BOMB Reviews Don Mee Choi's Hardly War

We can't get enough of Don Mee Choi's new book, Hardly War (mentioned here back in March). At BOMB, Lizzie Tribone writes that "Choi was moved to write Hardly War after she attended Heiner Goebbels’s 'Songs of Wars I Have Seen,' a concert work directly inspired by [Gertrude] Stein’s wartime memoir," Wars I Have Seen. A collection of poetry, prose, photography, and opera seen through the lens of Choi's adolescent self, it also "confronts the official histories of the Korean and Vietnam Wars, [focusing] on smaller images and objects informed by those larger histories." More from "Bad News":

Her father, a documentary photographer, would “bring back photographs of the wars he saw, then leave again.” His black-and-white images of Vietnam and Korea accompany her childhood sketches throughout. Imitating the spastic, unfiltered pattern of a child’s cognition, many of Choi’s poems lapse into fantastical babble, such as in “Kitty Stew”: “Under the starry night / Why, it’s practically a jungle / Hello Fatty! Hello Kitty! / Meow I love SPAM! / … / Miss you Mommy!”

The photographs serve as both a reminder of war and a medium that re-enlivens or resuscitates it. She quotes Roland Barthes, who wrote in Camera Lucida that photographs are “a new form of hallucination… (on the one hand ‘it is not there,’ on the other ‘but it has indeed been’).” They embody history as artifacts but can also elicit painful memories in the present. Choi cannot look away: she urges in “6.25,” “now look at this and look at it and look at it.” In “Operation Punctum,” she narrates her father’s newsreel footage as it appears in the classic 1978 film, The Deer Hunter, describing the onlookers’ shared trauma. In the collection’s closing piece, “Hardly Opera,” she brings the mementos and objects her father documented to life, and in doing so enacts a belief she held as a child—that these items “followed him and lived inside his camera.”

In a past interview, Choi described translation as a decolonizing act, and she has also spoken about how it subconsciously informs her own process. Translation can occupy a seemingly contradictory ideological terrain: while it allows regional writers to author their own voices and histories, its overwhelmingly Anglophone nature not only bears but also potentially reinforces colonial legacies.

Choi hints at this complexity by refusing to write completely in English and by challenging the structure and role of language in general. Indeed, Hardly War is a sort of arrested translation—its parts communicate neither fully nor easily...

Read it all at BOMB!