Voice and the Words of Others: Jane Jin Kaisen’s Community of Parting

(In lieu of an abstract) Community of Parting opens with blue-green ocean waters frothing up against black rocks. Amidst the sounds of waves surging and what may be the echoes of a bell, we hear a voice, inviting us to the myth of Bari. The seventh child of the King of Joseon, Bari is abandoned for being born a girl. Her mother places her in a stone box in the Hwangcheon River, which connects the living and the dead. When her father is critically ill, Bari searches the world of death, bringing him an elixir to save his life. In gratitude, he offers her half the kingdom. She refuses. Instead, she becomes the goddess at the threshold of life and death, connecting the dead with the living. The myth gains new life in voice: “Within sentiments of border keeping, the diminishing of other knowledges and partial remembrance, the abandoned delineates a different approach. Gathering and mediating what has been torn, it is one of diffusing boundaries between past and present, self and other, here and there.”The ending of these words [“there”] is marked by a sharp cut from the ocean waves to an elderly woman, sitting on a bedroom floor, closing a closet. The camera eye moves us close to the woman’s methodical dressing in a shaman’s robes and lingers on the cloth’s texture as a voice, perhaps a different one, introduces us to shamanism as a religion “by and for women.”2 Shamanic ritual gives expression to “our bloody history,” to the partition of Korea, to female oppression, to class conflict. The camera focuses on the woman’s hand ringing a bell. As we are drawn into the sound of ringing, the scene cuts to Kaisen herself: seated toward us, eyes covered by the hands of the shaman who sits behind her, discernible by her robes. We hear a voice, perhaps one we have heard before, uttering the words, “Bari is not a name. It simply means abandoned. The sentiment of the abandoned surge between speaker and listener, teller and told. Constantly evolving, no one can claim its root. It is many since each teller infuses her own life story into the telling of the abandoned.” Abandoned marks the entrance into a polyphony of voices and scenes, of women―who go unnamed―relating snippets of stories: of a North Korean broker, of parents fleeing South from the North, of a friend inviting her to a UN club with many US soldiers, of mom working in the garment district in Los Angeles, of mainland people despising the Jeju Island haenyo [women divers] for being poor and low, parents forcibly deported to Kazakhstan, a mine exploding, a grandfather’s worry for her granddaughter during Japanese occupation, relatives who keep North Korean nationality in Japan, an adoptive family, a separated family.