Ugly=Nation by Don Mee Choi

Ugly=Nation
Don Mee Choi

Once upon a time, there was Ugly=Nation. It still is, mind you. The most violently mountainous place on earth is no longer. The mountains were reduced to hills as everything depends on bombers and perspective if you happen to be nothing at all. In other words, the mountains were mere hills from the perspective of Beauty=Nation, which is endlessly lofty and correct. And it just happens that correctness has a great deal to do with beauty in general. If I may add, correctness is unbeatable beauty, which is why it is revered amongst skin crisp like fried potato chips. And so strategically speaking, nothing really matters in regards to Ugly=Nation since its ugliness is so utterly unbearable that it might as well be scorched, stripped bare of pines and feathers, barren to its bones. Welcome to the meat grinder. Naturally, Ugly=Nation swam in a pool of DDT. A licey situation. A nation devoid of lice! Is that possible? Beauty=Nation is possible. Ugly=Nation eventually grew up to be somewhat beautiful, but that was only from the perspective of its own kind, a perspective devoid of respectable distance. Patted with DDT powder, those azalea-pink beaks, bloated bellies and stubby toes. Those utterlings. And they aren’t just Orientals, they are Communists.

MARGINALIA

1.
It’s hard to explain to someone who has never been made into a metaphor how exhausting it is to be told how you look not just in face, but in story, in history, in bone. For example: your nation is a province for white colonialists. For example: that the colour of your skin is an afterthought.

2.
The distance between beauty and destruction is perspective—and perspective always belongs to the ones dropping the bombs.

3.
I have been both inside and outside of language like this. There is no safe way to speak about ugliness when it’s been institutionalised into geography, when the map itself says: you are not beautiful, therefore you are expendable.

4.
What happens when a body of people are reduced by rhetoric until all that’s left is to be eradicated or pitied.

5.
It is unbearable to be misseen again and again until you almost believe it.

6.
Yet even in the scorched landscape, the body remembers itself. And refuses to disappear.