Posted under: Essays
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s work Dictee, be it an ethnography, poem, or novel, challenges the reader to experience speech through the “voice” of those who have been silenced. It is a work that is hyper-aware of language being a crucial in the discourse between the powerful and the powerless. If one’s country is occupied by a hostile invading force, what tool does one have left to preserve culture other than language? Cha’s work as an avant-garde filmmaker allows her to constantly juxtapose images and speech to uncover the way language colonizes the individual. The experience of reading Dictee is one that implores the reader to experience the sonic qualities of words rather than their meanings. She takes“[p]leasure in the image pleasure in the copy pleasure in the projection of likeness pleasure in the repetition. (p.17)” This preoccupation with the sounds of language, rather than meaning, is crucial to the work. She hopes to disassociate language to give the reader a feeling of being lost in a nexus of unfamiliar words and images.
The way the text places itself culturally is rather complex. Cha begins first by identifying herself in the Greek tradition, beginning with her apocryphal quote from Sappho. She also anchors the text in the discourse of the West by the use of the Muses to set off each section. The text’s primary language is English, as well, which helps us identify Cha’s potential audience. Under Clio, the muse of history, Cha places her most cogent discussion of race in the text. Beginning by invoking Joan of Arc, the French hero, and Yu Guan Soon, the Korean hero, she laments the end of many Korean traditions and institutions to the invading Japanese. This assertion is backed up by a litany of horrors inflicted on the Korean people.
The disturbing implication is that her history, and that of all Koreans, is somehow lost. Neither she, nor any other Korean can truly know what it means to be Korean after this atrocity. Cha hopes to place herself into a tradition of woman heroes who were executed for trying to save their race from certain destruction. There is a crucial difference: Joan of Arc was executed by the Catholic Church after saving her people from the invading English armies, while Yu Guan Soon failed to free her country and was executed by the Japanese. In order to pin down the author’s own ethnic identity, she turns to her own history and that of her ancestors. Her mother flees the occupation of her own country, of her own language, “[n]o more sentence [sic] to exile.” Here she is drawing attention to the feeling of linguistic exile as well as racial exile.
The author is placing herself into the tradition of those who fought back against imperial invasions. However, it seems as if the battle she is waging against colonial influence is primarily in the sphere of language. The title of the book especially instructs us to be sensitized to linguistic effects. The act of la dictée (literally translated, “dictation”) is an exercise where schoolchildren recite passages aloud. As many of the niceties of French grammar are written and not spoken (a curious nod to the central paradox of the book), speaking these forms correctly from a printed text can be difficult. In South Korea, where Cha was born, there is a similar exercise called badasseugi. Much like the French dictée, badasseugi is a spoken exercise that demonstrates the ability to correctly pronounce written language. Interpreting written Korean into spoken Korean is a complex process that requires the speaker to have internalized many of the language’s rules, so the exercise is non-trivial in determining language proficiency.
As one reads the book, it becomes increasingly clear why Cha is so fixated on the idea of la dictée: it represents in clear terms the dichotomy between mastery of written and spoken speech. How can a gender whose role throughout history was to be silent, be immediately fluent in the act of speaking? How can the powerless refuse being colonized by the language of the imperial invaders? After her mother is forced to teach in Japanese, she eventually flees for China. “I speak another tongue, a second tongue. This is how distant I am.” Her mother is bottling up her Korean identity the moment she is no longer allowed to speak her home language.
This alludes to the reason why Cha is constantly oscillating between English, French, and Chinese: she wants the reader to experience the sounds and shapes of unfamiliar languages. While Cha couldn’t have predicted that many of us would be reading this with Google Translate to instantly make French readable and Google Goggles to caption her uncaptioned photos, the feeling of distance and esoteric knowledge pervade the text. In addition, the book works these languages against the reader’s expectations by using nonstandard grammar, punctuation, and diction.
Religion, or more accurately, Catholic liturgical texts, play a prominent role in the text. At times, religion is treated as a horrible, imposing force that has colonized her thinking forever. The text leads into the discussion of religion falteringly, by describing the act of imbibing the host (which becomes rather literal in the later passages, as she is translating Catholic passages into French). From the list of sentences, she launches into an attempt to place the God’s identity and God’s voice, as they seem to have colonized her own. Oblique references to the spoken elements of Catholic mass, which in itself is a type of dictée, with correct and incorrect responses, abound thought the text. From the epigraph leading into Clio, the historical muse, “In Nomine [Latin] / Le Nom [French] / Nomine [Latin],” the text plays on the Trinitarian formula “In nomine Patris et fillii et Spiritus Sancti.” This is placed in opposition to, a few pages later, the narrative of Yu Guan Soon, who as Cha emphatically declares below her birth date and death date, “is born of one mother and one father.” Yu Guan Soon seems to be elevated above even Jesus, as she was born from one mother and one father, rather than being a part of the (exclusively male) Trinity.
It is difficult to tell whether the author is mocking the entire institution of Catholicism or just trying to shed light on its endemic patriarchy. The text is hyper-aware of the Church’s attempts to silence women throughout history (the choice of Joan of Arc as muse seems more and more appropriate all the time), and is quite willing to be irreverent with church dogma. “Mass every First Friday. Dictée first. Every Friday. Before Mass. Dictée before.” Here, the author seems to be clearly drawing a parallel between the meaningless conjugations spoken aloud that she has been forced to memorize and the empty exchanges between priest and follower that she has also been forced to internalize. Not content to just condemn the baseless paternalism of Christianity, she directs her inquiry of identity squarely at God. “Acquiesce, to the messenger. [...] Theirs. Into Their tongue, the counterscript, my confession into Theirs. Into Theirs.” She seems horrified that her sins being confessed from her own mind into a language of the other, of the imperial entity.
The search for ethnic identity is a theme that Dictee returns to again and again. Sections of the work are presented as letters, which further alienates the text from one specific geographic location. Where is Cha from? What is her country of origin? The conventional answer, of course, is that she is Korean because she was born there, but Cha vehemently advances the notion that the reality of ethnic (or even national) identity is far more complex than one’s place of birth or citizenship status. “One day you raise the right hand and you are an American[,]” she states. The absurdity of this ritual is in the forefront at all times. Why do we need to have these “identity papers” when the reality is much more complex. Wherever she goes, people ask to see her papers, but they are not convinced that she is a “real” American. One gets the sense that even if she were to return to Korea, they wouldn’t consider her a “real” Korean either.
Cha is distressed at the possibility that her ineffable identity, forged through the narrative of the Korean occupation of Japan, is being somehow erased or supplanted by this ritual of right-hand-raising, of allegiance-swearing. “Somewhere someone has taken my identity and replaced it with their photograph. [...] Their signature their seals. Their own image.” What used to be a personal thing, her personal identity, is now emblazoned with seals and signs of a foreign power. Throughout the work, she is trying to stamp her own identity markers, her own signs and seals of power onto us.
The constantly repeated images of Joan of Arc give the text a resolute defiance to accept facile categorization from the outside. Dictee is a work that explores the intensely personal feelings evoked from being not only a silenced minority but a silenced gender. Would Yu Guan Soon and Joan of Arc been executed if they were men? It’s hard to say, but it is still a curious choice to be praising heroes who were murdered in their own country with their own people. There is a sense in the text that Cha is identifying everyone who imagines her identity as “other” is afraid of dissenting voices, afraid to fight back against imperialism and oppression. Both Joan of Arc and Yu Guan Soon were fighting “outsiders,” but it is their own people who allowed them to be executed. It’s a cliché sentiment, but it’s true: to do evil, all that is necessary is for the good people to do nothing. Dictee seems to be saying that those who have been silenced must speak. No matter how difficult (as the pages of poetry about dry mouths, stifled uttering, and dry voice boxes will attest to), we must speak out against the injustice of imperialism and the horror of those who would destroy a culture just because they could. What reason did the Japanese have for taking over Korea? What reason did England have for taking over France? This is not a question that is only historical. “We fight the same war. […] We are severed in Two by an abstract enemy an invisible enemy under the title of liberators who have conveniently named the severance, Civil War. Cold War. Stalemate.” In other words, as much as the West would like to banish the problems of imperialism to the past, the Korean War tore Korea apart in a way that will not be remedied any time soon. Korea was a casualty in the Cold War, which they did not want any part in. The book is imploring us to speak as well as Cha herself.
We must speak. Cha must speak. The last few pages in the book mention a woman who does actually speak, but it is described in the most mechanical way possible, “a sequence of words” with pauses between them. This hearkens back to the very beginning, which is all about someone trying to speak and failing. Much of this book is self-referential, and it seems that by the end of the novel, the text has convinced itself that yes, it can speak.