Winner of the National Book Award (USA)
‘I decided to translate the stories of eight girls who survived the Sancheong-Hamyang massacre, which took place in Gyeongsangnam-do, a southern province of South Korea, in 1951. My decision to translate the girls’ stories wasn’t entirely mine alone. It can take billions of years for light to reach us through the galaxies, which is to say, History is ever arriving.’
Woven from verse, prose, photographs, historical reports, typographic experimentation, drawings and more, DMZ Colony explores Edward Said’s notion of ‘intertwined and overlapping histories’ in regards to South Korea and the United States. At the start, the call of geese in the American sky translates into the letters D, M and Z, calling her back to her country of birth, Korea. She travels to a traditional village in the DMZ, the demilitarised zone, on the border of North and South Korea. There she interviews an old man who, although tortured brutally for many years, didn’t give up his belief in Communism. The artful use of the oral history genre continues as she gives voice to orphan survivors of a government massacre. In a language of haunting and suggestive construction, increasingly words give way to her father’s documentary photos from the time of General Park Chung Hee’s brutal putsch and dictatorship, a regime supported by the USA.
Like its sister books in Choi’s highly acclaimed KOR-US trilogy (Hardly War and Mirror Nation), DMZ Colony holds history accountable, its very presence a resistance to empire and a hope in humankind.
