...Kim, "Into Such Assembly" (30)

I didn't know what a difference in language meant then. Or how my tongue would tie in the initial attempts, stiffen so, struggle like an animal booby-trapped and dying inside my head. Native speakers may not fully know this, but English is a scabrous mouthful.

--Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker (233)

The voice in the first epigraph is that of a teacher helping a student with her English pronunciation. A native Korean speaker tends to have difficulty with the English th sound as in words like thing, thirty, and thirst),. As evidenced by the second epigraph, such contemplations of these difficulties are not unique to Myung Mi Kim's work, and one finds similar concerns in the writings of a good number of other Korean American writers. (1) Because there is no exact corresponding sound in Hangul, the written Korean language, a native Korean speaker tends to replace the th sound with a d or t sound, and "he is thirty," for example, may unfortunately sound like, "he is dirty." There are a handful of other sounds in English that present similar problems for these speakers, Because the process is as much physical as it is mental, both epigraphs demonstrate that acquiring a new language often extends beyond learning syntax, diction, and vocabulary. The student not only needs to learn how certain sounds correspond to certain letters but, often more fundamentally, how to orchestrate the tongue, lips, throat, and teeth in order to produce those sounds at all. What comes naturally in one's native language may become quite awkward in another. Mouths abound in Kim's poems, and her focus is not on speech per se but rather on the physical operation of speaking--that is, on the mechanics and shapes needed to produce the proper sounds necessary, to pronounce English words.

That the mouth in Kim's poetry belongs specifically to a native speaker of Korean makes all the attention even more important because of the deep connection of mouth and script in Hangul (see figure 1). The written consonants of this alphabet correspond to the shape of the mouth as it produces the sound of each letter; the consonants can be divided into categories based on the aspect of the mouth each emphasizes: labial, lingual, dental, molar, and glottal. In addition, within each group of consonants, as the sound becomes harder, the script of the letter becomes correspondingly more complex. An awareness of mouth is thus literally inscribed in the Korean alphabet, and, Kim, in her poetry, transfers this awareness into her dealings with English, her second language.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

The imaginative effort of Kim's poetry, however, is not spent simply in detailing the native Korean speaker's difficulty in learning to pronounce English. Indeed, the straightforward simplicity of the first epigraph is atypical of her generally more experimental and abstract poetry. Rather, Kim's poetry attempts to dramatize not how a foreign speaker learns to speak the native language of a new place but how the languages themselves learn to speak each other. Although her concern is not exactly translation, her poetics takes up the task of the translator as conceived by Walter Benjamin:

Translation thus ultimately serves the purpose of expressing the central reciprocal relationship between languages. It cannot possibly reveal or establish this hidden relationship itself; but it can represent it by realizing it in embryonic or intensive form.... As for the posited central kinship of languages, it is marked by a distinctive convergence. Languages are not strangers to one another, but are, a priori and apart from all historical relationships, interrelated in what they want to express. (72)

For Benjamin, translation functions not simply to transcribe accurately the content of the original language into another but also, and more importantly, to seek kinships between both languages. Kim's poetry aspires to locate this sort of kinship not only of languages but of mouths and uses this linguistic convergence of would-be strangers, of languages, as a means to think about the social integration of strangers in another sense: that of immigrants.

The presence of such a social project, admittedly, seems unlikely in Kim's poem "And Sing We," which expresses much of its content implicitly through its style. Although it may seem a random collage, the poem does assert an organizing logic. On a fundamental level, the poem is about immigration and assimilation. It therefore appropriates many of the issues common to Asian American literature--in particular loss, dislocation, and displacement. In addition, the poem seems to engage in what Patricia Chu foregrounds as a primary task of Asian American literature:

I argue that one of the central ideological tasks accomplished by Asian American literary texts is the construction of Asian American subjects through the transformation of existing narratives about American identity. To accomplish these fundamental tasks, Asian American writers have to address the dislocations particular to Asian immigration, the average American's unawareness of Asian American history and culture, and the deeply entrenched presumption that Asian Americans are not American. Because these factors affect Asian Americans both materially and in their cultural production, they have also entered the literature thematically.... Hence, this literature both foregrounds and seeks to resolve the contradictions of being Asian American in a country that has historically construed the terms Asian and American as mutually exclusive. (3-4)

The ideological exercise of transforming "existing narratives about American identity" laid out by Chu above becomes re-imagined in "And Sing We" as a poetic task that deals less with foreign and native identities and more with foreign and native languages. Although the emphasis shifts from social to linguistic concerns, it remains engaged with the project that Chu describes: "to resolve the contradictions of being Asian American in a country that has historically construed the terms Asian and American as mutually exclusive." In Kim's poem, the marginal becomes fundamental: the mouth of the native Korean speaker, with all of its awkwardness in speaking English, become the basis for the work of bridging the poem undertakes through its style. As a social project, the poem perhaps lacks distinctiveness; in many ways, it typifies the repeated theme of bridging and resolving conflicting identity positions in Asian American literature. What is more distinctive, however, is the poem's expenditure of imaginative energy in its attempt to re-imagine English as if it were Hangul and Hangul as if it were English.

"And Sing We" broaches these issues through the titles of not only the poem but also the volume it opens, Under Flag (1991). The pronoun we in the poem's title invites the obvious questions regarding identity: To whom does the poet refer here? Who is "we"? And, a related but not synonymous question, Who are we? In the volume's first poem, these questions seem unanswerable outside a national context: Are we all under one flag? Are Asian and American mutually exclusive, or is there a way to resolve this contradiction? The poem's rifle, in this regard, appropriately begins with the conjunction and, which reflects the poem's concern for the act of bridging the gaps caused by dislocation. Finally, the verb sing invokes voice, which the poem explores by considering mouths and perhaps by alluding here to Walt Whitman, the most celebrated singer in American poetry, whose song is often understood as being voiced by a representative, democratic American voice. (2)

In its opening lines, "And Sing We" begins to address the problem of dislocation by foregrounding gaps and lacunae of various kinds, both literal and figurative. And even from these early moments in the poem, we witness that the immigrant's emotional dislocation registers in the poem not only thematically but also stylistically:

Must it ring so true So we must sing it To span even yawning distance And would we be near then What would the sea be, if we were near it (13)

The opening couplet divides ten...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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