Artist Profile: Author E. J. Koh on ‘The Liberators’ and the Breaking of Borders

E. J. Koh’s debut novel, “The Liberators,” is a story about borders, and how to overcome them.

“The Liberators” follows four generations of two Korean families across different continents spanning decades of history from 1980 until 2014. The theme of borders is prominent in the book — external borders between nations and communities, but also internal ones, between individuals and families.

While “The Liberators” is her first novel, Koh isn’t a stranger to writing, having previously published a poetry collection, a memoir, and translated poetry. She was inspired to write the saga because of her personal history and her other work.

“I started the novel during my doctorate work at the University of Washington,” Koh said in an interview with The Harvard Crimson. “And at the same time, I was completing my memoir, ‘The Magical Language of Others,’ while writing a screenplay for a television show on Apple TV. So the novel came out of doing a lot of research on not only personal history, but a lot of my work in Korean American history and literature, as well as some of the work I was doing in translation, poetry, and screenplays.”

Koh strove to keep her identity as a poet present while writing the novel.

“While writing ‘The Liberators,’ I'd never read so much poetry in my life,” Koh said. “So poetry was a really important part of writing the novel. It wasn’t separate from fiction for me.”

Her journey toward becoming an author began, in a way, as an accident.

“I was a competitive hip-hop dancer, and I was in college in Southern California. And I thought that that was the life for me,” Koh said. “But in my last year in undergraduate school, my school counselor — because I was bad at math — said I could replace my math requirement with the Introduction to Poetry. And I walked into the first poetry class, and I’ll never forget it. Because I went home and I wrote 40 poems that week. And it changed my life forever.”

While the novel deals with complex topics such as memory, trauma, destruction, and reparation, “The Liberators” offers a salvaging of the fragile bonds that hold humanity together by showing the close relationships between these seemingly unconnected themes.

“We often think of these things as disparate and separate. But to see them as a braid, as tightly wound together — that helps us face our humanity,” Koh said. “And that was really the core of bringing in the different perspectives, the history, the language, and the ‘The Liberators.’”

While writing endings can be difficult, Koh is inspired by poetry and views it as a way to come to terms with stories of grief and loss.

“I love writing endings, because it's the first lesson I learned in poetry,” Koh said. “In poetry, you call it a turn. The turn is the end of the poem. And you want to come to the end of the poem. So that if I’m writing a poem about my mother, I have to forgive my mother by the end of the poem, or the poem has to forgive me for not. Otherwise it’s not a poem, it’s a journal or a diary entry, but not a poem.”

Koh’s personal self can be also seen in all of her work, such as her writing about her mother’s parents’ history and their tragic deaths in South Korea in her memoir.

“I really enjoy the process of revealing myself because of my work in my memoir,” Koh said. “And in a way, I feel like that way of revealing myself deepens human connection, and writing as a way to get to human connection.”

The internal journey toward interpersonal connection is especially important to Koh, as it presents part of her solution to the theme of borders in “The Liberators.”

“To cross those boundaries, especially those within ourselves, can be a powerful form of liberation,” Koh said.

Wishing for her novel to contribute to Korean American literature, Koh is also hopeful about the many Asian American writers, and their multitude of experiences, who are emerging in the literary scene today.

“Any time you try to write a story to represent a community, there will always be outsiders, even within a community. There will always be unsafe spaces in safe spaces,” Koh said. “So it’s always important to continue writing toward the things we don’t know.”

Her current project is a long-term epistolary work that, once again, emphasizes the power of human connection.

“Right now I’m writing love letters to strangers,” Koh said. “I started in 2016. And I’m still doing it. I had decided that I would write a thousand love letters to strangers by hand. And if you want one, you can. I’m still doing it. So I’ve just written over 600 love letters to strangers all over the world.”

Anyone can request a love letter on Koh’s website.

Beyond the letter-writing project, Koh describes love as one of the most prominent and important themes present in her work.

“I think love is such a presence in all of my work, including my love letter project,” Koh said. “Because it shows time and again, even across history, that more often than not, it’s not actually the easy thing to do. It’s not always a simple thing to do. In many cases, it’s the most complicated, difficult thing to do. And I think when you’re in a place where it’s even harder to do, that’s when it’s most important to love.”