Dance Dance Revolution is a poetry collection, but it has a novel-like premise. One of the book's voices is a historian (Korean father, American mother) who grew up in Africa (their father was with Doctors Without Borders). In the course of their research into the Kwangju massacre (a bloody government crackdown on a student protest that occurred in South Korea in 1980, comparable to Tlateleolco in Mexico or Tiananmen Square in China), the historian tracks down a woman was one of the inspirational figures in the protest, its La Pasionaria. This woman is now working as a tourist guide at some deluxe resort town, located in a desert and filled with replicas of world historical sites, something Las Vegas or Dubai.
Good so far? Okay. Dance Dance Revolution includes some passages from the historian's journal and his/her/their notes to some of the guide's discourses (the poems in Part V might be from the historian...I'm not sure), but the greater part of the book consists of poems in the voice of the guide. Some of these are about her present circumstances, some about her memories of Korea, of Kwangju, and of the Ginseng Colony, which seems to be a short-lived experiment in community that started up after Kwangju.
The guide's poems are in an extraordinary hybrid language that draws on the vocabulary and syntax of several different languages at once, sometimes even on different historical eras of the same language. Finnegans Wake is the only handy analogue, but Hong's language is quite distinct from Joyce's--fizzier, saltier, more staccato. Its music is its own.
Within this polyglot nova is a meditation on dissent and resistance. The book was published in 2007, but is set in 2016--presciently, I'm thinking, given that was the year so many folks had to start thinking hard again about dissent and resistance. With so many thousands pouring out in the streets again, this would be a great time for people to pick up Dance Dance Revolution.
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