Movement and the Watery Imaginary in the Contemporary North American Feminist Poetic

Abstract

What can hybridity teach us? The answer I posit is–like water–to embrace movement in all its forms. We are currently experiencing the sixth mass extinction event on earth and yet few scholars give prolonged attention to how we are to sustainably move our human inheritances forward on this increasingly uninhabitable planet. Reflecting on the work of transnational poets, specifically South Korean poet Kim Hyesoon translated through Korean American poet Don Mee Choi and Lebanese American poet Etel Adnan, we are reminded of the myriad ways in which humans can move and survive in a foreign yet familiar world. This paper finds its support in the confluence of transnational contemporary feminist poetics, formalism, environmentalism, and posthumanism. Through the use of various critical discourses, this paper considers how movement and its hybrid capacities offer a new understanding of contemporary North American poetics. In this sense, a poem should be viewed as a dynamic temporal cybernetic system, a vessel, full of energy, simultaneously pulsing with the changing movements and constrictions of everyday life.

1. Holding Water

“There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.”―Octavia E. Butler

In American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry (2009), Cole Swenson suggests that, “while the new is an important common denominator of much hybrid work, it is a combinatory new, one that recognizes that “there is nothing new under the sun.” She emphasizes “the importance of connection” and “that given elements are often less crucial than the relationships between them” (Swenson and David 2009, pp. xxi–xxii). Swenson’s emphasis on hybridity’s connections parallels hydrofeminist and queer black feminist theories of new materialist relation, but I would like to introduce an emphasis on oceanic movement’s hybrid imaginary to this idea of “new.” I believe that the way in which water harnesses energy creates hybrid access points to imaginaries not yet utilized for environmentally and humanistically productive purposes. Water, like hybridity, invites the idea of mixture or melding, of elements pulled apart and pushed back together in new yet materialistically familiar ways. Yet while there is “nothing new under the sun” I will argue that through the transformative movement of the watery imaginary, as Octavia Butler posits in the epigram of her unpublished The Parable of the Trickster, and I will emphasize in this paper, “there are new suns” (Canavan 2014).

A core principle of new materialist thought is that matter is inherently diverse, self-organizing, dynamic, and creative—constantly “moving between nature and culture, the animated and automated, bodies and environments” (Coleman 2019). Going a step further, Astrida Neimanis posits, “we are all bodies of water” (Neimanis 2017, p. 85). Hydrofeminism emphasizes a radical collectivity—a “watery commons”—in that if we are all bodies of water then we are connected to the watery planet through a fluid continuum” (Neimanis 2017, p. 108). Hydrofeminists highlight that like hybridity, water doesn’t necessarily dissolve into universal globality, but instead calls attention to our differences. For example, water can easily overflow a border like a dam or inundate a city exposing the stark contrasts between beings who can escape the waters and those who cannot, materials that can withstand the eroding qualities of water, and those that cannot.

In both argument and method, my research focuses on the ways in which water flows through our lives and what its movement reveals. What can hybridity teach us? The answer I posit is to move like water, embracing movement in all its forms. I contend that the poets Kim Hyesoon–translated through Don Mee Choi–and Etel Adnan, utilize this watery hybridity and transitory process in their work in diverse ways, involving components of the watery movement by alchemizing constraints while moving through modes of production like intergenerational knowledge, repetition, translation, and the abyss. These poets are interested in the access to movement that these modes of production may limit, but do not prohibit. The watery imaginary moves through these structures errantly. This article will unpack the persistent attempt to categorize and shunt “errant” movement, as Édouard Glissant names it, at the centre of these authors’ less celebrated 21st century collections: Kim Hyesoon’s All The Garbage of The World Unite (Kim and Choi 2011), and Etel Adnan’s Night (Adnan 2016).

In this sense, a poem should be viewed like water, as a hybrid medium/material, a dynamic temporal cybernetic system, a vessel, full of energy, simultaneously pulsing with the changing movements and constrictions of everyday life. Special attention will be paid to how constraints fail to halt movement and how the polyvalence of movement, through the poetry of the watery imaginary, has the ability to transform consciousness and matter in restorative directions. By affording access and credibility to alternative networks of intelligence and in characterizing the watery imaginary’s motion not merely as marginal–but like water, as a medium for many working invisible systems that move at the surface and at the subterranean, internally and externally–humanity may find a restorative way to switch amongst them, realize we are part of all of them, and move towards dynamic differentiated liberation as a whole.

In the spirit of a watery hybridity, I am aligning Édouard Glissant’s relational theory with a queer transnational hydrofeminist imaginary. Both Glissant’s Poetics of Relation (Glissant and Wing 1997) and hydrofeminism engage with the watery imaginary and its movement in transformational, perspective, and perception shifting ways. I will be utilizing bell hooks’ definition of queer: “Queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent, and create, and find a place to speak, and to thrive and to live” (The New School 2024, 1:27). Like hydrofeminism, if queer theory “challenges the reproductive narrative as it emerges in social institutions” then we must look to how it moves (Gumbs 2010, p. 50). I describe poetics as moving queerly in that they move unpredictably and variously like water. I use Syliva Wynter’s definition of poetic “as the production of an impossible relation that interrupts the narrative of capitalism by describing, creating and modeling an alternate relationship” (Wynter qtd. in Gumbs 2010, pp. 32–33). Poetics access the imagination to fuse the impossible with the austerely reliable.

Appropriately then, Glissant describes a relational movement that is preoccupied with the other in several contexts, most specifically how the other is able to move. I argue that his idea of “errantry” as a form of productive movement parallels waters’ unruly, unpredictable, and ultimately untimely queer movement (Glissant and Wing 1997, p. 11). Water can move to places it doesn’t belong in both our imagination and in our materially and terrestrially tethered reality. In this sense, the poet experiences “the shock of elsewhere.” (Glissant and Wing 1997, p. 30). Poetic watery movement does not follow logic as such, and its uncontrollable movement leads to production of new spaces, identities, and imagined realities. Although it moves errantly, water also moves dynamically and relationally.

The ocean remains an epistemological, ontological, and phenomenological mystery to humans. Because of this, it has become an unconscious well for humans to ponder, fear and try to control. Humans exert a terrestrial bias over what counts as history and what will be washed away with the tides of time. Displacement, then, becomes a place in itself where new possibilities emerge. Yet, if it were solely tied to grammar, temporal logic and language laws, the watery imaginary’s movement should be viewed as the present progressive: “I am dreaming,” “I am being,” “I am dying,” “I am living.” It is self aware and moving, it knows no future or past because it amalgamates both to energize a constantly reflexive nonlinear progression that holds several realities at once.

While creating a system of virtual connectedness, postmodern man made movement and systems, like algorithms, have also created fragmentation in the ways we are able to move through the world. Those operating amongst a watery imaginary use it to move against and alchemize the totalizing capitalistic forms that machines like AI automation have loosed upon the world. In essence, for those who have been systematically oppressed, it is impossible to be unaffected by patriarchy and colonialism and their holds. Therefore, feminist transnational poets are specifically located in this flux of control, and do not subscribe to the idea of separation between individual and intergenerational inheritance or the delineation between divine and everyday life. They embrace their enmeshment and contradictions. Kim and Adnan offer useful insights into the ways in which feminist transnational poets operating through the watery imaginary are able to concurrently grieve and celebrate, to be simultaneously living and dying.

I define constraints as controls on modes of production. Control as constraint can be concrete: language systems, poetic formalisms, dietary, physical; societal: access to knowledge and resources, taboos; or colonial: poverty, traumatic memory, and ancestral erasure. All of these forms of constraint, most notably traumatic memory, move with the poet. The cybernetic qualities of traumatic memory pull the poet back and forth through time, as its feedback creates a loop in the nervous system. Constraints such as trauma and access to resources are inescapable as they are a part of daily life. Those who have a history of moving with and through constraints, most notably transnational feminists, have special access to the ways in which the watery imaginary move despite these hurdles. There is wisdom inherent in an ostensible “no escape” if one thinks porously. When looking towards poetry, then, we must be aware of form as a control as well as an essential aspect of movement. Women, without their own formalist tradition, have used poetic forms as a conduit for transformation for decades. Annie Finch expresses that, “writing within the boundaries has released [women] into boundarylessness” (Finch 2010). Finch includes poets using forms like sonnets, sestinas, and pantoums to highlight the new life these poets breathe into old forms. Transnational feminist poets accessing the watery imaginary are also materially and metaphorically aware of their bodies as leaky and porous. Their bodies are tied temporally to fluid through moving processes like menstruation and lactation. Taking this leaky metaphor a bit further, however, as Stacy Alaimo extensively explains in Bodily Natures, “the human is always inter-meshed with the more-than-human world” which underlies “the extent to which the substance of the human is ultimately inseparable from ‘the environment” (Alaimo 2010, p. 2). Similarly, since patriarchy cannot be expelled from women’s experiences, just as microplastics are now a part of human biology, it is understandable then that structural form is reappropriated for transformative purposes. This selection of authors offers a useful insight into how transnational experimental feminist poetics utilize the watery imaginary to move with constraints and generate hybrid and essentially “bastardized” versions of fathered figurations.

South Korean poet and scholar Kim Hyesoon began publishing poetry in the 1970s in her experimental feminist style that butted up against tradition. For example, in a 2003 conversation with Choi, Kim describes the yǒryu siin, or “female poet” in the South Korean literary tradition: “A woman poet is expected to use ‘pretty’ language and is banned from using any language that may be inappropriate or outside the norm … In other words, women poets are oppressed from fully speaking out as liberated individuals” (Choi 2003, p. 531). Kim felt she “.… had no choice but to invent a new voice … to escape from the traditional Korean way of writing poetry and the prison of metaphor” (Williams 2012). Kim writes from and about Seoul, mirroring the grotesque, unpredictable and fluid movement of the city, while absorbing the environmental realities of a postcolonial country closely tied to US military and economic systems (Williams 2012). As the first woman poet to receive several South Korean literary awards, her poetics diminish expectations as she pushes her gender to uncategorize gendered spaces.

Etel Adnan was born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925 and died in 2021. In solidarity with the Algerian War of Independence, Adnan began to resist the political implications of writing in French and became a painter. Adnan describes “painting in Arabic” as a different way for her to engage with the Arab language which she learned as a child from her father but never used in daily life (Adnan 1996). She describes her discovery of painting in Arabic as that of “opening of a side window, as if one morning the sun did not rise where it was expected to rise, but close by, at a different point of the horizon” (Adnan 1996). Moving her poetics materially from the strictures of words to the fluidity of paint also opened up new possibilities for the watery imaginary to move through her poetics and create hybrid meanings. Later, through her participation in the movement against the Vietnam War, she began to write poetry and became, in her words, “an American poet” (Adnan 2016). Both Adnan and Kim, although born and living in different geographic locations, confront and move through socio-political and linguistic constraints respective to their lived experiences. As I will highlight, their work also thematically approaches nature, specifically water, as a space for transformative and transgressive movement.

Although neither poet is ostensibly “American,” Kim Hyesoon’s close translational work with Korean American poet Don Mee Choi has brought her poetry to the United States and proliferated its influence worldwide. Choi’s own poetry combines destabilizing traditional historical narratives through visual elements, collage, and memoir. In her collection, Mirror Nation (Choi 2024), which completes her KOR-US trilogy, she illustrates the violent and oftentimes erased colonial and neocolonial contemporary history of South Korea, specifically the Gwangju Uprising of May 1980. Choi, who has been translating Kim for over a decade, discovered when they first met in person that they both knew Jeong Yu-jin, an activist “involved in issues related to crimes committed against women by the U.S. troops in South Korea” (qtd. in Yoon 2019). It is clear then, that the relational and watery movement of nations overlap in ways that geographical labeling sever. Similarly uncategorizable, Etel Adnan has written her various works in English and French and is widely celebrated in the Arab world as well as the English speaking world. To categorize either poet as any one thing would be contradictory to the ways the watery imaginary dissolves and erodes boundaries and borders. Therefore, Adnan, Kim, and Choi exist as part of a constellation of relationally American poetics that embrace no place while aware of these amalgamative and distinct abstract realities that are dependent upon each other for existence.

2. Intergenerational Knowledge

Throughout their collections, Adnan and Kim use watery poetics to move intergenerationally, most notably through memory. My use of intergenerational knowledge is based upon Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ definition of “intergenerational” which, “not only marks co-production between people of different chronological ages, but also to activate the radical productivity of difference that emerges in the spaces of collaborative making” (Gumbs 2010, p. 67). As Gumbs insists, intergenerationality does not exclusively move through bloodlines, but other affinities as well. The watery imaginary accesses intergenerational knowledge through its ability to move knowledge anachronistically. The watery imaginary’s process of unearthing, revealing, and eroding temporal consistencies “reactivate cultural feminist memories in the present” and moves through a societally structured forgetting threatening authority and enabling access to impossibilities (Chidgey in Gunkel et al. 2012, p. 29).

Memory is a slippery and errant entry point into intergenerational knowledge. As Gumbs mentions, “Memory is the last(ing) danger” (Gumbs 2010, p. 18). Memory re-membered through a watery imaginary moves nonhegemonic human intergenerational inheritances to the present. As Adnan elucidates in her collection Night (Adnan 2016), “Memory is intelligent. It’s a knowledge seated neither in the senses, nor in the spirit, but in collective memory. It is communal, though deeply personal. Involved with the self, though autonomous. At war with death” (p. 15). In this sense, like water, memory moves everywhere.

The most insistent way that Adnan engages in this collection with intergenerational knowledge is through her deploying and re-deploying memory, a queer and lasting movement that takes place in the imagination. She states:

My memories form a forest with unstable boundaries. This forest has entrances in

Northern California, Lebanon, Brittany…The dead do not scare us, that’s what’s

wrong–we have let go of the power of fear. Streams are running, yes, but who’s going

to tell me how to find a way in the territory I’m speaking of, and if I don’t find it, what

am I living for?

(Adnan 2016, p. 17)

Here, Adnan signals to a hybrid place that does not exist in the material world. It is a combination of places she has called home. There is a recognition of natural watery movement, as the streams are “running” but they do not lead to the place her memory recalls because it does not materially exist. She then gives a call of “intergenerational accountability” questioning how we are to move these unstable inheritances into material embodiment amongst an increasingly overdetermined present (Gumbs 2010, p. 33). Adnan was witness to the Lebanese Civil War and an active voice against violence and war. She tracks intergenerational movement predominantly in this collection through nature. In Adnan’s work, and in Night (Adnan 2016) specifically, the natural world holds intergenerational knowledge. She makes the connection between war and its relational effect on the earth: “Down in the valley, war is unfolding its logic; on the other side of the ranch the ocean is raising a tantrum” (p. 34). While the war “unfolds its logic,” a movement that reveals layers, the ocean responds with emotion. The causality of military movement here manifests both physical and emotional movement: the environmental effects of war inevitably cause oceanic changes (connoting the idea that every genocide is an ecocide) but it also moves the ocean into an emotive space of anger. She emphasizes relational movement further: “The sea and the horizon/Are just making waves/but the horizon is moving over the sea…/and the river, across/my eyes, is moving faster” (p. 48). Here the watery imaginary moves queerly, as she describes multiple objects and abstractions moving at the same time. With a surreal quality, the horizon moves over the sea instead of the sea moving over the horizon. Things move internally and externally and in different directions, at the same time destabilizing what moves where. A “river across my eyes” is not what her eye sees, but is described as part of her actual eye, which denaturalizes and renaturalizes what moves, how the reader perceives, and where. She also deploys ellipses here and throughout the collection to illustrate a physical continuation into an unknown.

Adnan uses the watery imaginaries destabilizing movement to enhance the flow of humanistic intergenerational knowledge most explicitly when she states, “Often, the spirit runs swiftly, carrying the memory of women to whom existence had presented an unbearable sharpness. All I can tell is that I was there” (Adnan 2016, p. 24). What is moving within her–here it is errant memory–brings these women before her, into a present. The unbearable sharpness contrasts with the fluid and amniotic movement described in the imaginary. Existence as being “an unbearable sharpness” to women connotes the contrasts that women moving against the norm are confronted with: it becomes difficult to move and exist amongst sharpness when you are fluid. Adnan brings herself into communion with these women not through biological ancestry but through relational memory alone and its movement towards her. “I was there,” is the statement of awareness and presence that a watery imaginary requires. As both witness and productive space, Adnan implies that she was in the memory of women and the memory of these women was also in her, a self-reflexive intergenerational transformative practice.

Adnan also nods to a queer intergenerational knowledge that flows towards interspecies transmission. “There must be non-human memories from where our own surges, take us to the next thing” (Adnan 2016, p. 16). The term non-human connotes the introduction of a different kind of queer intergenerational knowledge, one between various species. She describes that these “memories surge” a sudden powerful movement usually caused by waves or tide. Through negation, this nonhuman movement can be anything but human, yet it is moving and nondescript, a part of the speaker without her knowing where or how it came to or through her, or even where it’s going, but it is present. She elucidates, “Memory trespasses our limits. Some animals hear it…some structures own it” (p. 16). The idea that memory as a form of intergenerational movement trespassing limits enhances the fluidity the watery imaginary generates. Relationally, certain animals and certain senses are aware of memory as it moves through structures or systems. The notion of some structures “owning” memory connotes co-option by hegemonic social means of production, like trauma or national nostalgia. She goes on to state, “Memory is the glue that keeps the universe going, therefore it is memory in action and in essence, in becoming and in being” (p. 15). The emphasis on the present progressive, of becoming and being, exemplifies the watery imaginary’s insistence on movement and an ever-generating relational process in present practice. Annan emphasizes that memory moves anachronistically, it “sews together events that hadn’t previously met,” memory is “glue” the properties are amalgamating and sticky, they move in different formations–sometimes wet sometimes dried–that create imaginaries lived but not necessarily realized materially (p. 15).

Kim also interweaves intergenerational knowledge with watery sensibilities throughout the collection, All The Garbage of the World, Unite! (Kim and Choi 2011, emphasizing that humanity moves between and amongst many informative worlds. For example, in the poem “Starfish,” Kim and Choi reveal that the Korean word pulgasal and starfish are homonyms. Pulgasal can refer to a monster from a Korean fable that can only be killed by fire and also an animal, the starfish (p. 5). Translator Don Mee Kim and Choi choose to place this piece of information as a descriptive note at the end of the poems to help readers understand connections that they would have no other way of knowing since they are presumably English speakers and from an ancestry of imperialism. The choice to inform the reader of this past is an opportunity for recognition, for both the one erasing and the one erased. This is a watery strategy in that it activates a fluvial process, transporting and depositing information that was otherwise hidden. Pulgasal, the reader comes to discover, is also a monster’s name from a fable that took place during the Choson period when Buddhism was suppressed by King Yi Song-gye. A monk created an animal out of a fleck of rice and it roamed the country as a monster. The speaker in the poem directly addresses the pulgasal saying, “Don’t return here even if a ditch forms from the tears/that I shed every night missing you/the ditch is no place for you to live” (l. 19–21). The myth that Kim invokes is a tale of rebellion and the monster, a product of repression. There is a wildness that the speaker longs for, a freedom that the pulgasal embodies. Yet the speaker knows that there is no place in the postmodern world, where she lives, for such a creature. In the first line of the poem the speaker says, “I leave my starfish in the Pacific Ocean” (l. 1). They later demand that the starfish not return, even if the speaker produces water from their own body. The object they liken their pool of tears to in the material world is a “ditch” (l. 21) connoting a culvert, or a man-made excavation for drainage. The idea that this starfish could move into a sewer, is too much for the speaker to bear. There is also a timeliness and timelessness present in the poem. The speaker states, “Being on time is my sickness, but I need to get going to be on time,” as if time is not just an illness she’s contracted in this postmodern world, but one that also lives outside of her. Then later, “My feet gradually fade away and/take off like wolves into the distant mountains” (l. 36–37). Movement feels inevitable, and also not contained to the physical body, but rather a dismembered defiant stomp back into the “natural” world to which she cannot return. Kim is not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. So the speaker’s feet, the vehicle for movement, maneuver without the rest of the body as if they are called to do what they are designed to do, move. This movement toward an origin is also present in the poem, “Like The Hand That Breaks The Heart.” The first lines state:

Maybe they’re leaves that have fallen from shindansu in autumn

Two leaves for each of the ten million people of Seoul, so twenty million

leaves rustle

They rustle nonstop, not pausing even for a second, trying to reattach

themselves to something

(Kim and Choi 2011, l. 1–5)

The note at the end of the poem informs the reader that shindansu is the first tree that came down from the sky in the Korean creation myth. It is no accident that the leaves are in the act of falling, in motion, a necessary movement to further the process of life and living. They do not try to “reattach themselves” (l. 4–5) because there is no freedom in attachment in our current neocolonial world. There is a longing for attachment, but an attachment to “something” (l. 5) which may be the cause of the problem. Words cannot attach to meaning in a way that would bring clarity or definitiveness to the collective unknown. All of this movement is in the hopes of attachment, which seems unattainable and very much besides the point. Kim uses attachment to illuminate another postmodern postcolonial preoccupation that forces movement. In the middle of the poem, Kim invokes the relationship between attachment and the assertory constriction of certainty. “A traditional military band goes up the street of falling leaves/Two hands and ten red fingers on a trumpet wiggle nonstop/as if they are trying to reattach themselves to something” (l. 6–8). Where the state manipulates memory through nostalgia and movement for military purposes (i.e., make America great “again” in the United States and similar notions that cement nationalism from states around the world), in this poem, the attachment evades even the military band. This vacillating movement of attachment and dismemberment is quintessential to re-membering and manifesting intergenerational myth, a type of movement the psyche–both collectively and individually–must travel with in order to create an impossibility. This is especially important to the poet steeped in the watery imaginary while moving through a neocolonial world, where home as a physical space is not always attainable.

The attachment offered in this poem is stagnant and definitive, it does not leave room for interpretation. It is, ironically, a dislocation. Once the shindansu leaves’ veins touch each other they “crumble and fall off.” They are later described as:

The discarded things!

They flutter about not knowing where they are supposed to go like the two

rats under the scorching sun!

The poverty one is born into has to be on the move constantly

(Kim and Choi 2011, l. 13–16)

Quite literally, movement is described here as a necessity for survival. If one stagnates, survival is in danger. There is a need to always be hustling, or in the case of discarded things, rustling, in order to feel safe. The poverty one is “born into” is the antithesis of generational wealth. Poverty “moves” from one generation to the next, but it also moves as an act of reform, or the restlessness of survival. If we think of the watery imaginary as a communicator between bodies, then its anachronistic movement through intergenerational knowledge expands our understanding of what is moving and how. This can open up new opportunities for thinking about how water not only drives climate change, but also our understanding of how to relationally move with it.

3. Repetition

Repetition as a constraint produces similarity and the illusion of sameness. Yet, the watery imaginary accesses repetition’s persistence while highlighting difference. For example an oceanic wave is a repetition never reproduced in the same place. Water repeats through waves but not exactly the same way (Helmreich 2023, p. 5). Similarly, the watery imaginary re-imagines repetition and raises questions as to how “feminist and resistance knowledge is generated and accessed” (Chidgey in Gunkel et al. 2012, p. 31). Repetition’s power on the psyche is not lost in the capitalist consciousness either. Internet users are repeatedly shown targeted ads for the same products and often feel the subconscious pull to purchase them. Repetition in this sense, like déjà vu, can feel like a “memory without a memory, a kind of forgetting without forgetting” (Chidgey in Gunkel et al. 2012, p. 30). Repetition in contemporary transnational poetry then, is a confrontation, an invocation, and apotropaic insistence. Repetition is an insistence that is also an erasure of what does not repeat. Those who feel an urgency to be heard or seen may urgently repeat themselves for fear of being erased. Repetition, in the postmodern sense, is also an obsession and a coping mechanism. In the twenty-first century, the word stimming refers to repetitive and stimulating movements or sounds that ameliorate discomfort. In this sense, repetition, or stimming, is used as a tool for the individual’s comfort. Repetition’s errant movement proposes an alternative way of existing with technologies often used to constrain. Through repetition Kim Hyesoon and Enel Annan illustrate how language and its repetition hold current injustices. Using formal constraints like repetition, poems transform into what Kim calls the “formless form” (vii) that is continuously moving meaning.

Kim and Choi create neologisms out of words that already exist, like glitching portmanteaus. In the poem “Alchemy,” the first line of the poem contains the word “flowflows,” the second stanza contains the word “streamstreams,” and the third and final stanza “bangbang” (p. 82). Choi translates parts of Kim’s poems into English neologisms emphasizing this flow or rhythm through repetition. It is important to note that Kim and Choi opt not to use adverbs but rather to double down on the verbs. Some postmodern thinkers, including Choi, associate this with an allusion to a mechanical glitch reminiscent of the fracture, or blip that the current late-capitalist technological era causes in the psyche. Choi writes, “I’ve come to notice that there are certain tics already embedded in Kim Hyesoon’s language in All the Garbage of the World, Unite! They might be tremors or ripples of some sort…History in translation induces a frenzy of misfits, fits, and tics” (qtd. in Yoon 2019). While this effect is certainly present, the specific words that are translated within repetition create onomatopoeic neologisms that defy definition, ablate any sense of definitiveness, and emphasize the “formless formal,” the contradictory relationship that movement—free from any societal rule—invites. I would go a step further and call them a technological echo, a cybernetic haunting (Kim, vii). Kim and Choi invent a language similar to the one with which the reader is familiar, yet this new language moves differently. It holds memory of the patriarchal language system that created both English and Hangul, yet something formless and not yet materially defined, repeats.

Similar to Etel Adnan, Kim’s neologisms also relate to nature, highlighting a relationship between watery movement and the natural world. Several of the neologisms in the poem “Alchemy” describe movement in this way. The speaker of the poem juxtaposes moonlight with “flowflows,” “streamstreams” with mountains, and “bangbang” with ground (Kim and Choi 2011, p. 82). The title itself suggests movement and transformation, the ancient branch of philosophy that originally tried to turn lead into gold. From one form to another, the juxtaposition of these neologisms with natural ephemera hints that this flow of movement is ever-present in the natural world as ordinary speech is destabilized through movement. This creation through translation further conflates the hydrofeminist and new materialist ideas of form and matter, freeing them from gendered or temporal assumptions. The activity described in these new words does not hold the reader in one place, rather it moves them along so that they “just get to go” (Kim and Choi 2011, p. 50). While it is true here that meaning accrues through structural repetition, the type of meaning that accrues is sensory and somatic. The effect is polyphonic, the reader hears the words as sounds and also as memories of meaning. The physical tightness and claustrophobia of the words on the page exemplify how constriction can still imply movement where it otherwise would seem contradictory, and how constraint can act as an alchemical force, a pressure point for amalgamation when there is no escape, yet there are passageways waiting to be moved through.

Adnan uses repetition most notably through its function in memory and the anxiety of forgetting, yet the ability to remember lets several imaginaries flow concurrently. The rhythmic and repetitive movement of the ocean first serves as a salve, “For now, it’s the return and the return of the ocean repeating itself over itself, water on water, movement over movement, waves over waves, breathing following breathing, affirmation coming over affirmation” (Adnan 2016, p. 25). She then describes the tides as “a pendular insanity, as impatient in its regularity as this gaze on the inbuilt instability of liquid metals” (p. 25). There is then an anxiety present in the repetitive motion and a restlessness that lies in wait within the repetition, within “liquid” metals. Etel Adnan deploys a queer repetition that moves similarly to Kim’s poetics but not on the grammatical level. The landscapes in the collection repeat several times but in different patterns and frequencies: trees, shadows, rivers, and water all appear, disappear, transform, and reappear throughout the collection. Repetition reinforces sameness, but its generative properties through the watery imaginary open up the floodgates for further meaning.

4. Translation

Like water, meaning is not static but generated through dynamic relationships and interactions. Translation through the watery imaginary is attuned to variations because multiple modes of movement are essential to translation’s process. It is important to note that while man-made machines translate perfectly according to syntactical rules, humans do not translate perfectly in that sense, yet meaning is less likely to keep its nuance without human translation. As Walter Benjamin asserts and Don Mee Choi agrees, “translation that intends to perform a transmitting function cannot transmit anything but information hence something inessential” (qtd. in Choi 2020, p. 3). In this sense, it is not the information that the words hold that is important but the way their meaning moves. A Deleuzian view rhizomatically related to the watery imaginary emphasizes that translation is many things at once, “both a thing, a substance, a material, and a conveyance, a way that one material is converted to another form” (qtd. in Choi 2020, p. 4).

Kim’s work is translated from the Korean by Choi, one source of its cultural and linguistic hybridity in contrast to Adnan’s Night (Adnan 2016). Kim and Choi further problematizes translation at the grammatical level, creating words that are compound, similar to signifiers but not quite the same. Translation through experimental feminist writers like Kim and Adnan emphasize the problems that act in accordance with siphoning meaning or movement into constricting boundaries. Through neologisms, Kim generates a form of resistance that even the most structured translator would have a problem translating through patriarchal/colonial language systems. Similarly in the preface to Glissant’s poetics, Betsy Wing describes her difficulty translating “la totalité- monde, les échos-monde, and le chaos-monde,” because they are “neologisms-no more instantly acceptable in French than in American English” (Glissant and Wing 1997, p. xv). When there is no structure appropriate to translate into, a hybrid is formed.

Etel Adnan wrote poetry in French and English but the many languages in her life changed based on where she was located. She spoke Turkish and Greek at home, French in school, and some Arabic which she learned from her father (Adnan 1996, p. 2). Written in French, Adnan mentions a translational issue with her poem, “The Book of the Sea”. In it, she sets up a relationship between the sea and the sun. At the time of the essay, the book was not translated in Arabic, because “sea” in French is feminine and “sun” is masculine, but in Arabic the gendered principals are reversed, “So the poem is not only not translatable, it is, in a genuine sense, unthinkable in Arabic” (Adnan 1996, p. 4). The limits of literal translation make certain relations “unthinkable” reinforcing Deleuze and Guattari’s notion that “there is no mother tongue, only a power takeover by a dominant language” (qtd. in Choi 2020, p. 4).

As Choi, Kim, and Adnan assert, watery translation becomes a form of alchemy, in which the original is in constant motion–just as language and meaning is constantly in motion–and cannot be fully preserved, but ultimately preservation is not translation’s intention. For example, physicists can only understand information they can measure with their metrics, and this becomes a problem of translation (Da Silva 2014, p. 92). In this sense, as Benjamin asserts, everything we can measure through translation is an “after” (Benjamin 2005, p. 254). Yet, translation in the watery imaginary is a witness of presence, it is not an after, it is a progressive and constant movement. Kim supports the movement of the watery imaginary when she states in her preface to the collection, “The essence of my existence does not have a fixed form; it has a moving form, always circulating but never repeating itself” (Kim and Choi 2011, p. vii). Watery translation then, as a system, does not identically repeat but becomes informed by feedback from grammatical rules as well as feedback from the translator’s lived experience.

As previously illustrated, Kim and Choi are keenly aware of language’s capaciousness. They emphasize that writing something down does not make it less moveable, not just unsettling stable ideas of language but promoting hybrid imaginaries. Language and its meaning are always in motion. Kim states:

The ether of a poem, the emptiness, the poetry exists inside the movement of language.

The trace of the movement can only be drawn as a formless formal like the way our brain

activities reveal themselves in waves, the way electric currents flow between you and me

(Kim and Choi 2011, p. vii)

Kim does not accidentally draw comparisons between the unviewable motion of the world and human bodies. She is aware that there are cybernetic overlaps between the ways of the world and the ways of the word. The body is the form, yet something formless and energetic moves through it. The idea of the “ether of the poem” as “emptiness” is the generative immenseness that poetry allows those who enter it. It is the moment at which all of the hegemonic notions of self dissolve and a watery imaginary leaks out. So how does one translate through water? Water depending on how it moves, what it moves, and what is moving it, causes certain relations to appear.

Neoliberal concerns force hegemonic systems to move with money and more scathingly, without it. Recognizing that most social and neoliberal connections move through violent force, Kim and Choi illustrate how this happens at the language level. For example, Choi is not interested in upholding the notion of national literature, or that literature outside of the Western canon is always bound to national borders” emphasizing that Kim herself views her poetry as rooted in “the republic of Kim Hyesoon” (Choi 2020, p. 4). Don Mee Choi finds all languages are touched by colonization, patriarchy, and violent histories, so she addresses these constraints through her experience with translation. She likens translation to a mirror; it is a doubling and a relationally reflective surface (Choi 2020, p. 10).

I would like to extend this metaphor to the surface of the water, where a reflection is visible but always moving, destabilizing, and distorting. When describing her experience deciphering Arab poetry, Adnan describes a similar experience. Her vague understanding of the language was, “like seeing through a veil, looking at an extraordinary scenery through a screen, as if the screen did not erase images but toned them down and made them look even more mysterious than they were” (Choi 2020, p. 6). In this sense, translation is no longer a constriction, but a mode for intergenerational and errant movement to spread its opaque and refractory connections across language, narrative, time, and space. This is a leaky relational knowledge that translation, as reimagined through the watery imaginary, pits up against old, prescriptive, language. It is not about relaying information as such, but allowing different forms of movement to access the present in transformative ways. Translation in this sense, “is a wound that makes impossible connections” (McSweeney, Göransson, qtd in Choi 2020). Translation utilized as a wound will open up new spaces for contamination. One of those spaces is the abyss.

5. The Abyss

The abyss is a mode of production that, like all others, acts as both a confine and a point of creation. The abyss is “a projection of and a perspective into the unknown” as Glissant posits (8). To be moved by the unknown and what we are unable to face, what lies under the surface, is to be moved by fear. The abyss is sensorially and logically destabilizing. Yet, as Glissant, Choi, Adnan, and Kim exemplify, it is also a space of amniotic production. The abyss is scientifically categorized as the deep sea zone filled with strange movement. Pitch black, creatures use bioluminescence to feel, light and sound move differently, currents change speeds and directions within moments. It is also a place where species face a higher rate of extinction due to human pollutants that settle there (Neimanis 2017, p. 92). All of these considerations are essential for analyzation.

In his poetics, Glissant notes three three iterations of the abyss, one as the belly of a boat, the second as the entire ocean, and a third that “projects a reverse image of all that had been left behind, not to be regained for generations except-more and more threadbare-in the blue savannas of memory or imagination” (Glissant and Wing 1997, p. 7). He illustrates how the ocean holds the bodies and history of the Transatlantic Slave trade while colonial boats simultaneously hold their own abyss. Glissant explains, “it is your womb, a matrix, and yet it expels you. This boat: pregnant with as many dead as living under the sentence of death” (Glissant and Wing 1997, p. 6) Christina Sharpe emphasizes this productive and annihilating movement in response to Glissant, “The birth canal of Black women or women who birth blackness, then, is another kind of domestic Middle Passage…The belly of the ship births blackness; the birth canal remains in, and as, the hold” (Sharpe 2016, p. 74). Here, Glissant and Sharpe locate what Alexis Pauline Gumbs calls a matrix between black maternity and queer intergenerationality (Gumbs 2010, p. 12). I’d like to emphasize the idea of passage and the movement described. Glissant and Sharpe illustrate the several passageways that concurrently exist and the relational movements therein. A boat moving across the ocean stifles the errant movement of the African people enslaved within it. Yet, the passageway, and the embodied reality of the birth canal are still producing, still moving. Glissant emphasizes that those who have accessed the abyss “do not believe they are giving birth to any modern force.” Like Adnan describes, memory and the oblivion of the abyss arrive in the present, “memory, and time, both immaterial, are rivers with no banks, and constantly merging” (Adnan 2016, p. 14).

In her poetics, Etel Adnan categorizes darkness as a catalyst for the abyss to move freely and (re)produce. In her most celebrated collection, The Arab Apocalypse (Adnan 2006), the sun and light itself become oppressive powers that see everything, even those who move against its reigning properties. She sets up a light/dark dichotomy while emphasizing the idea of being under the cover of night, a space where memory and errant imagination can flourish. Her collection Night (Adnan 2016) reemphasizes the moving relations of darkness. During, and in, Etel Adnan’s Night, memories, objects, and queer relations appear while disappearing, moving through a fraught landscape of obscurity and unknowability. The way things move and what moves at night are different from daytime. It is, as Glissant explains the abyss, a tautology all its own (Glissant and Wing 1997, p. 6). Adnan writes, “In this night, all nights. All the oceans in this brain. Life pushes/leaves out of this branch. Who are you, and where, drifting with the continents…” (Adnan 2016, p. 23). There is a feeling of destabilization, even the continents here are drifting, which echoes the diasporic reality of a colonial ship arriving on a “foreign” shore ready to relabel this “new land’s” identity. She says, “A disoriented goat is challenging the unknown, entering it, it/stays. The night is crowned with dreams. It’s because of their/mortality that things exist. In all seasons. In immortality’s split/seasons” (23). Dreams become an important space within the abyss, forming hybrid memories. Night moves errantly without the capitalistic demands that the day holds. Through the representation of a goat, we are shown how darkness will not allow our humanistic perception of sight to comprehend all that occurs there and what we don’t know becomes most obvious there. Adnan states, “And night and memory mediate each other. We move in them disoriented, for they often refuse to secure our vision. Avaricious, whimsical, they release things bit by bit” (18). Motion is hinted at here as well, memories release “bit by bit,” connoting a leakage or a sopping. She further explains, “Night is subtle rain, wetting body and soul” (19). Here Adnan makes the direct relation between night and water while also noting its speed or rate of motion. It is subtle and, like the watery imaginary, affects both the material and immaterial world. Night, like water, is a space that mediates what is known and is unknown. “It spreads like ink, moves like a forest animal, slides as fever in the veins: there’s savagery to this obscurity” (22). Describing again the way night moves is essential here. The night’s animal-like movement is “savage,” it is familiar but “will not secure our vision” (18). Adnan uses movement itself as a mode towards the abyss while emphasizing strange or errant movement. She states in a separate piece “Further On…”:

I move freely between the sun and the moon, I go further, I plunge into black holes and

emerge intact. I ride on comets, count galaxies. I’m on speaking terms with light-years, all

this since I traveled in a matter of seconds to the Universe’s edge and suspected that the

strange movement that I witnessed, once there, was the beginning of an abyss.

(Adnan 2001)

The abyss is an access point here. It is not located under the ocean but within a larger darker unknowable abyss, the universe. Adnan is aware that the abyss is a place of destabilization and queer motion as she reinscribes it as a productive place that is “on the edge.” The edge is an abyss in that it is also a shoreline of moving hybrid capabilities.

Kim Hyesoon also enters the abyss with her confrontation with holes. Holes in her piece appear as wounds, as potholes, as orifices, as a way to enter and exit and flow through. There is an emptying and refilling, a fluidity of movements that are constant in her poems that like water, alter our perspectives and create a united whirlwind. Things disintegrate just as they are being created, they spew out just as they are being stuffed in: “Red sap, bloody pus, mites are stuckstuck on the inner wall of a hole that leads up to the flower. The yellowish sebum, bloody pus on a newborn’s skin” (Kim and Choi 2011, p. 130). The incantatory final poem of the collection, “Manhole Humanity,” is composed of short sections that are separated visually with “O” icons. Previously published as its own body of work in 2009, this seventeen-page poem provides the final ode in the collection which feels like an incantation of the porous body and city.

As Adnan illustrates, the abyss exists above water too, and Kim brings us to the city, Seoul, her locus of movement. Here, she locates an anthropocentric abyss, the sewer system. The idea of associating humanity with a manhole connotes controlled movement. A manhole, after all, is a way to control what happens under the surface to all of our discarded fluids. She accentuates the idea that we try to separate ourselves from our discarded parts, the feces and the detritus that moves through us, yet she uses the metaphor of her female material existence to emphasize how this is an impossible endeavor.

The poem describes a world of black, empty, gaping movement, a place of dynamic holes and fluid fragments. Kim does not shy away from the metaphor of her feminine leaky body. The hole she describes in the titular poem manhole humanity serves not only to claim her own womb as a space for leakage but of projecting that womb-space out, enhancing the idea that relation is inherently amniotic: “At the hospital across the street, a hole is giving birth to a hole” (Kim and Choi 2011, p. 120).

It recognizes the porous body and earth, while also reiterating the historical violence of the abyss and terrestrial holes like the “250,000 pounds of napalm per day that were dropped by the United States forces [onto Korea]… [resulting in] countless mountains, hills, rice fields, and houses [being] turned into holes. Four million perished, leaving more holes” as Don Moi Chee writes in the translator’s notes (Kim and Choi 2011, p. xiii). The earth speaks and leaks through words and translation just as much as the narrator does.

The abyss as a generative matrix for the unknown is also made manifest through death. Both Kim and Adnan write about death, but not through its association with stagnancy. Instead death turns into a portal for more movement in different directions, more voices to speak, more constraints to be disintegrated and moved through. Kim states, “Dark tunnel before death/White tunnel after death” (Kim and Choi 2011, p. 122). Similarly in Night (2016) Adnan declares, “There’s death in the street, which feels like saying goodbye, or going downstream” (p. 25). For Adnan, death is a moving goodbye, downstream, towards the ocean, for Kim it is a tunnel of different shades. Both poets describe conduits for further movement through death.

In the final section of “Manhole Humanity” (Kim and Choi 2011) Kim leaves us with the dizzying image of water forming a hole in the water. This image immediately disorients our understanding of universal logic yet it exists as a hole made of water, existing for a few moments of wave movement. Metaphorically, water forms a hole in our logistical thinking, we live amongst this oceanic reality without realizing its potentiality as portals to new imaginaries and movements. Highlighting this idea, Kim’s final image of the book is thus:

O

There is a tunnel made by waves in Hawaii.

The tunnel was made by gigantic waves

That surge up then crash instantly in a circle.

When the blue sea let’s out a sigh, the sea turns inside out

And the surfer on the yellow board goes through the sigh

The blue tunnel opens, yet crumbles!

One rolled up hole roams in the deep wave.

(Kim and Choi 2011, p. 135)

Here, Kim brings us to the shore as we witness waves that move cyclically. A cycle is a circle, is a hole, but it is also a tunnel in which for an instant a surfer can move through. As Kim and Annan insist, a watery imaginary is not about an ideal futurity not yet realized, but a realization that what moves in us moves outside of us too, arrives to us as witness, like a roaming rolled up hole wave deep.

The postmodern world has tried to cause cosmic aphasia. The notion of progress and its linear movement towards technological and hegemonic advancement has not only erased cultures and species, but also ablated a dynamism that is present throughout this watery reality. Experimental transnational feminist poets like Kim and Adnan exemplify how moving within constraints that were designed to hold them back are also modes of production accessible through the watery imaginary. Accessing constraints through imaginaries and impossibilities offers humanity new ways to think through species specific but also climactic urgencies. The inclination to interpret errant feminist borderless thinkers through modes of hegemonic patriarchal Western thought stifles the chance to access and confront the dynamism of connectedness. The purpose of this paper is not to point out that our dominant systems are flawed, but that they obfuscate our perception of the many models moving amongst us, and limit the hybrid ways we can switch amongst them. Our aquatic and human legacy depends upon this diversity to keep its systems thriving.

Whether we want to admit it or not, systems of all sorts, visible and invisible, are at work and connected. For our species specific knowledge to survive and adapt, it is a matter of how much leniency we allow for the various currents running through everyday life to work in harmony, and how much freedom we allow ourselves to move between them. All must embrace ways of accessing and coming into conversation with hybrid inheritances accessible through the watery imaginary, moving forward while simultaneously going back.