“Light and darkness, brightness and obscurity, or if a more general expression is preferred, light and its absence, are necessary to the production of color… Color itself is a degree of darkness.” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Orders to Civilians
In 2005, my dad enlisted in the US Coast Guard. I was born in 2004. Since, I have lived in nine different states. My life has been constantly altered by military action, even though I have never witnessed an active war zone.
People don’t often think about the impact of war on their everyday life. Unless they are living in an active war zone the impact of militaries, war declarations, and the trajectories of bombs don’t register as consequential to more than the people living in the specific areas impacted. That is not to say that no one cares, but that activism extends only to talk about death and torture as caused by active states of war. No one talks about how much farther military action extends, the way bombings lead to deployments, legislation, and other reverberations into the lives of everyday citizens. Military families are constantly uprooted in efforts to portray an image of power to the world, an image in which the US is entirely insurmountable. Depending on which branch of the armed forces in which they enroll, those enlisted transfer military bases or are shipped overseas every few years. Their families can either go with or be left alone.
Writing War
Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet, short story writer, and essayist. In addition, he works as a librarian in Gaza to increase access to literature in a never not-active war zone. Mosab Abu Toha was raised in a warzone with a constant threat of bombing, loss of liberty, or death. A poet who writes of red roses, shells, and seashores was raised in Palestine, an unacknowledged state to some, a territory to others, but to Mosab, a home. Palestine has been under a constant state of conflict since 1948 when the Arab-Israeli War led to the creation of the State of Israel and the expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinian people from modern-day Israel. Mosab Abu Toha’s poetry portrays the experience of life in Palestine, both the beauty of a culture which takes shelter on the shore and the hardship which the ongoing genocide on Palistinians in Gaza evokes. He writes in a clear and evocative voice about the slaughter of his people beginning from a young age – a story which he tells in now-absent names, bullet wounds, and destroyed space. Poetry to Toha, offers him a way to express the horrors that have been done to his people in Gaza, a story which he shared in 2022 despite the ongoing state of war, with the publication of his collection, Thing You May Find Hidden In My Ear.
In the poem “A Voice from Beneath,” Mosab writes of these horrors, but also the emotional burden of his work’s creation.
A voice from beneath shakes my desk–
the ink spills on my drowsy pants.
It pummels my fingers and constricts my breath. It asks me
to stop writing heavy poems,
poems that have bombs and corpses,
destroyed houses and shrapnel-covered streets,
lest the words stumble and slip into the bloody potholes.
That voice takes away my voice.
It squeezes my poetry pages, tear them from
my head. Blood showers my curly hair.
My desk becomes crimson red.
Screams fill the cracks in the walls
and the potholes in the nameless roads.
He writes of a voice which shakes his desk in a plea to stop writing of the devastation around him. There is no external figure begging him to conceal the suffering he has witnessed, but rather only his own attempts to reckon with grotesque bodily and psychological horror. Bombs and shrapnel line the streets of his home, and corpses and potholes portray the devastation, which to the reader may be unimaginable, but to Mosab was everyday life growing up. Mosab Abu Toha’s home has been subjected to occupation and genocide founded in biblical myth and a history of oppression, and this subjugation has left its mark in the color of blood.
Crimson red coats the desk and blood showers the speakers curly hair and fills the potholes in the road. Red fills this poem and emerges from every line. The screams which fill the cracks are as brutally red as the tears falling from the narrator’s head. Mosab Abu Toha wrote the destruction of his world in a breathtaking tone which summons the red of death and transforms a linguistic symbol for a color into a representation of his hardship and the deaths of his people. Mosab Abu Toha’s work poignantly expresses what life under oppressive forces is like, and exhibits this torture and ruin in the red blood which stains his poetry’s pages. An entire cultural sect of people which has been silenced by bombs and guns thus, gains their voices back through the unignorable potency of Abu Toha’s red which forces the reader to recognize and feel the tragedy of thousands of unjust deaths.
Red also gives Abu Toha the power to speak. He begins a poem with a plea to stop remembering, to stop writing, and he finishes with the picture of red. His poetry volume allows him to express the trauma inflicted by living in an active warzone where fear is constant in a healing and remunerative way. The portrayal of red is not just the portrayal of a color, but the expression of and a meditational healing from a long-implemented hurt to him and his people.
Loneliness is a Place
At a certain point in time the color leached away from my world. It wasn’t a stark shift from the vibrancy of adolescence to a gray and monotone adulthood, but something I didn’t even notice. I have lived my life staring through windows. One looked out onto a rocky, desert hill in the south of Utah, another onto a driveway dusted with too-rare snow in Seattle. I’ve stared through glass for hours to see the fragmenting of my world which one day was that of a rundown apartment complex built in a humid swamp and the next, a classic suburban and domesticated lawn in western New York.
A window is meant to look out and break the separation that humans have made with themselves from the natural world. Green leaves are meant to rustle and cast yellow-tinted shadows across too-bland living rooms that no matter what designs we create, will never amount to the coloristic glory of the natural world. Someone who has spent all their days immersed in the structures of a man-made world can still look outside to see a bird floating over wind or a cricket jumping with its sage and dusty green limbs. Only, in my life, windows have been nothing but a breeding ground for longing. People walk past windows. Potential friends walk past windows. The window forces you to see the darkening of adulthood’s world.
Color and Emancipation
Color holds significant meaning in Palestinian culture. In 2024, the Met exhibited Tatreez in Time in solidarity with Palestine. The exhibition consisted of Thobe or dresses worn by Palestinian girls and women which were embroidered with colorful Tatreez. While they were originally made with red, blue, and brown silk threads, the invention of synthetic color dyes in the 19th century led to the expansion of the color used in making Thobe. Since Israel’s occupation of Palestine, the supplies needed to make traditional Thobe have been harder to obtain leading to the creation of nationalistic Thobe in the color of Palestine’s flag: red, green, and black.
The colors of Palestine’s flag are commonly compared to a watermelon with its red flesh, green rind, and black seeds, and each component having its own cultural and emancipatory meaning. Leve Palestina writes: “Red represents the sacrifices made for freedom, black symbolizes resilience, white stands for peace, and green signifies hope and the land itself. Together, these colors encapsulate the spirit of Palestine’s resistance and aspirations.” Thus, color emerges as a means of rebellion for the Palestinian people. The colors of the flag now both unite people facing injustice and adorn the clothing of young girls whose traditional garb has been made inaccessible.
In the book, Chromophobia, David Batchelor examines the use of color when considered through the ideological framework of minimalism. Minimalism glorifies the absence of color as purity and truth in which color then becomes secondary to a dominant ideology. Batchelor writes, “colour always exists as a disruption of the symbolic order, even when ‘in a painting, colour is pulled from the unconscious into the symbolic order…’ colour is unique in art in that it ‘escapes censorship; and the unconscious irrupts into a culturally coded pictorial distribution” (82). To Batchelor color is the exposition of the subconscious, but in the case of Palestine, color becomes a voice of expression for the oppressed. The red of the blood which has been spilled, the green of their land, and the black of their resistance opposes their oppressor and the perpetrator of their genocide. Color, to Palestinians, is resistance.
War and Hope
The red of blood holds an essential place in the poetry of Mosab Abu Toha. It represents not only his own experience in a warborne nation, but also the sacrifice of thousands of Palestinians who despite their innocence have faced murder by an unkind government. However, the red in Toha’s poetry is also the same as the red woven into a young girl’s Thobe or the Palestinian flag that ripples in a smoke-ridden sky. Below is the last poem in his collection titled “A Rose Shoulders Up.”
Don’t ever be surprised
to see a rose shoulders up
among the ruins of the house:
This is how we survived.
Red again appears as a central image in Toha’s work. The red rose rises up from the ruined ground in fresh, crimson bloom. The reader has just finished a series of poems that detail the destruction of an entire city and strip of land at the behest of an inescapable authority. There should be no hope left, no will to live, or faith that the world can grow anew. The image of the red rose blooming from rubble ridden soil contradicts the primary tone throughout Mosab Abu Toha’s work. It offers hope, rebirth, and brightness in a charred and crumbled world. Further, the rose’s petals are the same color as the spilled blood and bullet holes that chart destruction. Here, Toha inverts the trope of pain and destruction which writers often attribute to red. Instead, redemerges as a symbol of hope and rebirth amidst devastation. It carries the memory of former horrors all the while signaling to a rejuvenating future. The rose stands shoulders up, and as a testament to the will of the Palestinian people to survive. Color, here, is the renewal of the world.
Desaturating
According to scientific study, those who suffer from depression, anxiety, or other chronic conditions which affect dopamine production also perceive the world to be less colorful. The deficiency of dopamine decreases the effectiveness of the retina’s neurotransmitter receptivity. The National Library of Medicine published, “We found a reduction in the ability to discriminate colours in depressed patients. This finding underlines the importance of sensory deficits as part of the symptomatology of depression.” According to science, people who suffer from depression or even those who take SSRIs see the world less vividly. Depressed people are more likely to see the world as gray or blue due to a difficulty with distinguishing between light and dark, thus making those who suffer from depression more prone to becoming further depressed as a result of decreased vibrancy and color in their everyday life.
The world as an uncolorful place harkens back to the priorly discussed minimalism. David Batchelor defines “Chromophobia,” the title of his book, as a fear of color which leads to the creation of ostentatious and stark interiors which limit accessibility of a space by imposing a feeling of exclusivity. A space or design without the invitation of brightness, patterns, or the emotional nuance of color becomes the oppressor of all whom it was not designed for, and those to whom it does not initially appeal soon find themselves appreciative of minimalism, similarly to how a child will come to appreciate white as they grow older. In combination with the aforementioned scientific observations, minimalism, the oppressor, takes on a new meaning as the force which seeks to suppress the satisfaction of others by desaturating their worlds. Minimalism, like depression, limits color and all the hope and feeling which comes with it.
Going South
After the US military ordered my family to move to Houma, Louisiana, my mother tried not to cry. I didn’t fully understand why at the time, being too young to know much more about Louisiana other than that there were alligators. To me, it was just another place. To her, it was an entirely different world. Now I understand her long list of burdens against Louisiana. It was too far from family, and we were too poor to buy plane tickets. It was humid and temperate. The school system ranked poorly. Her best and only friend lived in Washington. To the US Coast Guard, my father was just another name to fill their ranks on a spreadsheet. Their orders were just a practicality of business. To my mother, another move was impossible.
Reawakening
Afaa Michael Weaver, a confessionalist poet who studies American studies, Chinese studies, and Jewish studies, published The Government of Nature in 2013. The poetry collection traces Weaver’s experience of sexual abuse while growing up and the process of healing from rape in childhood. Weaver writes with a harmonious and rhythmic tone that welcomes the reader into a lush and green forest where he explores the trauma of assault. The volume moves through his life and time in fluid strokes of poetry that seek healing from isolation and pain in the natural world. Green is the color for Weaver’s poetic healing and expression, but also the grotesque memories that move within him.
The following excerpt is from Weaver’s poem, “Leaves.”
The lines that make you are infinite, but I count them
every day to hear the stories you carry. These are not secrets,
but records, things we should know but ignore. If I commit
the sin of tearing you from the tree, I find another world
inside the torn vein, another lifetime of counting the records
of who walked here before, of what lover lay here
holding each other through fear and starvation.
Some days I stand here until I lose focus and travel,
drifting off out of the moment, too full of it, and my legs
are now like trees, mindless but vigilant, held
into the earth by the rules of debt, what we own
to nature for trying to tear ourselves away. I drift
and the pleasure of touch comes again, layers of green
in the mountainside a tickling in my palms (Weaver 10).
In this poem, Weaver only mentions color by name once, albeit detailed and graphic images of nature compose the entire poem, infusing an inherent sense of color throughout. Weaver speaks of the lines or layers which compose a person, making one an amalgamation of their former hardships. He speaks to the object, “you” in this poem, signaling for the reader to feel included in the story. Weaver counts the lines that make “you”, while claiming that those lines or former experiences are the stories that make one who they are, no matter if they are good or bad. The investigation of the reader makes one feel vulnerable and invaded by the narrator’s attempts for connection. Weaver’s narration embodies the authority of his own fear, that of being possessed.
To combat this fear, Weaver promises the reader that he will not learn their secrets, but only the things which everyone should know. While the narration forces Weaver to become the perverse and invasive, his own compassion and humanity shows through in a display of resistance. The trauma of his past assault and the fear that he may one day perpetrate the same harm emerges in the words, “torn vein,” “sin,” and “fear and starvation.” He has been forced to carry an inescapable weight due to violence which not only tortures him, but removes color from his language. Even if the torn tree limbs evoke images of splintering brown and yellow-spotted green, Weaver makes no specific reference to color until the poem’s very end.
In the poem’s last phrase color emerges. Weaver writes, “I drift and the pleasure of touch comes again, layers of green in the mountainside a tickling in my palms.” In a poetry collection about sexual abuse, the description of rediscovering pleasure in touch holds a special type of power. What has been taken without consent and haunted the poet’s mind transforms into a fulfilling experience of human connection that Weaver emphasizes by paralleling with a renewal of the natural world. The trees are no longer violently torn and the subject, likewise, is no longer torn from them. Instead, the soft rustling of leaves brushes the poet’s palm in a comforting embrace and the color green prevails. The narrator feels healing in his sexuality and relationship with nature alongside the emergence of color in his life.
The History of Color
Sigmund Skard wrote of color: “They are entwined with the emotional and intellectual life of man in countless ways, and have always been an important element of human culture. From the very beginnings they played a part in religion and magic, rites and symbolism, and in the entire material world” (164). For as long as man has existed, he has written of color, painted color, and dreamed in color. It is the closest to magical representation within the natural world and it emerges in the vibrancy of flowers, potent hues of blue stretched across the sky, and the constant phenomena of sunrise and sunset. Color serves to represent our world in literature.
Skard continues to explain that after a brief aversion to color in Enlightenment writing, which strove for such acute specificity that to write of color which invokes so many varying meanings and symbolisms would have contradicted their efforts, the intensity of color as a descriptor in literature returned during the age of romanticism. With essential pioneering work by Goethe, color became a means of portraying the natural world in poetic and grandiose descriptions that sought to invoke images of the sublime and increase imagination.
Literature followed the changes of new science from “from physics to physiology, from the color in itself to color as a stimulus to the human soul” (Skard 165).
However, to universally assume that writers intend color within their work to have a specific epistemological impact would be naive due to the mass variety of ways to interpret color’s meaning. Further, a strictly scientific approach to color neglects to observe the process of artistic creation in which an artist may choose colors based on ideology, observation, creative impulse, or any other variety of methods. Further, no one individual meaning can be assigned to any use of color due to the variety of psychological and cultural differentiations in their valuations when color theory is extended beyond the western canon. As Olivia Gude states in her article, “Color Coding,” “no system is adequate to represent the complexity of reality” (23).
Decolonizing Color Theory
In 1920, Marcus Gavey designed the Pan-African flag to aid the black liberation and cultural movements at the behest of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. The flag includes four colors: red in representation of the bloodshed of those who fought for freedom; black to represent unity and heritage; green to represent Africa’s natural wealth and abundance of resources; and yellow to represent optimism, justice, and wealth in gold. The Pan-African flag uses the same colors as the Palestinian one, both of which use color to represent the fight for freedom and the sacrifice to obtain it. It too uses color to promote the voices of those who have been oppressed, enslaved, and murdered by whiteness.
Considering Afaa Michael Weaver’s involvement with the black cultural movement, there’s no doubt that he would have been aware of the emancipatory representations of these colors. The green of his poetry represents healing and reconnection with the natural world, just as the green of the Pan-African flag recognizes the beauty of Africa. However, Weaver’s relationship to color was also likely influenced by non-western interpretations of color’s meaning. In University, Weaver studied Chinese studies, which would have put him into communication with an entirely different cultural knowledge of color theory.
Color maintains strong cultural meaning and values in Chinese culture, which drastically impact meaning in a way that’s entirely different from western society’s. For example, white represents mourning instead of black, making a bouquet of white flowers have a totally different meaning in China as opposed to the western world. For example, if white flowers were to be presented at a wedding or celebration, confusion would arise at the potential morbid intention of their whiteness.
Color symbolism in China stems from the taoist association of colors to the five elements which compose our world: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water. Specific colors and values are attributed to each of these elements with green and blue representing wood’s growth, renewal, and vitality; red representing fire’s joy, celebration, and energy; yellow representing the Earth’s stability, nourishment, and prestige; white representing metal’s clarity and purity; and black and blue representing water’s depth, wisdom, and adaptability.
Purple Romance
The following poem is another excerpt from Afaa Michael Weaver’s collection, The Government of Nature. It is titled “The Ten Thousand.”
If I write without color it is to obey the gray way rain brings
the past to us. The ten thousand are a giant palace with a room
for remembering, where you must stand alone, touch and believe
while it seems you are touching nothing and have gone all mad
in this life, this gift. We are sitting on a rock in the thick falling
of water, purple lilies are growing in the sun’s ocean shadow,
sheep with golden wool are flying in the trees, a patient monkey
is bandaging a wounded blade of grass, the garden is a mesa,
seeds are mountain caves, the moon has gone infinite, made
Two of its selves for each of our palms. Now we have faces.
The past seeps forth in gray rain in remote numbness. The western canon characterizes gray as empty melancholy and despair and here, Weaver fully embodies this interpretation of gray. The room surrounding the poet sinks into madness as his past confronts him entirely alone and the purpose of life turns to nothing. The gift of existence, in the face of the trauma of the poet’s past feels meaningless, maddening, and isolating, despite the ten thousands that compose it. The feeling portrays the same feeling of helplessness as the first depiction of ripping trees from his earlier excerpt, but in a more somber and meditative way. The trauma of having one’s agency and bodily autonomy stolen through assault at a young age resonates just as potently from this excerpt as the first, only now the poet forces his voice to relive his memories in a calm isolation. Weaver contemplates trauma and horror in a room of gray and panicked rain.
The second section of the poem goes on to depict the narrator sitting by another in a romantic scene where purple lilies grow and golden wool glints between the trees. The use of colors in this stanza alternates the focus from the color theory of the western canon to that of China’s. Purple, in Chinese culture, represents romantic love while gold, associated with the emperor and dynasties, represents stability and nourishment. With the convergence of Chinese color symbolism, Weaver’s poem shows stability as found through a blossoming romantic partnership, the opposite of his experience in adolescence. The monkey patiently bandages the grass demonstrating both healing and the offering of autonomy through waiting, while the moon’s infiniteness shows the expansion of possibilities for the narrator now that color, consent, and autonomy have returned. In the final line, Weaver says, “Now we have faces.” Weaver has been reunited with his identity and color signaling the completion of his healing journey.
Displacement
I was born in a small town of 7,900 people in the same hospital as both my sister and my mother. Now my only memories of that small desert town come not from the year in which I lived there, but rather from infrequent visits that have since all but disappeared. My grandparents would take my sister and I to the dinosaur museum where old bones towered above us in mass reconstructions. Fossilized feet and ferns had outlived death for centuries to be stared at behind protective glass cases, smudged with greasy finger prints.
That museum of which my memories are at best hazy recreations lies in the middle of the rocky cliffs and striped umber and brown plateaus of Utah. Wilting cacti, more brown than green, spotted the rugged landscape and the sun, rather than beaming down, sucked all the breath from the surrounding air. The drive through the western countryside holds more poignancy in my memory than anyone I have met in my many trips to Utah. I can see the steep escarpments of crumbling stone and the head of a prairie dog emerging on the side of the highway, but the faces of any one person have all but disappeared. I never stayed long enough to memorize the unique lift of a smile or the soft twinkle in one’s eyes. Instead the military commanded that my family move again.
My dad worked milking cows and my mom worked the night shift at Walmart. During their off hours they took turns taking care of my sister and I. They lived on a diet of chicken and rice while I still only drank milk. In an effort to find a way to feed a young family, my dad joined the US Coast Guard despite his strong aversion to all things authoritative or militaristic. From that moment we moved as a unit of four on a nomadic journey across the United States. We uprooted our not yet established lives from communities of strangers every few years to begin the process again. Our home was only in each other, and the outside world was no longer a place that we belonged.
Dandelions
The official flower of the military brat is a dandelion. One picks the flowers just as they fade from yellow to gray and white wisps to blow the seeds across the fields. Whoever came up with the symbol thought the seeds were like roots, sprawling everywhere and sprouting up. They thought that constant movement only shared a person. But what of the fade from bright yellow to gray. A hundred yellow petals that were once tied together by an untrimmed stem are separated, when they’re blown away. They lose the color that shines from within, and puckered lips forcibly blow them far away from everything that they know.
Of course, the seeds can bloom again. They’ll show up somewhere else, but soon their stems will yet again be ripped in jagged grips from tender ground. The stem drips fluid like blood. The roots are left behind, unworthy of going on. They are severed from the hard-packed ground that their roots had just begun to pierce, and they are blown far, far away to grow alone again.
People say that it takes at least two years to make an actual friend. Further, people who are already incorporated into a community are infinitely less likely to befriend new people due to valuing their time spent with former friends more than making new ones. Neither of these trends are inherently bad, but when someone can never stay for long in one place, the concept of making friends becomes near impossible. Just as the roots of the dandelion can’t embed themselves in unwelcoming ground, the military brat struggles to any genuine, lasting connection. I have lived in nine different states and attended six different schools, and until college I didn’t know what it meant to have an actual friend.
Reckoning
The story of displacement was written before we were born. Toha’s home was displaced from beneath his feet by exploding bombs and littered shrapnel. Weaver’s identity was displaced from his own body through a forceful invasion. I have never had the chance to grow up in any one place, and as such I have been displaced. We, as individuals, are all displaced. The loss of color represents our collective displacement.
The Origins of the DMZ
After World War II, Korea was divided along the 38th parallel at the suggestion of Roosevelt during the Yalta conference. The Soviet Union regulated North Korea while the United States occupied the South. With prior cases of military occupation by both the Mongol and Japan, Korea has not had a moment of peace and freedom. A culture dating to 40,000 BC has had its autonomy stolen throughout history, and as such, has been displaced. In 1948, North Korea bloodily invaded South Korea in an attempt for reunification, but rather than achieving union, the long and bloody conflict only led to further division. The DMZ or demilitarized zone now extends 1.4 miles away from the 38th parallel in all directions, although skirmishes still linger on the border.
In description of countless years of conflict, Britanica claims “The Koreans were deprived of freedom of assembly, association, the press, and speech.” Nothing about this statement is incorrect. It concisely articulates the consequences of occupation and division, those being limitations on freedom, but fails to carry the emotional devastation of war. It fails to express the shared desire amongst Koreans for reunification, a process made impossible by deeply ingrained differences from separate occupiers after the world wars and the inevitable deadliness of a violent means of combination. In his article, “Avoiding Conflict on the Korean Peninsula: The Case for Preserving the Status Quo,” Andrew O’Neil estimates that should a military effort seek reunification between the two Koreas, that thirty-eight percent of Seoul’s twelve-million person population would likely die even with South Korea being projected to win a war effort against North Korea. An even higher death toll would likely occur in North Korea due to the south’s military aid from the United States. As such, the reunification between North and South Korea is unlikely due to the immense devastation it would impose on both human lives and landscapes.
As such, the story of Korean history has been briefly told. Military endeavors have been chronicled and deaths have been tallied in disregarded files. History tells the story of Korea without remembering the spirit of the nation and devastation is locked into numeric form.
Almost Monochromatic
Don Mee Choi, an award winning poet and translator was born in Seoul, South Korea. In 2020, she published DMZ COLONY, a poetry collection that begins by chronicling her family’s own flight from South Korea and then extends to the lives of all of those who have been lost or tortured by occupied governments and military conflict in Korea. She seeks to translate the pain of division and occupation, which has long been neglected and history can never fully capture, into poetic form. The poetry collection takes place in black and white words, symbols, and photographs, with only one visual exception. In the section of her work titled, “Mirror Words,” Don Mee Choi includes a drawing of exactly 300 roughly sketched bodies in dull graphite and powdery blue. Linguistically, color is only mentioned by name 21 times throughout the poetry collection. Of those 21 instances, 11 refer to blue.
The collection uses fragmented language to make visible the suffering of thousands: “we were ready to die…when your stomach stays empty for so long…we were near starved to begin with,” “You stand up to use the toilet, and they beat you | for standing up without permission,” “snow was pink | flakes of scabs” (Choi 24, 28, 36). Life in a camp along the DMZ dehumanizes its victims and starves them in genocidal fashion. It’s gruesome and bloody with crude violence forced on innocent victims. Life in a DMZ colony is colorless and the opposite of living. Choi foregrounds each section of poems by a block of black ink only broken by pristine, white titles. Somehow, this lack of color is meant to translate the pain of living in the DMZ.
The mention of pink snow occurs three times throughout the poetry collection: “…snow was pink | …flakes of scabs,” “You are snow. | Who am I? | You are snow pink” (Choi 35, 71). The first mention of snow appears in the transcription of Ahn Hak-sŏp’s time in a DMZ camp, and the second appears in the writing of Orphan 9. Pink is the first color other than black which DMZ COLONY references, and offers no escape from agony. The snow is pink with diluted blood and fallen scabs, the waste of human wounds. This meaning binds itself to the color pink, making every other mention of the color an evocation of blood. Thus, when Choi writes, “You are snow pink,” the attribution of the color to the reader attributes the emotions of pain and injury to them as well. Don Mee Choi uses color to enforce suffering on the reader in an attempt of making them understand what only those who have lived through it can. Choi uses color to translate the unimaginable. Her poetry collection, with minimal exceptions, captures the ever-darkening emotional landscape of the people in South and North Korea as war plagues their lives and land.
The Red of Communism or Joy
The Joseon Dynasty established the basis for Korean color theory during its reign which lasted from 1392-1897. The 5 primary colors were named Obangsaek and are as follows: white, blue, black, red, and yellow, each of which is derived from a natural element: fire, water, trees, precious metals, and Earth. White is often tied to the harvest ceremony and the sun and is associated with the origin or foundation of humanity, purity, cleanliness, and devotion to the natural world. In combination with black, white represents harmony and knowledge, while alone black stands for dignity, particularly in public officials. Blue, in Korean culture, represents utopia and hope, and red represents either happiness or communism, depending on the year. Finally, bright color is seen as good luck, which explains the colorful nature of traditional wedding garb.
Both the North and South Korean flags use red and blue, the colors of hope and happiness or communism, to represent their nations. The South Korean flag, which was originally the flag of the united one Korea consists of a white background in representation of peace and traditionalism with a red and blue T’aeguk or yin and yang in the center which represent the duality and origins of the universe. Surrounding the central symbol, are segmented black bars which in the confucian tradition represent the sun. moon, Earth, and heavens. Upon the formation of North Korea under Kim Il-sung after the departure of the Soviet Union, the North Korean flag was presented on July 10, 1948. The North Korean flag uses a red star and stripes in support of communism, blue stripes to show peace, and white to show purity, strength and dignity.
We the People of the United States of America
I don’t feel pride when I look at the flag of the United States of America. Its red and white straps, blue stars are ingrained in the periphery of my everyday: on a pole in front of the supermarket, hanging from the ceiling of the gym, stuck into the lawns of my neighbors. I’m sure some people still feel pride when they look at it, probably my neighbors with twenty in a line down their front driveway do. The old colonial-made patterns are meant to incite nationalistic reverie, pride in freedom, remembrance of those lost fighting for it in the American Revolution, but when I see the flag of the United States, I see only shame and political divide.
When I think of the military of the United States, I don’t think of security and power, but orders to keep on moving. I think of the violence of the Vietnam War, the occupation of South Korea, the bombings in Iraq. I think of the use of the National Guard to oppress peaceful protests, ICE to deport immigrants and refugees, and the Police transformed into a weapon against BLM. I don’t think of pride, but unnecessary violence and displacement ingrained so deeply in our nations that it has altered the course of my own everyday life. I think of just how little the consequences to myself have been, and how so much power has perverted and destroyed the lives of others in unthinkable ways.
Bruises in the Penal Colony
Blue first appears in the poem titled, “The Apparatus,” which places the Penal Colony in discussion with the Neo-Colony. Franz Kafka, an acclaimed German writer, wrote “In der Strafkolonie” or “In the Penal Colony” in October, 1914. The short story offers a criticism of the justice system, though other interpretations argue the story to be about religious conflict or Freudian discontent. “In the Penal Colony,” an officer explains an execution machine, which was designed by the Old Commadant to induce the most possible torture and punishment, to a traveler visiting the island. Though the machine is deteriorating with time and no longer attracts massive audiences, the Officer still carries forth executions, during which the Prisoners are unaware of their sentences until the machine has carved the words repeatedly into their bodies and eventually killing them.
Kafka’s short story critiques the justice system for unjust and brutal methods of control, a critique which the secrecy of the prisoner’s sentencing only enhances. The prisoner has committed no crime, but only been accused of doing so, making him seemingly innocent to the reader. Just as those slaughtered and tortured by acts of war are innocent, the prisoner is innocent. Just as those persecuted along the DMZ are innocent, the prisoner is innocent. Don Mee Choi engages this parallel to express the injustice of military action in Korea and to critique injustice of today’s political situation to Koreans. The argumentation between the Neo-Colony which represents the DMZ and the Penal Colony accuse the contemporary world of harboring methods of torture which have been ignored by the global world.
In this poem, Don Mee Choi writes, “Her whole body was blue! There wasn’t a single part of her body that was not blue from the savage beatings. She thought she was the only blue one, but the woman next to her was also blue! The woman in front of her was again, blue! And the woman behind her was totally blue!” (78). Blue marks where the woman has been beaten during an interrogation. Like the pink of the snow, the blue of the skin shows the bodily horrors inflicted during times of war or militarized conflict. Blue is the color of her wounds and the scars that mark authority’s abuse of her innocent body.
Moral and A-moral Blue
In their article, “The Color Blue: Its Use as a Metaphor and a Symbol,”Vivian and Wilheminia Jacobs write, “Blue is defined as signifying heaven, heavenly love, and truth, constancy, and fidelity. It is the color of truth because blue always appears in the sky after the clouds are dispelled, suggesting the unveiling of truth” (29). From being used to decorate Christian and Jewish altars, to adorning brides on their wedding day in a representation of faithfulness, blue holds a strong meaning of purity, truth, and the divine as influenced by cultural values. Further, it signals to the sky where the heavens and infinity both rest.
However, blue also represents the opposite of divinity in western culture. Blue flames dance around the devil who wears a blue cap in many christian iconographies leading to a sinisterness also being attributed to the color blue. This devilishness aligns more so with the psychological perception of blue as a sad or muted color. Blue, which even those who struggle with light and dark differentiation can easily see, thus, holds two opposite values. Both the devil and the heavens clothe themselves in blue, a color which is as infinite in meaning as the sky is in distance.
In Don Mee Choi’s poetry, blue takes on another connotation. Choi writes of blue bodily bruising from being hit too hard, too many times. Choi’s blue women are a combination of blue’s multiple meanings. They are innocent without any actual accusations of crime. They are the prisoners of the Penal Colony who face persecution at the hands of injustice. They hold the blue purity of the heavens through their innocence and wear the blue darkness of the Devil as has been thrust upon their skin. The blue and tortured women evoke the cultural history of blue, a color both hopeful and ruinous in interpretation.
Translating Pain
The translator speaks, “Blue x 300,” and the USA asks, “Are you saying blue can be translated?” (Choi 78-79). The translator replies, “Yes, blue can be translated as “Blue x 300,” without the exclamation mark, if need be” (Choi 79). 300 blue outlines of faceless bodies follow (Choi 107-109). An unnamed translator claims that “Blue x 300” can represent the torture of countless innocent Korean women in the DMZ, and the United States, a nation largely responsible due to its role in dividing and occupying South Korea, accepts this claim. Blue means abuse and 300, a number nowhere near high enough, is supposed to count the women. However, a number composed of three digits and incapable of visualization inside one’s head does little to even capture a miniscule portion of the amount of people actually harmed in the DMZ. The translator claims the catastrophes of the DMZ to be translatable, but the actual attempt to do so fails. Blue fails.
Don Mee Choi recognizes this failure, and so, she draws 300 outlines in powder blue. The drawing fills three pages of her collection, and while it shows no evidence of violence or gore, the image expands the number 300 into something visual. It expresses the expansiveness of devastation on a scale which is comprehensible even if it still fails to show the extent of death and suffering as caused by the Korean War and the DMZ. Unlike the other Confessionalist poets discussed, Choi doesn’t use color to give her poetry hope. Choi uses color to infuse visual representation of suffering into her writing. Choi uses color to make the experiences of those who have been persecuted visible to the reader, despite government attempts to censor their experiences and stories. Color, here is reckoning with injustice and the imposition of visibility into the unseen’s narrative.
Victims of Peace
During the process of getting discharges, members of the US military undergo a psychological and bodily review. The result is an estimated percentage of disability, of which every percentage of increased disability leads to a higher pension rate. Former members of the military are compensated for the bodily trauma accumulated, but no amount of retirement fund can actually replace the physical and mental well-being of youth. Even members of branches which don’t participate in warfare accumulate disability charges as a mere side effect of the harsh military environment and the structure of the institution. War has been prioritized by nations across the world, and now even when living in a state of peace, those who build a nation’s military and image of dominance face the same consequences as an active warfront. My father will be discharged from the US Coast Guard with at least a 90% disability rating. The military has irreparably altered my father’s life, just as it has my mothers, just as it has my own.
Reconciliation
Don Mee Choi writes of color only two times in her collection without invoking trauma, although both occasions still pay penance to the dead. In the final section, “(Neo) (=) (Angels),” Don Mee Choi writes both “We were angels in white blouses like the white-naped cranes” and “Red-crowned cranes feeding nearby” (Choi 115, 119). She speaks of angels or those who have passed on cloaked in white, the color of purity and status. Those who have been lost are as powerful as public officials and as elegant as a white-naped crane. Their beauty has not been taken from the world, no matter the abuse they have been put through. Choi continues to write of the red-cranes feeding. Red, a color of joy and celebration in Korean color tradition, crowns their heads as they fuel themselves to grow anew and take flight. In the final poem of her collection, the tragedy of death remains at the front of Choi’s imagery, but joy and pride also emerge. Devastation has not destroyed the spirit of South Korea.
Color Vs. Authority
In DMZ COLONY, color never fully translates the complexities of war. Instead, it can only serve as a visual representation for what can never be understood. Those who have not survived the DMZ will never comprehend the blue bruising of the body, the pink blood in the snow, or the sheer totality of casualties, but color, an object of the everyday, offers an emotive potential to understand. Confessionalist poetry has discovered the potential of color to communicate both trauma and joy due to its multiplicity of cultural and natural meanings. Color brings awareness to the stories that we, personally, can not see.
Traditionally, confessional poetry therapeutically explores the experiences of the individual. Mosab Abu Toha and Michael Afaa Weaver explore, primarily, their own personal histories in their writing. They use color to give themselves hope and its absence to express even a fraction of their pain. Their works may deal with larger themes whether that be assault of war in Palestine, but the most prominent subject of their works is themselves, and their own meditative journeys to healing. Don Mee Choi uses the same mode of poetry, the confessional, but her collection expands beyond her own perspective or her own confession. In the DMZ COLONY, Don Mee Choi uses color to tell the story of a tortured nation from the perspectives of each of those who have lost or been lost. Militarism in Korea condemns the freedom of its people and obstructs the people’s authority to share their own narratives, but color provides a potential means of rebellion and expression. Color rebels against authority and the military’s oppressive minimalism.
The Process of Decentering the Military in my Family
Finally free from the US military, my dad learned something essential about being happy. He started smiling when I returned home from college and held less stress in his limbs. He made more jokes and laughed more, ran more, played guitar more. He lived more. My mom told me he finally started therapy without the stress of losing his job in consequence of admitting something was “wrong” with him. My dad left the US military, and slowly regained his irreparably altered life. He is a man who has never seen a front of war, but has lived within the system of militarism and authority. He made a comment to my sister about trees appearing greener after starting treatment. Free from authority, the color literally returned to his world bringing back old passions for the Outdoors, something my family watched slowly leech away. Free from the military, color embraced him with welcome arms and guided him back into the demilitarized, civilian world.
I have grown up the daughter of a military man. I have grown up with severe anxiety and depression, likely caused by the instability of growing up while constantly moving from coast to coast. I have grown up in a world that I didn’t realize was lacking color. I never wrote confessional poetry to tell my narrative, but I have written this essay immersing myself in the dark and colorless worlds of others. I have found myself a stable home balanced between my parent’s house and a small, liberal arts college campus. I have built a life all my own where I live in books, papers, poems, and every other facet of the written word. I have watched the color seep into my world until one day I couldn’t help but notice as I ran through a field of yellow wildflowers.
I am the daughter of a military man, though I have never fought or seen an active warzone, and neither has my father. We have lived in peace alongside the repercussions of war, and while the damage to our lives is infinitely small besides the confessions of Toha and Choi, those repercussions expose how deeply embedded the military is in our lives. The United States lives in an active state of war while at peace, and its citizens must pay the consequences, and the consequences are outlined in the color or lack thereof in our passing lives.
Mosab Abu Toha’s Complete “A Voice from Beneath”
I want to drown myself in the silence of absence,
to fill my pockets with poems
and throw myself in a lazy river.
A distant voice calls upon me to build a room
from straw and clay,
to raise a black flag in the night,
to play the piano to the crossing owl.
A voice from beneath shakes my desk–
the ink spills on my drowsy pants.
It pummels my fingers and constricts my breath. It asks me
to stop writing heavy poems,
poems that have bombs and corpses,
destroyed houses and shrapnel-covered streets,
lest the words stumble and slip into the bloody potholes.
That voice takes away my voice.
It squeezes my poetry pages, tear them from
my head. Blood showers my curly hair.
My desk becomes crimson red.
Screams fill the cracks in the walls
and the potholes in the nameless roads.
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