Dictee

In “Melpomene Tragedy” and “Erato Love Poetry,” Cha adopts voices from a variety of perspectives, weaving them into a collage that portrays the experience of colonized and oppressed people throughout several centuries. Cha’s mother’s experiences during the mid-20th century and the Korean War, and Cha’s own experiences of displacement, exile, and separation from her home in the late-20th century when her family immigrated to the United States, are fused together into a fraught family history. Cha also presents the story of St. Therese of Lisieux, a late 19th-century French nun who died at the age of 24. Cha mixes St. Therese’s sainthood with images of Joan of Arc and scenes of a woman watching the film Gertrud, a 1964 Danish film directed by Carl Dreyer.

While all these narratives are interwoven, Cha also presents an unnamed woman who watches the narratives: She is depicted in a theater where she is nearly alone, but not quite, as there is another woman seated in the theater whom is never described. The anti-heroine that Cha portrays is close to herself, though this is never made explicit, and she takes on the position of a disembodied viewer.

The letter to her mother follows directly after the first of these film scenes, showing how Cha is creating a new form in which the visual and the linguistic are put into conversation with each other. “Melpomene” uses an epistolary format, primarily composed of a letter Cha has written to her mother. The date for the letter, April 19, is a significant date in Korean history: April 19 refers to the April Revolution of 1960, when mass protests occurred after a student was found dead, killed by police during protests against an undemocratic election of Syngman Rhee, the first president of South Korea.

In the letter, Cha describes a feeling of helplessness that characterized both her mother’s experiences and her own as a refugee. Cha’s style and tone shifts frequently throughout the letter. In some portions, Cha uses straightforward diction and linear storytelling, specifically the section describing the day when her brother attempted to join a protest and her mother did not want him to join: “You are threatening him, you are begging him. He has on his school uniform […] You are pulling at him you stand before the door. He argues with you he pushes you away” (83). Cha presents the scene as a realistic memory of an autobiographical event.

In other sections, Cha uses more abstract and lyrical descriptions of the events. In another portion of the letter, Cha describes herself pulled along in a demonstration; she hears voices and sees the tears and blood of those protesting around her and tells her mother that these sounds and voices would be familiar to her as well, as she experienced this years ealier during the protest for independence from Japanese occupation: “Dead air stagnant water still exhales mist. Pure hazard igniting flame itself with the slightest of friction like firefly” (87). This language emphasizes a sense of timelessness, as the letter’s contents refer to specific historical events, but the experience of exile, displacement, and loss is universal and could have taken place in any year. Cha’s uses the specificity of her experiences as a Korean American woman to tap into the universal experiences of oppressed and dispossessed people throughout history.

In “Erato Love Poetry,” Cha once again ironizes the title of the chapter by subverting reader expectations: Instead of telling a love story, she tells the story of a loveless marriage and of a nun whose love is focused on God. Cha is exploring love in its multi-faceted dimensions. In addition, this chapter explores non-Korean experiences, interjecting the stories of women who are seemingly disconnected from the historical parts of the book thus far. Cha shows how martyrdom, colonialism, religion, and the silenced experiences of women are present in other cultures and historical periods.

The format of the “Erato Love Poetry” chapter is one of the more experimental sections of the book: Rather than having the text read left to right in the page order, the text scrolls down with the lefthand side devoted to the description of the narrator watching the movie Gertrud, and the righthand side is focused on the words of St. Therese of Lisieux. The quotes from St. Therese are from her book, The Story of a Soul, that she began writing when she fell ill in her convent. She passed away at the age of 24. Despite the apparent dissimilarities between these two representations of women’s lives, Cha’s choice of juxtaposing the text draws attention to the similarities between the experiences, which is the shared sense of loneliness and alienation. Both pursuits of love are depicted as requiring great sacrifice and suffering. In this way, Cha connects the concept of love with that of martyrdom, specifically the martyrdom of women.

St. Therese’s martyrdom is juxtaposed with the martyrdom of the marriage portrayed in the film that the speaker watches. The wife’s loneliness touches the viewer, and she feels herself becoming a part of the relationship even though the wife is silent: “You are she, she speaks you, you speak her, she cannot speak” (106). The observer notes the coldness of the relationship, remarking that the couple does not touch. Cha contrasts this cold marriage with the image of ecstatic joy in the photo at the end of the chapter (119); the image is of Renee Maria Falconetti playing Joan of Arc in Carl Dreyer’s 1928 silent film, The Passion of Joan of Arc. The inclusion of this photo and the photo of St. Therese dressed up as Joan of Arc suggests the performative idea of martyrdom for women throughout history and filmic representations of martyrdom. St. Therese’s own idea of her martyrdom is connected to her dressing up as Joan of Arc and her desire to martyr herself for love. Joan of Arc, as both a nationalist symbol and saint, uniquely suits the concept both of martyring oneself for love and of rebellion against systems of oppression. By showing how Joan of Arc influenced St. Therese and the filmmaker Carl Dreyer, who also directed the film Gertrud, Cha is showing how the martyrdom of women for religious and nationalist purposes is a long-standing tradition.