‘박탈’의 시학, 시의 주체에 따른 세월호 시의 정치성

Abstract

This article is based on the awareness of the problem that the emphasis on otherness/ethics in Sewol Ferry disaster poetry(literature) should be thought of in conjunction with political nature of the accident. I examine Sewol Ferry disaster poetry from the perspective of a poetics of ‘Dispossession’ by referring to the concept of ‘dispossession’ presented by Judith Butler and Athena Athanasiou. They have explored the possibility practices in the ethical and political domains that can respond to the reality of global dispossession, in which subject is radically collapsed as a form of subordination. In this article, I comparatively analyzed the representation aspects of the collection of poems by the mother of the victims, by the poet who documented the scene of the Sewol Ferry disaster after the event and a group of professional poets belonging to the Korean Writers Association by focusing on the fact that the aspects of the poems written display significantly definite differences depending on the distance of the poetic subject from the Sewol Ferry disaster. The collection of poems by the victim’s mother, ‘My longings for you’, presents the figure of a disenfranchised person in a position outside of humanity. Following the occurrence of the Sewol Ferry disaster, time was experienced as a retribution by the poet. The poet, who experienced time as a loss of temporality, adheres to an impossible position of responsibility by binding herself to the position of a sinner. She, by accessing the realm of death, tried to remember her daughter through composition of poetry. The collection of poems, ‘From 5.18 mother to 4.6 son’, is a collection of poems written by a female poet who has the memory of having searched her child at the time of the 5.18 Democratic Movement containing the contents of her experiences while participating in volunteer services at the site of the Sewol Ferry disaster. As a ‘recorder’, the poet composedly depicted the eerie and tragic ‘immediacy of dispossession’. In addition, by recording the encounters with places and people that overlapped after the occurrence of Sewol Ferry disaster, the poet 3-dimensionally presented the reality of suffering in the midst of fluid flow of such experiences of suffering. In the joint collection of poems, ‘We were all Sewol Ferry’, published by the poets affiliated with the Korean Writers Association, the poets visually materialized the world of ‘dispossession’ by composing the ‘impossible knowledge’ through embodiment of the moments of the victim’ suffering into poems. The poets identified themselves as testifying subjects and unabashedly poured out their voices of outrage. By writing the reality of dispossession caused by the neoliberal order and the incompetent government in the history of Korea, they emphasized awareness of historical reality and practiced composition of poem as an expression of resistance. Each of the poetic representation of the subjects in accordance with their respective distances from the Sewol Ferry accident examined in this article has their unique corresponding characteristics. What is important in the poetics of dispossession is the differences between the various representation themselves. Specific aspect of representation also illuminates the unreproducible aspects of other layers. Due to this inevitable unreproducibility, the act of representation can continue to be attempted, and the political nature that has been implied by the poetic representation can be accessed through diversified formats. Therefore, a disjunctive perspective that encompasses the interstices of diversified identities and their respective voices is crucial in constituting a ‘poetics of dispossession’. The power of ‘Sewol Ferry accident poetry’ will become apparent when we do not recognize the memories of individuals and languages of resistance as being fragmented, but, rather, view them as a political and historical practice by the enormous spirit of denial of the poetry.