Breakage and Silence: the Poetry of Under Flag by Myung Mi Kim in Times of Global Crisis
by Marina Burana
Les mots qui vont surgir savent de nous des choses que nous ignorons d’eux.¹
—René Char, Chants de la Balandrane
Tell me the story / Of all these things. / Beginning wherever you wish, tell even us.
—Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictée
Under Flag by Myung Mi Kim. Kelsey Street Press, 2008.
In Under Flag, Myung Mi Kim delves into a fragile universe where the reality of the world—decadent and unjust—ominously shapes the spaces between the imagery in her poetry and the fissures among voice, language, and silence. Her work explores an intersection of multiple themes and looming crises that are relevant to today’s global challenges: migration, territory, self, existential conundrums, broken language, bodies and borders, torn landscapes, silence and space, social and familial survival and fracture, memory, war, violence, destruction, and diaspora.
As we begin reading, silence immediately feels like an undeniable presence in poems that abandon a linear narrative from the very beginning. It is a presence that breathes out a secret world of meaning that wants to be discovered. This makes it complex and incomprehensible. There is a psychological displacement within a physical space. Silence breaks the sentence and informs the sound of the words in a new way. The pull is relentless and absolute. The mind vanishes or seems to vanish, and the materiality of form becomes a supple indication of existence. Only when interrupted by a sudden word in an irregular narrative does this type of silence disappear into a temporal exile:
To span even yawning distance
And would we be near then
What would the sea be, if we were near it
Voice
It catches its underside and drags it back
What sound do we make, “n”, “h” , “g”
Speak and it is sound in time
(Kim 2008, 13)
Silence, like its close friend death, is unavoidable, and it comes and goes as it pleases. It quietly haunts the borders of meaning, lurking in the subtle folds of symbolism, waiting for the words to fade, allowing itself to sink back into the comforting realm of perplexity and incomprehension in pages that feel “crowded” with blank space. Silence in these poems reveals more than it conceals, and in its death-like quality, it envisages the catastrophe of the linguistic trauma of bodies that migrate to survive amidst war and seek a utopia, always on the verge of oblivion. However, utopia cannot be reached, as the bodies fade beyond new borders and the mind falls into abstraction. The physical places words and bodies travel to—“Granaries will be wrecked / Welts in marble inured to injury” (Kim 2008, 42)—have undergone destruction, or surge as empty spaces that evoke disillusionment: “They had oared to cross the ocean / And where had they come to / These bearers of a homeland” (22). Life rituals are imbued with the presence of war and annihilation: “Save the water from rinsing rice for sleek hair / This is what the young women are told, then they’re told / Cut off this hair that cedar combs combed / Empty straw sacks and hide under them / Enemy soldiers are approaching, are near” (35). What do our origins and identity mean in a convoluted reality? What is the contrast between our voice and the land that birthed us? “Who is mother tongue, who is father country?” (29).
Family, the first connection we have with people and with the world, is subsumed into the collective, in a complicated reality of labels when crossing borders, almost as an extension of a recurring conversation about brokenness and bafflement:
What must we call each other if we meet there
Brother sister neighbor lover go unsaid what we are
Tens of thousands of names
Go unsaid the family name
(Kim 2008, 19)
Words take on a personality of their own in these poems, and as they appear on the page—leaving large spaces of silence, that is, blank space—they become objects in themselves: embodying a duplicity (language and materiality) mirrored in the human crisis of mind and body. How are we to survive in a world of total inequality and injustice? How are we to locate balance to this dismembered self in a barren land of material and intellectual pillage? “Citizens to the streets marching / Their demands lettered in blood / The leader counters them / With gas meant to thwart any crowd’s ambition / And they must scatter, white cloths over their faces” (Kim 2008, 18). How are we to think of ourselves as “selves,” and as selves that are part of a “whole of selves”? Heidegger told us that “being-with” is an ontological structure of being-in-the-world. And yet, Under Flag hints at a broken social dimension. Solitude and despair now permeate our very existence as human beings. Shared connection is doomed in a realm of emotional emptiness and warlike scenarios.
As we walk through her poems—like a scholar once suggested we do when reading her books—we feel the spaces reserved for silence. At the same time, we are confronted with the materiality of the words, which remind us that our walking is not a stroll in the park but a difficult wading into deep emotion. The musicality of her diction penetrates meaning to find a new form: a personal rearrangement of grammatical rules, neologisms, or near-neologisms that speak of something felt in the body—too complex to be limited by literature. This feature reminds me of my readings of Argentine writer Oliverio Girondo’s poems, in which he created new words that seemingly make no sense but possess a pertinent musicality that transcends lyricism and reveals an inner world—ultimately, an invitation to connect and find togetherness in shared confusion. Much like Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, it’s something almost impossible to translate. In Under Flag, “language is originally in a state of wandering”—like Taiwanese writer 陳克華 Chen Ke Hua once wrote in a poem [「語言原都處於漂泊的狀態」] (Chen 2018, 95). Myung Mi Kim lets her language wander as she starts a new page with:
Will be plain foil credo
Figures previous arboretum
ave mella ferro
(Kim 2008, 28)
The use of blank space, grammatical disruptions, and a broken voice in a language that is not her own constantly remind us how our systems push us toward the depletion of a profound relationship with time, and how the social structures meant to support and nourish us carry us away from communal thinking. This gradually affects our connection with our inner selves and with others. Susan Sontag once wrote: “ours is a culture based on excess, on overproduction; the result is a steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience” (Sontag 2009, 13). That steady loss of sharpness in our sensory experience is being further advanced by a general renunciation to the sanctity of time and human interactions, having a hard time accessing our little utopias, our navigation toward the most beautiful, profound abstraction of the self, the self in community and the self in nature.
As we read, we are at the same time witnessing a world of natural complexity where the hand of man has disempowered the voice of the environment and has dictated how to use the land. One would think that after stealing the voice of nature, a new voice, a human voice, would be the one to rule to establish a new order, or to achieve a different kind of balance, but instead, the demarcation of power alienates humans and creates more silence, not being able to speak of and with nature. In the poem “Demarcation,” Kim writes: “The treble, the trouble, of woods, of words / Elements. Elemental. So speak. Air water rise fall / No way to speak it” (Kim 2008, 37).
This book is, at its core, an account of war, migration and diaspora heading towards a poetics of the self and the existence of human beings in a world of chaos and disconnection. Language, Kim’s vehicle, acts as an exploration of her own and also as an evidence of what is lost, of what cannot be said and recovered as a community of nations that exist beyond physical borders. Language lives in the effort of the tongue (the physiological instrument of speech), in the “mother” tongue, and the extraneous verbal reality that is found in times of physical and intellectual displacement. The role of silence seems to be dwelling in abstraction, serving almost as a reminder of a taste of mortality that appears when words rest from the restless machinery of the brain, which, like bodies, is in a constant quest for a territory that could offer substance and meaning. Violence in these poems is not strictly displayed in a choice of raw lexicon, rather than in the rhythm of the sentence and in the fragmented—sometimes unintelligible, obscure—interactions between words.
As I find myself reading the last poem in the book, I am struck by a feeling of longing, yearning, and something elusive—an experience that slips away before we fully notice. It’s close to a sensation that pervades modern times, in a world fractured by individualism and a lack of depth in human connection. It makes me think about something the writer Karen Tei Yamashita once wrote in her book Letters to Memory: “How close can anyone get to history even if you live it?”
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1. The words that will emerge know things about us that we ignore about them.
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Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. 2001. Dictée. University of California Press.
Chen, Ke Hua. 2018. 陳克華. 與騎鯨少年相遇:陳克華的「詩想」。臺灣商務. Taiwan.
Herrera Guillen, Rafael. 2013. Breve historia de la utopía. Editor digital: FLeCos ePub base r2.1.
Hwang, Joon Ho. 2021. Narratives of “borders conquered, disfigured” in Myung Mi Kim’s Under Flag. Routledge Journals, Taylor and Francis Ltd.
Kim, Myung Mi. 2008. Under Flag. Berkeley: Kelsey Street Press.
Sontag, Susan. 2009. Against Interpretation. Penguin Classics.
Marina Burana is an Argentine writer and painter of Algerian and Italian descent, based in Taiwan. She writes both in English and Spanish and keeps a journal in Chinese and French. She has published 3 books of short stories and her work has appeared in numerous journals, newspapers, and magazines. She is a Reviews Editor for Action, Spectacle magazine and a poetry reader for The Adroit Journal. She is also an amateur violinist, a puppeteer/puppet builder, and a facilitator of participatory art projects for different types of communities. IG handle: @burana_studio
