Rezension: "Vernehmungsraum. Aufzeichnungen einer Vermissten" von Jennifer Kwon Dobbs, übersetzt von Irina Bondas und Felix Schiller

Abstract

In her remarkable poetry collection, Jennifer Kwon Dobbs interweaves the scars of colonial past with current aspects of discrimination and addresses collective trauma as well as individual experiences. The lyrical I searches for its mother and its mother tongue Korean, it remembers a childhood between two cultures, and builds bridges between the border of a divided country and between generational gaps. The heterogeneous texts work with blanks, omissions, elisions, photographs, and letters, consolidating poem by poem into a mapping of historical events such as the Korean War and the Cold War and provides an exploration of the terrible aftermath of Korea’s colonization, which today is still not exhaustively discussed. Moreover, Dobbs’ work addresses growing up in the USA, it thematizes aspects of migration, identity and origin and examines multilingualism, as well as the act of translation. The author’s concise language, combined with great narrative sensitivity, opposes authoritarian systems of all kinds and the silence surrounding past crimes. Dobb's Interrogation Room is therefore a highly important work that forces us to confront the legacy of colonial horror and thus opposes oblivion.