Death’s Houseguest: Reading Kim Hyesoon’s Autobiography of Death, trans. Don Mee Choi
by Rochelle Hurt
Kim Hyesoon’s Autobiography of Death enacts poetic necromancy—not to communicate with the dead, who are perhaps beyond our reach, but with death itself. In this collection, Hyesoon is death’s ghostwriter and architect, sketching out “the structure of death,” a structure in which (as she explains in an interview with the collection’s translator, Don Mee Choi) we are all living. Indeed as I read the book, I started to think of death as a physical structure being built poem by poem around me. Once I began, there was no way out—no way back to thinking I wasn’t living inside death’s house, a guest among many ghost-guests.
These guests include the hundreds of students who died in the Sewol ferry disaster in 2014. One of the collection’s most moving poems, “I Want to Go to the Island,” addresses this event directly, and Hyesoon cites it, along with other Korean national tragedies caused by governmental corruption, as an impetus for writing the collection: “Why does our country make us ashamed for being alive, for surviving these tragic events?” Collectivity is an important aspect of the work, and Hyesoon links a collective experience of death to generative anonymity, negativity, and absence. In death’s house, “the body becomes anonymous, disenfranchised, and expelled,” and it is here that death’s language is born. Hyesoon’s use of the second person in these poems achieves a sense of simultaneous anonymity and collectivity. You, the reader, are stripped of your specific bodily circumstance when you enter into these poems. You could be any “you,” yet you are still you—you think. Aren’t you? At what point in death do you become another you? Hyesoon writes: “You’re merely a ripple upon ripple of the top floor of the abyss.”
Autobiography of Death contains one poem for each of the 49 days it takes the soul to journey through a liminal space between death and reincarnation, as well as a final long poem at the end of this journey—so at the close of the book, the reader-guests must leave death’s house—or maybe the walls simply come apart. Hyesoon says that she wants readers to be left with nothing in the end: “I wanted the poems to vaporize.”
Generically I’ve come to think of this book as philosophical horror, but as Hyesoon herself writes, “explanation is a lie,” so rather than go on explaining, I’ll lay down some of Hyesoon’s lines in a blueprint you can use for a brief tour of death’s house, or maybe directions for getting out. Click on the floor plan for a full view.
Rochelle Hurt is the founding editor of The Bind. She is the author of In Which I Play the Runaway (Barrow Street, 2016), which won the Barrow Street Prize, and The Rusted City: A Novel in Poems (White Pine, 2014). She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Central Florida.