Animalized Asians in Li-Young Lee’s “The Cleaving” and Myung Mi Kim’s Poetics of Commons

초록

This paper aims to address Asian (im)migrants’ animalized or Otherized humanity and representations of humanity transposed to animlaity in two poets’ poems (Li-Young Lee and Myung Mi Kim) which jointly create a constellation that provides a universal picture of Asians in oppressive history. By this analysis, this paper endeavors to envision two cross-ethnic and cross-aesthetic relations between Li-Young Lee’s commonplace of animalized Asians and Myung Mi Kim’s poetics of commons. Li-Young Lee’s poem, “Cleaving” raises a fundamental question of historicity related to beings’ facticity and visualizes, as an ontological de-hierarchization, death as commonly relational ethos of all beings. By these fundamental question and visualization Lee posits this imagery of history and universal Being to physical and spiritual imageries of immigrants; in turn, Lee ends his poem with an image of gathering of all different immigrants into a common place or a ring where the alterity on their faces requires ethical responsibility. Myung Mi Kim’s poems, relational and experimental, draw a constellation which delivers ideas about animalized humanity in the context of global violence such as wars and colonization of Korea and other nations. This paper especially focuses two long poems from her Commons which can be read as a manifesto of her poetics. This paper also shows how Myung Mi Kim traces Western philosophies, aesthetics, and their spirits by forming commons as a literary space of a community through the rhythm of historicity from which she envisages a space of errancy or a trans-spatial experience.

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