“Lady No” by Kim Hyesoon

First published anonymously in March 2014 as a series of blog posts, Lady No is Kim Hyesoon’s latest collection of poetry translated into English. These posts were written during the most politically significant years of South Korea, when the ferry MV Sewol sank, killing 304 people, including 250 high school students. The event and the poor handling of the disaster contributed to the impeachment of then president, Park Geun-hye. While her poems are critical of  the political failures  of modern-day South Korea, her sharpest attacks are directed towards an allegorical country, “Aerok”. In his translator’s note, Jack Saebyok Jung describes Aerok as “a mirror version of Korea where the country’s anxieties, gender politics, and media obsessions are magnified.”

Aerok effectively provides Kim the latitude to employ the grotesque without risking incredulity. In “Aerok Fiction Factory”, the poet describes the absurd and violent production of fiction:

There once was a country where beatings produced works of fiction.
The tools needed for producing such fictions were clubs, screams, and bathtubs.
There were various methods of completing a work of fiction, such as beating, hanging, and pushing a writer’s face into water.
When a writer’s progress on their fiction slowed down, the screaming of friends, relatives, parents, and spouses were brought into the adjoining room, and this pushed the peak of the fiction’s climax higher.

The violence in the poem alludes to Kim’s own experience as an editor during the dictatorship that ruled South Korea until the 1980s, where she hit seven times after refusing to reveal the name of a subversive translator. Moreover, she marks how the censorship and propaganda mechanism,  rather than be removed, merely adapted its method of control. In the last section of the poem, Kim plays on the metaphor of the carrot and stick, writing how

After ages passed, when the daily record-keeper of Aerok’s tortures was elected mayor,
an order came down that now instead of beatings, carrots would be hung around everyone’s neck.

Kim’s style does not readily conform to poetic traditions, a form she labels as “shisanmun — poetry-prose, or po-prose, ‘minus poetry, minus prose.’”

With both the structure and the substance, Kim challenges the industrialization of the creative process. “The Name of Poetry” reinforces the elimination of the author by separating the identity of the poet from their work, then erasing their name.

The poetry of ‘I’ is where the name of ‘I’ is erased.
There, ‘I’ is the one who is most terrified of the name of ‘I.’
Poetry is the language of the one who has fallen beneath one’s name.
Because one’s name carries death.
Because in poetry ‘my’ is the one who can’t stand ‘I’ the most.
Once one has run far away from a name, poetry finally begins.

That aversion towards the presence of the poet speaks to how the pieces of shisanmun were originally published with the pseudonym, ahn-ah, which later transformed into the title of the text. Jung offers some context on the origins of Lady No, explaining how it was initially considered as 

Thus Spoke n’t, then Thus Spoke No, and at one point known as Thus Spoke Lady No, the book now simply appears as Lady No. This shifting title, much like the pseudonym ahn-ah, evokes the idea of negation—of refusing established categories, refusing compliance and, in the final iteration, personifying resistance as a figure of feminist critique.

That theme of resistance is prominent in the poem, “The Privilege of Bleeding”. A child was humiliated by her friend and asks Lady No to take her to the hospital. Rather than acquiescing to the request, Lady No told the child to take revenge instead.

Underneath pure white quilt between pure white walls,
Exercising the privilege of bleeding,
A child lay still, wanting to take revenge against her friend, and lying beside the child
Lady No imagined a revenge that dug into the grave’s embrace.
She imagined taking revenge and exercising the privilege of disappearing forever.

The anonymity of the girl and the vague details of her humility elevates her to a symbol of younger women, a generation inspired by Lady No to take their blood as proof of injury and justification for revenge. In turn, imagination becomes the first path to empowerment, rendering revenge possible. The grotesquery, often weaponized against the weak and the abused, has now been claimed by the girl and Lady No, albeit still a germ of feminist imagination.

Written with the same force as her other books, Lady No joins Kim Hyesoon’s oeuvre of sharp, brutal poetry.

The allegorical city of Aerok and the persona of Lady No add a new dimension to the themes that the poet has previously written: oppression, feminism, capitalism, an unjust world. However, they do not take away from the style that is uniquely Kim Hyesoon’s. Written with the same force as her other books, Lady No joins Kim Hyesoon’s oeuvre of sharp, brutal poetry.