타자의 고통 재현의 양가성

Ambivalence in the Representation of Others’ Suffering: Suji Kwock Kim’s Korean War Poetry

This essay discusses the political and aesthetic significance in Suji Kwock Kim’s description of Koreans’ suffering as a way of reviving the Korean War, conventionally referred to as the “Forgotten War” in American society. The war serves as key subject matter in her first book, Notes from the Divided Country (2003), which received much critical acclaim, including the 2002 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. In her Korean War poems, Suji Kwock Kim represents Koreans’ collective suffering through the crystallizing images of violated bodies and the old battlefield hidden in contemporary Seoul. The essay focuses on the potentially ambivalent effects of her aesthetic strategy of provoking American readers’ humanitarian feelings toward Korean victims as well as the risk of re-inscribing stereotypical portrayals of ethnic minorities and their foreign lands. The multiple readings lead to the argument that Kim’s war poems should not be construed simply as an attempt to familiarize American readers with an old Third World tragedy. They also capture Kim’s position as a second generation Korean American where the dualism between Same and Other is more subtle and complicated. In this regard, I would argue that Kim’s war poems reveal the possibility that contemporary approaches to the more than 60-year-old “Forgotten War” can still create a site for debatable political and literary concerns.