‘내부의 이방인들’과 ‘태생의 시’

Outsiders Within, Poetry of Origin: A Study of Korean American Adoptee Poetry

Adoptee discourse and its literature have garnered the critical interest and attention very recently under the numerous approaches to transnational, transracial subjects, transnational flows of people, good, and knowledge. But there has been little or no attempt to consider how ‘different’ the languages of adoptees are, expecially in the field of poetry. Trying to capture the different voices of Korean American Adoptee poets, this essay attempts to ponder on rather flexible practices of poetry writings by contemporary Korean American Adoptees in and out of the border crossing discourses. I will propose that close reading of poetic languages by Korean Adoptee poets, outsiders within in America reveals that there we can see breaks and rifts on the recognition of adoption rather than a single voice of displacement. Poems of Lee Herrick, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, and Sun Yung Shin, whose poetry books were published in the same year in 2007, traverse freely from their living places in America to Seoul, their birthplace, origin. In their flexible, mobile meandering, Korean adoptees once uprooted and abandoned from their birthplace go back to the very place of origin and keep on constructing their identities, which is a not-yet-finished process itself. To invite their poems to the critical field of contemporary poetics is to experience these new languages and forms of ‘outsiders within’ both in America and in Korea. Their poems, sometimes fallen in a somewhat nostalgic mood, sometimes being a sign of blessings, or being a weapon to pierce the guilt sense of Koreans, or being an experimental form that draws Hangul in a white page, are not staying on the level of privation, depression, or rage. Rather the different voices of these Korean Adoptee poets prove that their poetic returning in English wearing various poetic forms is a ceremony and practice crossing the long distance of erasure and reconciliation, so that they take an active role in refashioning a literary landscape of contemporary Korean and American poetry.