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In Korea, a woman must first obey her father, then her husband when she becomes an ajuma, and finally obey her son as a halmoni. Any woman who violates or lives outside of these roles is called a ch'angyŏ (prostitute).
Kim Hyesoon
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Kim Hyesoon
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: January 1
Poet
Writer
Firsts
Husband
First
Outside
Must
Roles
Violates
Becomes
Prostitute
Called
Korea
Woman
Obey
Lives
Finally
Father
Son
More quotes by Kim Hyesoon
As a university student, I tried hard to write poems in Korean. It was at that time that I foresaw my death and the world's death. I think my poems started at that time.
Kim Hyesoon
Women are foils to men. It is hard for women to take a lead role even in NGOs for political resistance.
Kim Hyesoon
If someone asks, Is anyone alive? Break, your, head, open, and, show, your, ten, ta, cle.
Kim Hyesoon
Our mothers who have gone are buried in our bodies. It can be said that we were born with dead mothers in our body.
Kim Hyesoon
Women in Korean myths disappear after giving birth. The reason they were born is to produce sons.
Kim Hyesoon
Speaking as an outsider is the most authentic voice for a poet. Poets who have one hundred thousand or one million readers [as many South Korean poets do] might not be a real, authentic poet.
Kim Hyesoon
Mother does not exist, like water that has given life to a flower and then disappeared. Mothers live somewhere after giving birth to us.
Kim Hyesoon
When I first started to write poetry, I used to feel as if my tongue would go numb.
Kim Hyesoon
Korean feminism has been swept away by popular culture. It became a sort of old-fashioned trend or a joke.
Kim Hyesoon
The language of poetry is not stuck in place. Nothing can own language. I think, however, the genre of poetry itself is very feminine and motherly.
Kim Hyesoon
I have to reach the poetry condition to write. Then it is as if the border around me is thinned or blurred or erased or disappeared or dead.
Kim Hyesoon
My body is full of graves. A sepulcher is dug up, and a young girl comes out of it with her dusty hands in tears. A lady who is a young girl and an old girl at the same time feels the presence of the young girl. I feel that the 15-year-old me and the 50-year-old me come out of the sepulcher through an illegal excavation.
Kim Hyesoon
I am a tomb robber who is robbing my own tomb. Things from my tomb are exhibited under the radiant sun. Every time it happens I feel crude.
Kim Hyesoon
We carve on our body what society teaches us and continue this task, not knowing the identity they force us to have. This identity is carved on our faces and our skins. Not knowing our bodies have become the paper made of human meat, we stuff our bodies and make them a theater where cultural symbols or suppressed symbols play.
Kim Hyesoon
Living in South Korea as a girl meant living under a lot of discrimination and limitation. It was the same in my university and in the Korean literary world I am involved in.
Kim Hyesoon
Poems are ways of saying you clearly remember the day of your death and your tomb. When I am writing poetry, I relive my days when a woman inside me dies many times.
Kim Hyesoon
When I was at university, the policemen used to measure how short the women's mini-skirts were and how long guys' hair was. We were living under a government that considers people to be soldiers.
Kim Hyesoon
If you propose there is a feminism problem in Korea, somebody would point out that you are bringing up antiquated issues. No one acknowledges that discrimination against women is still widespread.
Kim Hyesoon
Mother is a synonym for abandonment and death. Comparing this synonym to water, it is like poured-out water. I call it mother, the identity that I cannot identify.
Kim Hyesoon
The grotesque in my poems is the motion I use to put myself and the grotesque world together. So the miserable images I use in my poems are the same as the letters I send into the miserable world.
Kim Hyesoon
