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[hayorii]

The Past is Never Finished

Hayeon Kim 김하연

The sound of a song flows through us with boundless views stretching before our eyes along the snow-capped Tien Shan road in the closing scene of the film Heart of Snow, Heart of Blood: “I can see a distant road from the window. Where is the sadness coming from? … I feel alive but undead as well. Where is the sadness coming from?” (Kim, 1:37:00) These images and sounds emerge against and fade into the screen as well as us, the audience. Our gaze upon Koryu-saram by which he or she is perceived is the gaze through which he or she vanishes from us. Sometime, somewhere, here and now, something has been lost in and out of Korean diasporic history; the loss can only be assessed by the remnants of it, by how these remains are retained. Soyoung Kim attempts such retrieval by summoning up what she calls “the technology of the dead” throughout her documentary film series, Kim Alex’s Place: Ansan−Tashkent (2014) and Heart of Snow, Heart of Blood (2014), the first work of Exile Trilogy. Her approach renders a quiet, supposedly unobtrusive glimpse into the life of Koryu-saram, an embodiment of the forgotten past and the uncertain present. The life history of a diasporic subject herein involves a collapse of time that is altogether lost and that is very difficult, if not impossible, to be pieced together for reasons we will discuss in the course of this review paper. 

To address the troublesome connection between past and present assigned to Korean diaspora, we must examine its ontology – the nature of existence – whereby the past is brought to bear upon the present through an analysis of survivor and witness testimonies in Kim’s films. What we hear in their testimonies is the displacement of the traumatic events into memory of which a subject is led to verbalize in language, mostly ending up inarticulate and broken. It is interesting to note that Heart of Snow, Heart of Blood (2014) presents an incessant collage of multiple testimonial narratives featuring survivors and witnesses back and forth, seemingly in an irregular manner, where the director does not intrude in with archival footages of Korean diasporic history, as compared to Kim Alex’s Place: Ansan-Tashkent. Such uncontrolled, uncertain telling does not provide an account of past events, but rather gives a glimpse of disrupted memory, which Jacque Derrida suggests is incinerated into the “cinders.” (Derrida, p.391)1 For Derrida, the cinders, or the remains of some events, may indicate the existence of something but may never be restored into what once was; therefore they attest to “the destruction of memory itself.” (Derrida, p.209) Essentially, we are cut off from our past and unable to resurrect it into now. But, we are haunted by the traces of Koryu-saram today in Ddet-gol village in Ansan, the graveyard in Almaty, Kazakhstan, homes in Uzbek, and the Koryu Senior Association’s center in Kyrgyzstan. Hence, though prevented from fully retrieving the catastrophic past, we shall desperately do our best to recall their voices and mourn the fact that the past is never finished.2 

Yugay Constantine family’s somewhat clumsy bowing to Koryu ancestors in Kyrgyzstan and Alex Kim’s standing in memorial service to Sewol Ferry victims resonate deeply and indelibly with the audiences. While we may fail bringing the past into the present and the dead into life, its cinders propel us to continue facing with the impossible and share their stories. We do not accurately know “where the sadness is coming from,” but we mourn the untraceable lost and keep our faith with the promise of future. 

 Footnotes 

1. The term “cinders” literally refers to the remains after a thing has burned. Here, Derrida introduces the term to connote the remnants of a disintegrated past in a human body, burned by the already-gone time, such that the memory of a past cannot be present because the movement of memory is linked to the future as well as the past. In other words, the issue of traumatic memory is never a matter of recollection but more of self-annihilation driven by the promise for the future, therefore rendering the witness inaccessible to the past events. (Derrida, p. 210&p.383) 

2. Derrida identifies the act of mourning as what he can do best to interiorize the dead other and to lose it, and acknowledges it to be doubly constrained because “what one might dream of is the end of mourning.” (Derrida, p.152&p.51) 

 References 

- Heart of Snow, Heart of Blood. Dir. Soyoung Kim. Cinema DAL, 2014. Film. - Kim Alex’s Place: Ansan−Tashkent. Dir. Soyoung Kim. Cinema DAL, 2014. Film. - Derrida, Jacques, and Elisabeth Weber. Points ...: Interviews, 1974-1994. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1995. Print.