Dear Rasheedah,

Your workshop Time Zone Protocols at Leeum struck a chord with me. Seojin and me often found ourselves talking about our experience of time and (dis)placement. Our conversations were a result of, as much as they produced, a sense of nostalgia. Not in the transferred sense as a wistful yearning for the past or as a reenactment of a feeling, but a reflection rooted in the present. We kept thinking about our own entanglement in genealogies and temporalities.

I had assumed that coming to Seoul to trace my mother’s past would mean, above all, looking back. But everything I heard, encountered was in front of me. Living, breathing. I tried to make sense of what I experienced but what I encountered often carried no measure of comparison. My feelings stood alone, self-contained. Any comparison to the cultural context I grew up in, tended to dangerously fall into the imperialist thinking that is based on linear progression. The term ‘novelty’ felt inadequate too. It clung too closely to an economics of the New where novelty is part of the endless churn of consumerism dressing up as a new invention. In the book On the New (2014), Boris Groys challenges the assumption that the new is inherently progressive. He describes instead how the term reflects how societies relate to the future, deciding what kind of past will be remembered and what future will be imagined. 

But how do you imagine your future if part of your present is being denied? How do you navigate a history shaped by the absence of documentation and memory?

A common methodology in working with adopted children is the construction of what is termed a Life Story. This practice encourages them to assemble a chronology of childhood and adulthood, ostensibly to foster self-understanding and to process past trauma in order to move forward. Yet this approach presupposes a linear temporality, one in which trauma is confined to the past and the future stretches ahead as a space of potential progress. To engage with one’s history in this framework is continually problematized, as it implies a form of stasis: dwelling in the past rather than advancing toward the future.

My own story, too, seemed to be governed by time. I felt that my being and becoming was preceded by a hostile separation in time. That parts of my Korean identity seemed to be forever inaccessible, available –and legitimate– only through a childhood in Korea that I never experienced. I never knew what it felt like to attend school here, to celebrate Chuseok, to share meals with the family. I was eager to hear from Seojin how it felt to grow up in Seoul. Perhaps because I felt a connection to her, I allowed myself to believe that her life might have been mine, had I grown up there. I was caught in a linear timeline; one in which the self I have become could never have existed without the ruptures in my family’s genealogy and the displacement that shaped it. A line that stopped abruptly and started again in a parallel line, disconnected from each other. 

This severance led me to believe that not only my families history was beyond my reach, but that it was a history that didn’t belong to me nor did I possess any claim to it. It took months to gather all the documents tracing the outline of the adoption for my visa application for which I had to prove my mothers Korean nationality. The woman at the counter leafed through the papers with practiced indifference—folding, creasing, wetting her fingertips to separate the pages. Her saliva on my mother’s name. The sound of paper bending under her impatience. I sat there, watching. In that moment, it seemed that I wasn’t verifying a relationship, but defending the existence of one.

My mother told me that there was no reason for her to come back to Korea. She came for me. There is no history for her in Korea, she said. I could finally understand her resistance. What it feels like when your own past is being questioned. When the story of your life is being subjected to the actions of others, dependent on approval.

When I participated in your workshop, you talked about co-existing across time. You asked us what Time Wounds we have and how they could be healed. I listened to the other people talk about how they struggle to not being able to own their time. How their time was being weaponized by their boss. How in discussions they were put on hold. They were made to wait. You asked us how we could think of ways to heal these Time Wounds. People started to talk. So much, they often extended the timeline of the workshop program.

My fixedness in time I realised, was a fixedness of my notion of time. Under the gaze of a predominantly white Swiss environment, the Korean contours of my face hummed like a scrutinized script. I became the archaeologist of my own identity: holding an artefact but not the culture or the language it once belonged to. I was fixed on a past as an orientation, a reference point against which to measure my own identity. I was fixed on a future I hoped to arrive in and a present that seemed to fell short in-between. Most of all, I was fixed on a cohesive self that moves progressively along a linear timeline. 

Yet now I find myself returning to the experiences I gathered in Seoul; moments that form a history of my own. One that refuses to be compressed into a single timeline or a universalised notion of history-as-time. I am thinking about myself dispersed through being and time as a state of superposition. Everything everywhere all at once.  Not a lack of knowledge or the fear of indeterminacy, but a freedom in opening up to infinite alterity. Reclaiming the ownership of my story: A story in which memories and histories fold into one another. A cycle of re/turning and re/living histories, which I shape into the narrative fabric of myself. Each trace, each gesture, each echo never settles but drifts, forming a story that is always becoming, never complete, but mine.

Warmly,
Céline

Video Still from Monsters, Inc (2001)

Reading List

Rasheedah Phillips, Counter Clockwise: Unmapping Black Temporalities From Greenwich Mean Timelines, 2021.

Karen Barad, Troubling time/s and ecologies of nothingness, 2018.