Because daughter is also mother

Because daughter is also mother Janice Lee (bio) Sometimes, a very old, familiar voice speaks or writes through me. Recently, these are the words that keep writing themselves: 딸도 엄마니까 because daughter is also mother 버린딸도 엄마니까 because an abandoned daughter is also a mother The words become unfamiliar memory which becomes a geologic record of consolidation, reconsolidation, untangling, retangling, becoming again and again. When we remember, don't we become undone each time in the doing of the remembering? I remember learning to skip rocks by the river. I hardly remember my mother standing there showing me how. Her own corporeal disappearance has seeped into the memory of her corporeal body, but she isn't fading. As she became dust and ashes and sediment, the memory of her body too becomes dust and ashes and sediment, and becomes more absorbed into me, becomes more of me. We grow into each other, clasts of mother/daughter in nonlinear time. More of my grief becomes her grief. The grief of my mother becomes my own. 딸도 엄마니까 Once I was fire, choking on my own breath, the breath that kept the fire alive, the breath I consumed and that consumed me. I didn't know how to stop, how to stop myself from wanting more and more, until I saw my own reflection in the vast ocean, fire, the moon looking down, fire, on the surface of the ocean, fire, the sky and smoke sifting through, fire. I couldn't stop myself from wanting more, from diving in to embrace myself, from wanting to be submerged in moonlight, so I didn't stop myself, and arrived inside my own reflection as fire and evaporated as smoke and whisper. The vibrations of the whispers create [End Page 249] ripples on the ocean's surface, and the ripples are the stories of everything I destroyed and witnessed as fire. 버린딸도 엄마니까 On the morning after my death, I took a breath that was an unbreath. All of my dogs gathered on the bed beside me; here the times or dates of our deaths no longer intersecting at inappropriate times, but gathered like a pile of laundry—familiar, haphazard, full of bodily smell and history, the vehicles of our bodies gone like wispy smoke but gathered, nevertheless, here. 딸도 엄마니까 because daughter is also mother 버린딸도 엄마니까 because an abandoned daughter is also a mother [End Page 250] Janice Lee Janice Lee (she/they) is a Korean American writer, teacher, spiritual scholar, and shamanic healer. She is the author of eight books of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry, most recently: Imagine a Death (Texas Review Press, 2021), Separation Anxiety (CLASH Books, 2022), a finalist for the 2023 Oregon Book Award, and A roundtable, unanimous dreamers chime in, a collaborative novel co-authored with Brenda Iijima (Meekling Press, 2023). Her next book seeks to explore ties between the Korean cultural concept of han, narratives of inherited trauma in the West, the Korean folk traditions and shamanic practices of her ancestors (especially rituals around death), the history and creation of Korean script (Hangul), and revisions of the Korean myth of Princess Bari. She currently lives in Portland, OR, where she is the Operational Creative Director at Corporeal Writing and an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Portland State University. Copyright © 2023 Feminist Formations