"Korean Survivors of the Japanese 'Comfort Women' System"
By Melanie Hyo-In Han
This erasure poem revisits the historical trauma of Korea’s “comfort women,” women and girls forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during World War II. An erasure poem is created by selectively removing words from an existing text so that the remaining language forms a new poetic work, often revealing silenced voices or hidden meanings. Han draws on The Comfort Women: Sexual Violence and Postcolonial Memory in Korea and Japan by anthropologist C. Sarah Soh, whose influential and contested study both documents the system and interrogates how survivor narratives have been remembered and politicized. By transforming Soh’s academic analysis into poetic form, Han allows survivor voices to surface in a new register that foregrounds memory, absence, and testimony. Please visit this site to view the poem.
About the poet:
Melanie Hyo-In Han is a Korean-born poet and educator who grew up in East Africa. She is the author of Sandpaper Tongue, Parchment Lips and holds an M.F.A. in Poetry and Translation from Emerson College, where she also taught and worked as an ELL Consultant. Her work has been recognized by Boston in 100 Words and The Lyric Magazine, and she currently serves as a poetry editor at Flora Fiction. Her poetry often reflects her transnational upbringing and linguistic fluency, exploring themes of identity, voice, and cultural memory.