The Brooklyn Rail

Ultimately, Photography is subversive not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks… The photographs I am speaking of are in effect punctuated, sometimes even speckled with these sensitive points; precisely these marks, these wounds are so many points. This second element which will disturb the studium I shall therefore call punctum.

History is hysterical.

–Roland Barthes from Camera Lucida,
translated by Richard Howard

In Hardly War (2016), I explored what the language of wound might sound and look like. I incorporated my father’s photographs taken during the Korean and Vietnam Wars into my poems so that the images and sounds become part of the anticolonial poetic resistance. I folded race/identity into geopolitics and geopolitics into poetry. Hence, Hardly War is generated by geopolitical poetics that involves disobeying history, severing its ties to colonizing power. It strings together the faintly remembered, the faintly imagined, the faintly discarded, which is to say race=nation gets to speak its own faint history in its own faint language. Its mere umbilical cord is hardly attached to anything at all. Hence, hardly=war.

I used translingual punning throughout the book in an attempt to create a new anticolonial vocabulary of wound. For example, my repetitive use of “Me=Gook” throughout the book. “Me=Gook” sounds the same as “America” in Korean; “Me” sounds the same as “beauty”; and “Gook” sounds the same as “nation” and “soup.” When Korea fell under the control of the US military government in 1945, a part of our race had split off as ppalgaengi, Reds or Commies. But really, anyone in “those white pajama things,” traditional pants, which majority of the Koreans wore back then, was seen as a gook. This is how a gook=nation was born. Our race, our national identity, even our clothing became racialized and geopoliticized within the global class war. Therefore, when I was born in the tiny, tile-roofed house in Seoul, I was already geopolitically raced. Hence, me=gook.

O in English sounds the same as number five in Korean. And number five refers to the five petals of the rose of Sharon, which is the national flower and emblem for the Republic of Korea. The news footage in the film, The Deer Hunter, projected onto a paper dress is my father’s. For me, that twenty-nine seconds of footage embedded in the three hour-long film, is punctum, is wound. The dress becomes a pensive site. It’s a site of resistance. It thinks, it speaks. I wanted the punctum of the film and the punctum O words to overlap, to double, to double their pensiveness. Wound=Wound.

History is hysterical…The chopper blades tilt, making a diagonal line across the entire screen. That strange cry. It wants to go home—O like me, like my father… My father’s framing never sways even when flowers call to him. He edits as he films, he often told me. He’s still nowhere to be seen. Missing in action somewhere in Cambodia, filming carpet bombing, my mother said. O the chopper’s belly convulses. O it’s in immeasurable pain. The chopper’s door opens and the pilot and men in white shirts and dark pants spill out. IT’S ALSO BEEN THE LARGEST SINGLE MOVEMENT OF PEOPLE IN THE HISTORY OF AMERICA ITSELF. The chopper’s blades are swirling in every frenzied direction. O suicidal lines. Sayonara, Saigon! HILARY BROWN, ABC NEWS ABOARD THE ATTACK AIRCRAFT CARRIER USS HANCOCK IN THE SOUTH CHINA SEA. White with foam. Now I see buttons on History’s blouse.