Men think women should do trivial things on the margins. They think women should be merely a seasoning for a dish. I feel anger and sorrow seeing this.
Women are foils to men. It is hard for women to take a lead role even in NGOs for political resistance.
Living in Korea as a girl meant living under a lot of discrimination and limitation. It was the same in my university and in the Korean literary world I am involved in now.
As a sick kid, I always looked out the window. The objects of my observation were the sun, the seasons, the wind, crazy people, and my grandfather's death. During my long period of observation, I felt that something like poems were filling up my body. They were in some kind of state and condition that made them difficult to render into words. As a university student, I tried hard to write them in Korean. It was at that time that I foresaw my death and the world's death. I think my poems started at that time.
If you happen to live in Korea, you might always suffer from anger towards people in power, because of political and social problems. I felt gloomy under this social dictatorship. Looking back, I feel like I never saw a sunrise in Seoul. When I was at university, the policemen used to measure how short the women's mini-skirts were and how long guys' hair was. We were living under a government that considers her people to be soldiers.
If someone asks, Is anyone alive? Break, your, head, open, and, show, your, ten, ta, cle.
In Korea, a woman must first obey her father, then her husband when she becomes an ajuma, and finally obey her son as a halmoni. Any woman who violates or lives outside of these roles is called a ch'angyŏ (prostitute).
You cannot call a poem female just because it is written by a woman. Nevertheless, I think attempts to find femininity in female bodies, life, and thinking, attempts to find a way for women to speak, will improve widely in Korea.
South Korea is one of the worst countries when it comes to opportunity for women in social activities and employment. To my disgust, in certain communities in Korea, you cannot even imagine how severe sex discrimination is.
If you propose there is a feminism problem in Korea, somebody would point out that you are bringing up antiquated issues. No one acknowledges that discrimination against women is still widespread.
It seems Korean women are enjoying a passive and fragile status, intoxicated by appearance. Not only feminism, but any serious discourse ends up being swept away by popular culture in Korea.
Korean feminism has been swept away by popular culture. It became a sort of old-fashioned trend or a joke.
Our mothers who have gone are buried in our bodies. It can be said that we were born with dead mothers in our body.
Korean feminism is on the brink of death. Korea has a less clear boundary between popular literature and serious literature than in other countries. I feel that feminism is abandoned like a product that was a craze in the past.
Mother does not exist, like water that has given life to a flower and then disappeared. Mothers live somewhere after giving birth to us.
My mom does not exist anymore, and I cannot see my mother in myself. To me, the word "mother" is the synonym for the words "parting" or "separation" or "farewell."
Mother is a synonym for abandonment and death. Comparing this synonym to water, it is like poured-out water. I call it mother, the identity that I cannot identify.
Once, I compared poetry to mothers in my book called To Write as a Woman, because my mother is someone who captures me in her body and gave birth to me out of her desire but washed her hands of me after giving birth to me as a poet.
The language of poetry is not stuck in place. Nothing can own language. I think, however, the genre of poetry itself is very feminine and motherly.
I am a tomb robber who is robbing my own tomb. Things from my tomb are exhibited under the radiant sun. Every time it happens I feel crude.
Since the boundary of the world of poetry is fluid, the language in it is also fluid. Hence, the language that is outside of the poetry world, namely the language that is not the language of poetry, cannot go into the poetry world.
My body is full of graves. A sepulcher is dug up, and a young girl comes out of it with her dusty hands in tears. A lady who is a young girl and an old girl at the same time feels the presence of the young girl. I feel that the 15-year-old me and the 50-year-old me come out of the sepulcher through an illegal excavation.
Poems are ways of saying you clearly remember the day of your death and your tomb. When I am writing poetry, I relive my days when a woman inside me dies many times.
Poems are a dance of language that comes out when my body taps into the rhythm of language. Rhythm gets us naked and exposes our selves completely.
Alienation between the content and form happens frequently in my poems because I obstinately carry on dismantling my body, an act you can also call "dismantling delusion." I think that after I dismantle my female body, I can finally dismantle established lyric poems.
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