In the gutters of grief and shame: drawing displacement in Kim Suk Gendry-Kim’s Grass

ABSTRACT

This essay explores the haunting shadows of coloniality through the lens of shame and grief. Highlighting the graphic novel Grass by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim, I trace the diasporic linkages between gendered violence, colonial amnesia, and the patriarchal silencing of the stories of ‘comfort women.’ I argue that the search for legibility and homecoming trouble shame, grief, and memory. Shame and the female body play a central role in the narrative and visual framework of Gendry-Kim’s graphic novel. It challenges us to reconsider our understanding of history by engaging with shame that disrupts history. Such alternative archives of memory are important in that they articulate exclusions that frame history, documenting stories about home, diaspora, displacement, and their aftereffects from the vantage point of women who are relegated to the haunting shadows left by the legacies of war.

KEYWORDS:

• Gendered violence
• comfort women
• graphic novel
• shame
• grief

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Keum-Suk Gendry-Kim (2019), Grass, 8.

2. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee, 33.

3. The transgenerational trauma experienced by ‘comfort women’ during WWII reverberates to the camptown (kijichon) women of the Cold War era. Referred to as ‘the women in the shadows’ both comfort women and camptown women who were involved in state sanctioned military prostitution highlighting misogyny and patriarchy. Patriarchal structures during and after WWII manipulated history and displaced and erased the bodies of these women in the name of nationalism. See J. T. Takagi and Hye Jung Park (1995), The Women Outside; Ji – Yeon Yuh (2002), Beyond the Shadow of Camptown; Chunghee Sarah Soh (2008), The Comfort Women; and Katharine Hyung-Sun Moon (1997), Sex Among Allies.

4. Gendry-Kim, 17.

5. Gendry-Kim, 16.

6. Cha, 33.

7. Ibid.

8. Gendry-Kim, 16.

9. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead, 55.

10. Cha, 33.

11. Avery Gordon (1997), Ghostly Matters, 205.

12. Other notable works featured in this exhibit were ‘Oribal Nipponno’ by cartoonist Lee Hyun-se; ‘The Song of a Butterfly’ by artists Kim Gwant0sung and Jeong Ki-young; ‘The Flower Ring’ by Tak Young-ho; and ‘The Spring of a 14-year-old Girl’ by artists Oh Se-yeong. Videos including director Kim Jun-ki’s ‘A Girl’s Tale’ and ‘The Unfinished Story’ were also screened.

13. Gendry-Kim’s interview with the author. August 12, 2023.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid.

16. See Susannah Ketchum Glass, ‘Witnessing the Witness’

17. See Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead.

18. Golnar Nabizadeh, Representation and Memory in Graphic Novels, 3.

19. Gendry-Kim, 143.

20. Hillary Chute (2015), Graphic Women, 5.

21. See Ann Laura Stoler (2016), Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times.

22. Gendry-Kim, 479.

23. Edouard Glissant (1997), Poetics of Relation, 11.

24. Marianne Hirsh (2012), The Generation of Postmemory, 15.

25. Hillary Chute, Graphic Women, 201.

26. Keum Suk Gendry-Kim’s interview with the author, August 12, 2023.

27. Ibid.

28. Smith, Sidonie (2011). ‘Human Rights and Comics,’ 70.

29. Weaver-Hightower (2015), Marcus B. ‘Losing Thomas & Ella,’ 226.

30. Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub (1992), Testimony Crises of Witnessing in Literature, 221.

31. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) and Adam Frank, Shame and Its Sisters, 159.

32. The term ‘sexual slave’ was first used on February 17, 1992, by a Japanese attorney, Etsuro Totsuka, on behalf of the International Educational Development (IED), a non-governmental organisation, at the United Nations Human Right Committee. Totsuka argued that ‘comfort women were sex slaves’ and requested UN’s mediation.

33. See Paul Gilbert’s (1998) ‘What Is Shame?’.

34. Sara Ahmed offers an approach of thinking through affects as sticky, in that ‘affect is what sticks, or what sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects.’ Ahmed’s contention that shame swells and sticks to us and our perception by the world around us expands our understanding of how ‘shame is about appearances, shame is about how the subject appears to and for others.’ This articulation of shame and how it can swell and stick to us is useful for thinking through how shame materialises for marginalised bodies for failing to meet the normative measures of corporeality. See Sara Ahmed’s (2014) Cultural Politics of Emotions.

35. Sandra Lee Bartky (1990), Femininity and Domination, 96–97.

36. Laura Hyun-Yi Kang (2020), Traffic in Asian Women, 14.

37. Jeffrey Kauffman (2010), ‘On the Primacy of Shame,’ 5.

38. Kauffman (2010), 20.

39. Kauffman (2010), 8.

40. Gendry-Kim, 192.

41. Dian Million (2013), Therapeutic Nations, 37.

42. Gendry-Kim’s (2023), interview with the author, August 12, 2023.

43. Marianne Hirsch as quoted in Alisa Lebow, ‘Memory Once Removed,’ 47.

44. Hillary Chute, ‘The Space of Graphic Narrative,’ 200.

45. Ibid.

46. Elaine Scary (1985), The Body in Pain, 4.

47. Gendry-Kim’s (2023), interview with the author, August 12, 2023.

48. Gendry-Kim 215.

49. Gendry-Kim 217.

50. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 140.

51. Gendry-Kim 155.

52. See Michelle Ye Hee Lee (2023). ‘Ukraine, China man focus as South Korean president visits White House’

53. See ‘The MOFEF needs to be there’: Survivor of ‘comfort women’ system sends letter to Yoon (2022). Hankyoreh.

54. Cha, 38.

55. The one in San Francisco depicts Chinese, Filipina, and Korean girls holding hands together in a circle of support. The memorial in Shanghai depicts a Chinese girl seated next to a Korean girl and an empty chair next to them. There are ongoing attempts to remove these mnemonic installations by the Japanese government including a lawsuit filed against the City of Glendale in California that was dismissed by the district court, Superior Court, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.

56. Gendry-Kim’s interview with author, August 12, 2023.

57. Cha, 38.

58. Cathy Caruth (1996), Unclaimed Experience, 9.

59. Caruth, 8.

60. See Kandice Chuh (2003), Imagine Otherwise.

61. See Silvan Tomkins (1995).