Fractured Families and Poetics in Don Mee Choi’s DMZ Colony

In considering how individuals, and in particular children, grapple with and grieve family dynamics altered and/or annihilated by militaristic violence, one is left to reckon with the implications and outcomes of an intersection of kinship and state formation. This is particularly pertinent to works such as Dictee (1982) by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and the poetry of the Korean American Don Mee Choi, whose writing draws inspiration from Cha’s seminal work. A close consideration of the above conditions as represented in these texts highlights the difficulty in defining what constitutes freedom. With this in mind, I will closely analyse Choi’s DMZ Colony (2020) as a representation of how fractured and composite histories portray families severed by war and imperialism while also describing a poetics that is resistant to Western discourse and empire. In specific reference to Choi’s collection, I investigate “The Orphans” section, which provides a narrative in which eight young girls tell their stories of survival during the 1951 Sancheong-Hamyang massacre. With these testimonies, I will examine what I call the poetics of fracture, a poetry which details the primary feature of state-sanctioned violence: that of the severing of kinship bonds and the fracturing of the family unit.