Citizens of Literature

At a reading in Seoul on May 24, the novelistKim Young-ha reflected on the recent death ofPhilip Roth. From the US, or more specifically,a Jewish enclave of greater New York City, Portnoy’sComplaint and other of Roth’s books in translation had madetheir way to Kim’s South Korea. However different theirbackgrounds, Kim felt bonded to Roth on account of theirshared “citizenship of literature.” Through books, Kim said,the world could feel simultaneously vast and small, and newsolidarities could be forged. He described the familiar, evenfamilial, sense of community at readings across the globe.I looked around and thought how at home the audiencewould seem at a bookstore back in America.Kim said something else that I’ve thought about manytimes since. He reminded us that Korean society is nowundeniably multiethnic and multicultural, on the brink ofproducing diasporic literature. There will soon be novelswritten by immigrants from Vietnam and poems crafted byBangladeshi Koreans, all of it, Kim said, “Korean literature.”I mulled these literal and figurative citizenships atsubsequent readings organized by LTI Korea. The first wasin September, at the Asian American Writers’ Workshopin Manhattan, where poet Song Kyung-dong and fictionwriter Hwang Jungeun were in conversation with JenniferKwon Dobbs, a poet, professor, and Korean adoptee basedin Minnesota. (I had the luck of moderating the panel.)Here were three writers whose social consciences were asdeveloped as their facility with words. Across a linguisticdivide, they spoke on the theme of “resistance” throughpolitics and on the page. (At a related event, Song andHwang read with Alexander Chee and John Freeman; seetheir essays starting on page 18.)The second reading was in late October, at the SeoulInternational Writers’ Festival. (See page 59 for a transcriptof a separate festival talk, “Gender—Sight without Seeing.”)During the Q&A, Chehem Watta, a French-speakingpoet from Djibouti, threw a challenging question to thecrowd: “What place do foreigners have in Korea?” Wattahad in mind, I assume, South Korea’s recent denial ofrefugee status to a group of Yemeni migrants, as well as thehundreds of thousands of “foreign” workers whose existenceis made intentionally precarious by those in power. Willmulticulturalism continue to be a synonym for assimilation,or will it evolve into a politics of welcome?A few days after Watta,s invocation, I made a pilgrimageto the LTI Korea library. I marveled at the stacks of Koreanvolumes in unfamiliar tongues, and took pleasure in seeingtranslators of all races pore over their latest infatuations.There is no “logical” reason why someone from Zagrebor Accra, St. Petersburg or Bogotá would fall in love withKorean literature. And yet.These connections are always urgent but feel even more sonow. South Korea, however imperfectly governed, is a relativeisle of tolerance in a time of frightening nationalisms. Soonafter my visit to LTI Korea, 5,600 of my fellow Americans,employed by our incomparable military, were sent to theborder with Mexico. They had become unwitting emissaries ofour brutal head of state, called upon not to serve and protect,but to bolster anti-immigrant sentiment and deter a desperatequeue of Latin American migrants from claiming asylum, as istheir right under international law.The current US president is famously averse to reading.He is not illiterate, but non-literate, anti-literate. At the riskof sounding reductive, I do wonder what difference—inknowledge and empathy—a dose of literature might make.Literature in translation, all the more so. 

E. Tammy Kim 

Reporter and essayist 

based in Brooklyn, NY