, Kim critiques the appalling insignificance history ascribes to the ramifications of trauma and suffering experienced by the marginalised and the wounded:
Once upon a time there lived a big story and a little story.
The little story is so little that even though it thinks that it is speaking, it’s the
same as not speaking at all. (Phantom Pain Wings 78)
While the “little story” of the afflicted seems all too trivial compared to the “big story” of official historical narratives, the speaker refuses to surrender to the latter. She boldly talks back to “you” – the “big story” that has been overpowering her voice, and explains how her seemingly inaudible utterances are capable of reaching her listeners, though in unconventional ways:
You say that you can bash my story whenever you want because it’s so little,
that you’ll write my story instead, that my story is like an animal too small to
be seen, living stuck to your little eardrum, but my little story crosses many
bridges inside your brain and takes the third road where the path splits into
three, and it walks for a long time and sets up house on top of your seahorse
and in every dream you scream – that’s how little my story is. (Phantom Pain Wings 79)
Here we see how the “little story” travels in the same way a tiny animal does. As it moves between the spaces of different body parts—from the eardrum to the insides of the brain, I begin to picture the tiny animal as one that doesn’t just walk, but also flies. Only by wings could it get to places too hard to reach and move through cracks too slippery to walk on. The very littleness of the animal, or in here the “little story”, is thus an enabling power that makes its navigation possible. Taking this unusual path, the voice of the afflicted and expelled eventually enters a ghostly zone free from any forms of constriction established by culture or conventions.
In this borderless poetic space opened up by Kim Hyesoon, the same butterfly is still hovering above the ocean. Flapping its ink-drenched wings, it disappears into the waters and comes back out repeatedly—each time morphing into something different. Sometimes, it comes out in a winged body, its face unrecognisable, like a scarily gaunt face of a human. In other moments, it disappears into the pitch-black sea as strong winds start blowing and whipping up huge waves as vast as the sky. Dancing fiercely, the winds and waves anticipate the arrival of spirits like shamans entering a trance. Within such a locale as Kim’s poetry, “bird”, “I”, and shaman unceasingly mutate and merge into one another. “Bragging About My Dress”, for example, demonstrates the intermingling of “bird”, “I”, and shaman:
But I can say that my dress is a birdcage
When it’s windy, it feels like I’m wearing an oversized birdcage
…………………………………………………………….
When the wings sprout from my hips
Spreading till they’re no longer visible
I feel as if I’m caressing the lightest thing in the world
Somehow I feel sad to float so high up
…………………………………………………………….
The night I put on the darkness, my favorite black dress unfurls
This feeling of a black ribbon around my neck unwinding
and the lights on my dress twinkle like the nightscape of Seoul
This feeling of infinite wings slowly taking off
like an insane stingray roaming in the deep ocean
Next, this feeling of a gigantic sparkly dress silently floating away in the
……….clear sky (Phantom Pain Wings 145-146)
In this vertiginous process of doing bird, what clearly comes to mind is Kim’s resistance to “aboutness” in her writing. There is no way to tell from this poem if she is writing explicitly about a mourner, a shaman, a bird, a butterfly, or maybe all of them, or none at all. Omitting details in this way, the poem points us to the only thing that is of significance—the very place Kim writes from. Through her poetry of deliberate obfuscation, it is as if Kim is assuring us that she will continue writing from the death-like non-space where grief and pain accumulate, intermingle, and proliferate, no matter what the afflictions entail and who the afflicted are.
Phantom Pain Wings is never a realistic representation of deaths, brutalities, and injustices. It is instead an I-do-bird record of incessant mourning and ventriloquy. Writing with her bird language, the poet reminds us that the ocean of sadness has never ceased deepening, and its shamanic waves will carry on surging. But if we look attentively enough, somewhere close to the sea surface, we will catch a butterfly-bird-shaman with a human face looking right back at us. It’s time we spread our wings.
[1] Kim Hyesoon mentioned in the afterword “Bird Rider: An Essay” how she knew her father would pass away soon after her dream of a bird with a “human face” (165).
Works Cited
Choi, Don Mee. “Translator’s Note.” I’m OK, I’m Pig!, by Kim Hyesoon, Bloodaxe Books, 2014, pp. 158-160.
Kim Hyesoon, “An Interview.” Autobiography of Death, Translated by Don Mee Choi, New Directions, 2018, pp. 97-104.
———. “Bird Rider: An Essay.” Phantom Pain Wings, Translated by Don Mee Choi, New Directions, 2023, pp. 163-169.
———. Phantom Pain Wings. Translated by Don Mee Choi, New Directions, 2023.
How to cite: Lee, Kammy. “The Birth of Deathly Birds: Kim Hyesoon’s Phantom Pain Wings.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 6 Apr. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/04/06/phantom.
Kammy Lee is from Hong Kong. She majored in English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and completed her MA degree in English Studies. Her research interests include representations of postcolonialism and its after-effects, traumatic inheritance, and narratives of violence. Currently, she has a growing interest in Asian-Anglophone fiction and poetry, and is working towards publishing more of her work. [All contributions by Kammy Lee.]