Read on Twitter
In this pamphlet, @DonMeeChoi contextualizes Deleuze and Guattari's thesis "there is no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language" through her experience as someone from the neocolony, a feminist translator
By debunking mother tongue, Don Mee also refutes second tongue, in a world of US militarism and neoliberal economy, there's no longer space for western lit vs. national (bordered) literatures. She points to how mother language (here: korean) is already a class construction
I am enchanted by Don Mee's reflection on mirrors in relation to korean women's spirituality "to intensify energies, to induce trances, or to light a path to the underworld during spirit-travel." My reference for mirrors is rather western, which dismisses it as (not the original)
I'm thinking here of how Salman Rushdie, for ex, says for the emigre writer to write about the homeland from exile, is to look back through a broken mirror. We are fixated at what's lost via mirroring, not what's to be revealed, enhanced
Don Mee uses the examples of mirrors in Bergman's The Silence, as well as this poem she translated by the great Korean poet Kim Hyesoon:
