Han, Rachel Jihye: I Am Returning for the Body

I AM RETURNING FOR THE BODY explores and maps liminal experiences—the posthuman, hybridity and diaspora, the afterlife, and the uncertainties of our real and imagined dystopias—through work that pushes genre boundaries and weaves together the primordial and futuristic, documentarian and autobiographical, narrative and musical, and sacred and profane. Through a pentaptych structure, these poems trace the anthropology of fire—how it brightens and ignites, then haunts—experimenting with methods of illuminating the pathways we may uncover as we press deeper and deeper into the dark: fashioning beings of metal, electricity, and light, only to return home to ourselves, to the softness of the body.

The conventional hero’s journey is twisted and warped as one peers behind the veil and into other worlds which have historically been left in the dark. Transcending the old linear structures, this mythology grows roots, branches; it is visceral, celebrating the wildness and musculature of the ancient, returned to us elliptically.

Portals into these other worlds are often dismissed as primitive, invalidated by the Capitolocene world. Questions that arise when they are instead embraced are: What have we passed through to reach this place? How do we illuminate and protect what is sacred to us through this new dark? What do we carry with us through the fires, and how do we carry it so it does not burn?

There is alchemy in this process of searching. Perhaps along the way, we may find that paradise was always a myth—but that there is something much stranger and much more hopeful waiting for us on the other side.