Poetry for Students

132 Poetry for Students

mother to speak more English in their upstate New

York home. That way, Suji could learn to speak

English, which she did. She also lost her knowl-

edge of Korean. Regaining it became a project

when she was in college at Yale, and later, on a

fellowship in Seoul, also regaining a connection to

Korea. Much of her poetry is about Korea, about

war, bloodshed, division.

[Ms. Suji Kwock Kim (Poet)]: “Occupation.”

‘The soldiers are hard at work building a house.

They hammer bodies into the earth like nails. They

paint the walls with blood. Inside, the doors stay

shut, locked as eyes of stone. Inside, the stairs feel

slippery; all flights go down. There’s no floor, only

a roof where ash is falling. Dark snow, human

snow, thickly, mutely falling. “Come,” they say,

“this house will last forever. You must occupy it,

and you and you and you and you. Come,” they

say, “there is room for everyone.”’

“Occupation” is one of the poems inNotes

From the Divided Countries, Suji Kwock Kim’s first

book. The poet Yusef Komunyakaa chose it for the

Walt Whitman Award, given to an outstanding

young poet. Suji Kwock Kim’s poems reflect a Ko-

rean heritage passed on to her in the unlikely en-

virons of Poughkeepsie, New York. That’s where

her father, a doctor, found work and took the fam-

ily. This was in the 1970s, just as Korean immi-

gration to the US really started to take off.

This was definitely the very beginning of it.

And especially since this was upstate New York,

this was not like growing up in New York City or

Los Angeles where there are really large Korean-

American and Asian-American communities. But

at the same time, I think because of that particular

isolation, my parents were even more eager to make

sure that the stories about their relatives who didn’t

survive either the Japanese occupation of Korea or

the Korean War—they were even more determined

that I know about that.

Well, some of those stories, it seems, are the

substance, the stories behind poems that you’ve

now written, and I wonder if you could read one

of them for us.

Of course. I’d love to. This is a poem called

“Borderlands,” and it’s dedicated to my grand-

mother. Now the context of this poem is that, of

course, the Japanese occupied Korea starting in 1910

in a formal way, but they actually had arrived in Ko-

rea in 1905. And the Japanese occupation went on

until, really, the American liberation in 1945, and,

of course, it was quite brutal. So this comes out of

that particular context and it’s called “Borderlands.”

Crush my eyes, bitter grapes, wring out the wine of

seeing. We try to escape across the frozen Yalu to

Chientao or Harbin. I saw the Japanese soldiers shoot.

I saw men and women from our village blown to hi-

eroglyphs of viscera, engraving nothing. River of

never, river, the opposite of Lethe, the opposite of

forgetting; dividing those who lived from those who

are killed. Why did I survive? I wondered at each

body with its separate skin, its separate suffering. My

childhood friend lay on the boot-blackened ice. I

touched his face with disbelief. I tried to hold his

hand, but he snatched it away as if he were ashamed

of dying, eye grown large with everything it saw,

everyone who disappeared. Pupil of suffering. Lonely

O, blank of an eye rolled back into its socket. I was

afraid to see you. Last thoughts, last dreams crawl-

ing through his skull like worms.

How do you summon these horrific battlefield

images, which, while obviously the experience of your

extended family, seem, I assume, a world apart from

Poughkeepsie, New York, in the 1970s and ’80s?

Very much so. In fact, that’s interesting. The

whole epigraph to that section is one that I took

from Brecht. And it has something to do with what

I believe is very important in terms of the respon-

sibility that one has in terms of using the imagina-

tion as a means of compassion and understanding

things that one couldn’t have experienced. The

Brecht epigraph is, ‘It is the crudest form of empa-

thy when the actor simply asks: What should I be

like if this or that were to happen to me?’ And,

of course, in that epigraph, in the context, he is

Monologue for an Onion

But at the same

time, I think because of

that particular isolation,

my parents were even more

eager to make sure that the

stories about their relatives

who didn’t survive either

the Japanese occupation of

Korea or the Korean

War—they were even more

determined that I know

about that.”