Skirt Full of Black, by Sun Yung Shin
(Coffee House Press, 2006)
What is identity supposed to be? Should it be stable? Should we be aspiring for stability? Sun Yung Shin is Korean-American, her book is overtly political, and so am I supposed to be reading Skirt Full of Black as a testament to the Korean-American experience? There are books of contemporary poetry whose explicit and often repeated theme is the texture of life when living with that single identity. But Sun Yung Shin complicates how we see her. She is a mother, a woman, a girl who had been separated from her twin in the womb, an emigrant to the United States. In other words, identities are confused. And with Shin, poetic identities are language-driven, which confuses them further. And don't look to narrative to connect these disparate points together.
Which seems appropriate. Especially in this book, where the speaker presents not just a fractured accumulation of identity, but, in fact, a swirl of priorities that pull her to think about many different identities, usually by swift, not-necessarily-logical associations. How does the Korean language fit into the Altaic system, into the landscape of Asian languages? How should a Korean-American living in the United States respond to the Western assumptions about Korea? What obligation does a Korean-American woman have to recast the history of women in Korea?
Quite honestly, I relish this confusion. Too often I feel identity poems settle for a conventional set of assumptions, and these assumptions act as a dividing point in the poem. "This injustice exists" is opposed to "this is how things should be." The book often works from a set narrative, where the speaker is forced to endure some undignified circumstance. And while Skirt Full of Black does have references to the kisaeng parties, where female entertainers attended to one man (from “Economic Miracles”), and reference to the typewriter as a tool used primarily by women, these aren't narratives as much as they're flat facts. As the reader, I am left to infer the significance. In fact, in these circumstances, I am left in my own swirl, where I try to discover how and why the poet fits these facts with the disparate set of identities she presents in the book.
The true dilemma of Skirt Full of Black, then, is discerning which should be given more weight: the politics, the speaker's identity, or the speaker's biography. We learn she is in the United States and she is a mother. Was she one of the many adopted children who were shipped to the United States from Korea? Is she the daughter of an American serviceman? Is she married to a white man? Personal facts like these are to clearly related to Sun Yung Shin. Because even as she introduces them, she is also placing them alongside fictional elements, like the fable of a girl who is the youngest sister of 11 boys. This fabled girl is the personas of Eve and a princess and Pandora. She is almost every mythical role for a woman that exists.
All of which is to say that Skirt Full of Black is a welcoming, complicating, consistently deviating take on one person's Korean-American identity. Kimiko Hahn is not Korean-American; however, her book The Unbearable Heart could be an excellent counterpoint to Skirt Full of Black. Where Skirt Full of Black offers no consistent narrative, only fragments and impressions, The Unbearable Heart focuses on a central narrative regarding the speaker's family after they lose her father. Both books show an intense concern with language, though. And both are clearly cognizant that the language of a poem is like a machine, in that it guides a reader through facts and impressions. Part of that machine is the implicit logic connecting those facts and impressions--an implicit logic that is closest to that unspoken understanding of what an identity might mean.
Recommended Links:
Skirt Full of Black
The Unbearable Heart
Sun Yung Shin's homepage
Sung Yung Shin @ From the Fishouse
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