Communal Mourning and Contemporary Elegy in Korean Poetry

An extended period of public mourning followed the 2014 Sewol Ferry disaster, one of South Korea’s largest maritime disasters which resulted in over three hundred passenger deaths. This article examines leading contemporary South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon’s narration of collective trauma in her elegy for the dead, Chugŭmŭi chasajŏn (Autobiography of Death, 2016). Drawing on the oral tradition, particularly the songs of female shamans, Kim facilitates a radical empathy with which her speaker enters the physical bodies of the dead and invokes their spirits. Kim’s polyvocal speaker traverses historical memory to excavate these deaths: Autobiography of Death connects the recent loss of life involved in the sinking of the Sewol Ferry with the structural injustice experienced by dissidents who were killed during South Korea’s democratization movement. I argue that Kim places her elegy in the public sphere by engaging the embodied memory of individuals to voice the transhistorical grief of the Korean community.