Mee-Ju Ro reviews Mu, 49 Marks of Abolition

Sora Y. Han. Mu, 49 Marks of Abolition. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2024. 280 pp.

20 September 2024

In Canadian elementary schools, the day begins when the national anthem plays over the PA system and you’re required to stand up and sing along. I didn’t know English, so this meant that I didn’t sing at all for the first year. But I did open my mouth, rhythmically. The rhythm of the anthem seemed to be counting me in, or seducing me that it could count me in. To avoid the shame of silence (or exclusion), I mimed the way people’s mouths looked when they sang. As I learned more words, the anthem eventually progressed to the level of comedic gobbledygook, partially homophonic nonsense. An index for my English acquisition, I could track the words I knew and the ones I didn’t. The only word that didn’t fall into either category (of knowing) was free. The problem was that free was something I thought I knew—in Korean, there are two separate words for free (no payment) and free (liberty). Free was one of the earliest words I learned, as in “buy one get one free” (language acquisition is always inflected by the accent of material conditions). As I was reading Sora Y. Han’s Mu, 49 Marks of Abolition, I was reminded of the time when, as a fluent adult, I caught myself humming the gook version.

In his 2022 Carpenter Lecture at University of Chicago, Fred Moten tells us, “Freedom is a word we love but not adequate to what we want.”[1] Han’s Mu takes up Moten’s challenge to sidestep (Frantz Fanon’s) disavowal of pidgin and to imagine it as a language of study that takes place under conditions of violent deprivation. Mu is a portrait of that mad laboratory where the objects and the method of study are a poetics of nonsense. Put another way, Mu is a study and performance of “the ethics of the cut” that puts on hold the constant shuttle back and forth between notions of the subject versus the collective.[2] We understand the debate around these terms but the questions are: How do we recuperate “the honor of the whole” without recourse to an essence or sameness understood as shared property?[3] “How do we refuse individuation?” (p. 99) I believe Moten/Han’s use of the term mediation acts as a placeholder for this question.

Hyesoon Kim's Autobiography of Death (2018) is composed of forty-nine poems for the Korean folk belief that spirits linger on after death for forty-nine days. Styled after Kim and written after the passing of her father, Han’s Mu unravels in seven sections that are further divided into seven subsections totaling forty-nine “letters.” The form of her book suggests a structure of nesting, a kind of fractal organization, that serves as a commentary on mediation. For Han, the mudang, a Korean shaman, becomes a figure of and for mediation, particularly at the site of those stories about being unable to tell a story. Here, again, we hear echoes of Moten, specifically his reading of Leon Litwack’s ethical mediation of Uncle Toliver (the story of a man who could not tell his story). But Moten goes on to read a “more genuinely predatory mediation” in Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography (“KF,” p. 287). Equiano’s learning of English both produces and marks his desire to resemble the master but also, paradoxically, it becomes the medium of his many “ineffectual appeals to the law” (“KF,” p. 296; my emphasis). Han’s first book, Letters of the Law, is arguably an expansion of this turn of phrase through what she calls the “poetics of the plea.”[4] In Mu, she returns to her earlier themes but alongside an intense meditation on language as mediation. Despite Equiano’s failed attempts at using the English language to effect a resemblance or appeal, it is from within this language that a “resistant, improvisatory, asyntagmatic use of language occurs (“KF,” p. 295).

Mu is the citation of citation: it’s a reference to Moten, Nathaniel Mackey, the Dogon peoples’ funeral chants, Don Cherry’s “Mutron (Medley),” the Japanese for nonbeing/nothingness, the Greek word muthos for myth and mouth. Moten’s/Han’s primary focus is the mu—or materiality—of language. Dystranslation, according to Han, is a way of translating so loosely that what is preserved is the non-meaning of the letter’s sound. Dystranslation never asserts an indigenous monolingualism or a global multilingualism but rather works between multiple translations to listen to what is untranslatable in language (its mu), as is exemplified in her reading of Fanon through and between the various English translations, the French, and the Korean in the final section of Mu. For Han, this cut, this hold, takes on many forms: theory written in the form of a contrapuntal poem (reminiscent of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and M. NourbeSe Philip), various stylistic breaks (graphic, grammatic, syntactic), etymological improvisations, the figure of the DMZ, the letters of the law, Lacanian psychoanalysis, the windows of North County Jail, radical black feminist writings, the returning scene of her father teaching her math, Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee (1982), the mudang, hangul, and more.

But what does this have to do with mourning? I find a compelling answer in Mackey’s intimation: “Any longingly imagined, mourned or remembered place, time, state, or condition can be called ‘Mu’” (quoted on p. 3). In Kim’s essay “Bird Rider,” she tells us that Phantom Pain Wings was prompted by her father’s passing. She wanted to become a translator of bird language—a language that flies to places never been.[5] According to Kim, a bird rider “is a baby ghost—rejected by its mother and starved.”[6] The bird-baby is perhaps part of the extension and broader meaning of family that Hortense Spillers calls the bringing together of “children lost, stolen, or strayed from their mothers.”[7] Bird Rider “channels its voice through the shaman . . . in the voice of a bird, chirping. Nobody understands the chirping.”[8] Moten writes that gobbledygook, pidgin, baby talk, bird talk, Bird’s talk, is an essential element of mu. If Kim's bird language is that which no one understands, it is its untranslatability that becomes desire, one born of mourning, to reach places never been.

[1] Fred Moten, “The Case of Blackness: Anthology, Sociology, Echomusecology” (lecture, University of Chicago, Chicago, 23 Mar. 2022).

[2] Ibid.

[3] Moten, “Knowledge of Freedom,” New Centennial Review 4 (Fall 2004): 280; hereafter abbreviated “KF.”

[4] Sora Y. Han, Letters of the Law: Race and the Fantasy of Colorblindness in American Law (Stanford, Calif., 2015), p. 14.

[5] See Hyesoon Kim, “Bird Rider,” Phantom Pain Wings, trans. Don Mee Choi (New York, 2019), p. 167; hereafter abbreviated “BR.”

[6] Ibid.

[7] Hortense Spillers, “‘The Permanent Obliquity of an In(pha)llibly Straight’: In the Time of the Daughters and the Fathers,” Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago, 2003), p. 249.

[8] Kim, “Bird Rider,” p. 167.