Dictee

“First Friday. One hour before mass. Mass every First Friday. Dictée first. Every Friday. Before mass. Dictée before. Back in the study hall. It is time. Snaps once. One step right from the desk. Single file. Snaps twice. Follow single line. Move all the way to the right hand side of the wall. Single file.”

The unnamed narrator is a young girl in Catholic school. Cha captures the authoritative and disciplined environment of the school and its dehumanizing effect on the narrator via clipped sentences, repetition, and no references to the people. “Dictée first” refers to the French recitation exercises that tested a student’s mastery of the language. Cha shows how religion, formal education, and language are representations of power and hierarchy.

“Into Their tongue, the counterscript, my confession in Theirs. Into Theirs. To scribe to make hear the words, to make sound the words, the words, the words, the words made flesh.”

Cha connects the body to the spoken word. By referring to the “word,” meaning the word of the religious text (frequently the Bible is called “the word of God”), Cha emphasizes that the narrator’s words are not yet her own, as they are simply repetitions of what she has been taught.

“There is no people without a nation, no people without ancestry. There are other nations no matter how small their land, who have their independence. But our country, even with 5,000 years of history, has lost it to the Japanese.”

Cha provides historical context for the chapter on Yu Guan Soon, referring to Korea’s long history of independence. Using anaphora (the repetition of the same few words at the beginning of phrases), Cha emphasizes the connection between the dispossession of the nation with the dispossession of culture and identity.

“To the other nations who are not witnesses, who are not subject to the same oppressions, they cannot know. Unfathomable the words, the terminology: enemy, atrocities, conquest, betrayal, invasion, destruction. They exist only in the larger perception of History’s recording […] Not physical enough. Not to the very flesh and bone, to the core, to the mark, to the point where it is necessary to intervene...”

This quote refers to the one Cha uses to announce her project: to arrive at the bodily reality of historical traumas. She focuses on the experience of women in particular, and in this quote she is referencing the martyrdom of Yu Guan Soon for her nation. Cha also references the concept of unknowability, that is, the limitations of understanding that exist between different people in different societies and times. Cha seeks to bridge this gap in understanding by evoking the human realities of war and suffering.

“Why resurrect it all now. From the Past. History, the old wound. The past emotions all over again. To confess to relive the same folly. To name it now so as not to repeat history in oblivion”

Cha asks the question: What is the purpose of reliving historical traumas? How can excavating the past serve the present and future? Cha evokes the power of language to reveal the truth. Cha states that this is a form of confession, but this confession differs from those mentioned in the earlier chapter in which the unnamed narrator fabricates sins. Instead, these confessions are authentic and strive to remake the future.

“The tongue that is forbidden is your own mother tongue. You speak in the dark. In the secret. The one that is yours. Your own. You speak very softly, you speak in a whisper. In the dark, in secret. Mother tongue is your refuge.”

In this chapter, Cha’s mother’s Hyun Soon Huo is a Korean refugee living in China and working as a teacher. Under Japanese imperial rule, she was forbidden to speak her mother tongue, Korean, and Cha describes her mother’s sense of safety in her native language. Cha uses imagery of her mother whispering to feel the sanctuary of her native tongue; this emphasizes the power of language to either make one feel comfortable or alienated.

“You write. You write you speak voices hidden masked you plant words to the moon you send word through the wind. Through the passing of seasons […] From one mouth to another, from one reading to the next the words are realized in their full meaning. The wind. The dawn or dusk the clay earth and traveling birds south bound birds are mouth pieces wear the ghost veil for the seed of message. Correspondence. To scatter the words.”

Beginning to connect the mythology of Demeter and Persephone with her mother’s story, Cha describes words as seeds that are planted and produce fruits. This metaphor emphasizes the influence of language as powerful words travel far beyond the speaker. The imagery of the earth, birds, and harvest connects her mother’s yearning to speak her native Korean with the yearning of Demeter for her daughter Persephone’s return from the underworld.

“I have the documents. Documents, proof, evidence, photograph, signature. One day you raise the right hand and you are American. They give you an American Pass port. The United States of America. Somewhere someone has taken my identity and replaced it with their photograph. The other one. Their signature their seals. Their own image.”

Cha describes the process of becoming an American through the lens of the immigrant experience: a bureaucratic, cold process in which one’s identity is reduced to a card. Cha includes photography throughout her book, but the photographs lack captions: Through clipped sentences that are characteristic of her style, Cha illustrates how the photograph on the identification card with the name and citizenship number dehumanizes the complexity of identity.

“The submission is complete. Relinquishes even the vision to immobility. Abandons all protests to that which will appear to the sight. About to appear. Forecast. Break. Break, by all means. The illusion that the act of viewing is to make alteration of the visible.”

Another unnamed narrator appears and seems to be a reflection of Cha in the scene in which two women watch a film. Cha describes the act of watching a film as a submission and forgetting of the self: She later states that this forgetting is intimately related to remembering, as in moments in which the self is absorbed allows one to remember long-lost memories. Cha shows how watching the film Gertrud inspires the narrator to contemplate herself and her relationship to her mother.

“Here at my return in eighteen years, the war is not ended. We fight the same war. We are inside the same struggle seeking the same destination. 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.”

When the unnamed narrator returns to South Korea two decades after leaving with her family for the United States, she notes that though the situation has apparently changed, South and North Korea are experiencing the same strife and turbulence as the nations were earlier in the century, when her mother was a young woman and fled the formerly united country during the Japanese occupation. Cha calls it an “invisible enemy,” referring to the powerful imperialistic countries that have pushed for the division of Korea into North Korea, a communist country, and South Korea, a capitalist country.

“There is no surrendering you are chosen to fail to be martyred to shed blood to be set an example one who has defied one who has chosen to defy and was to be set an example to be martyred an animal useless betrayer to the cause to the welfare to peace to harmony to progress”

Embedded within the epistolary form of the letter, Cha includes italicized passages that indicate an more inwardly-focused audience. It is uncertain whether these italicized passages are still addressing the narrator’s mother, or if these passages address the self in addition to the mother. The wording of this passage indicates an ambiguity, as if the “you” in this portion is both the self and the mother, connecting them through their shared identities as exiles and refugees and the sense of loss that accompanies this history.

“My brother. You are all the rest all the others are you. You fell you died you gave your life. That day. It rained. It rained for several days […] I heard that the rain does not erase the blood fallen on the ground. I heard from the adults, the blood stains still. Year after year it rained. The stone pavement stained where you fell still remains dark.”

Cha refers to her brother who died in one of the infamous student protests associated with the date April 19 in Korean history. Cha uses imagery of blood and rain to capture the atmosphere of violence and sorrow that surrounds the protests during which many people were murdered. Speaking poetically, Cha amplifies the emotional impact by describing a rain that continues for years, projecting her own emotional state and that of her fellow Koreans on to nature in what is known as the “pathetic fallacy,” the common literary device to ascribe human emotions onto nature.

“Suffice Melpomene, arrest the screen en-trance flickering hue from behind cast shadow silhouette from back not visible. Like ice. Metal. Glass. Mirror. Receives none admits none. Arrest the machine that purports to employ democracy but rather causes the successive refraction of her none other than her own. Suffice Melpomene, to exorcize from this mouth the name the words the memory of severance through this act by this very act to utter one, Her once, Her to utter at once, She without the separate act of uttering.”

Invoking Melpomene, Cha appears to be calling up the muse through the film screen: She compares this screen to transparent and opaque screens and uses paradox to say that these screens allow nothing in and nothing to escape. The idea of escaping history and its violence and horror is captured in the possibility that Melpomene, or tragedy, can finally be put to rest through a ritual that releases one. Cha identifies language, despite its violence and inherent relationship to the exercise of power, as one of the means that points the way toward freedom.

“It is the husband who touches. Not as husband. He touches her as he touches all the others. But he touches her with his own rank. By his knowledge of his own rank. By the claim of his rank. Gratuity is her body her spirit. Her non-body her non-entity. His privilege possession his claim. Infallible is his ownership.”

Watching the film Gertrud (directed by Carl Dreyer, the same director as the Joan of Arc film from which Cha took a film still for this chapter), Cha describes a cold relationship between a husband and wife. Cha shows how the relationship is a reflection of power dynamics and does not reflect pure love: Instead, it is a relationship of conqueror and conquered, much like the relationship between the people of Korea and the imperialists who colonized it. Cha repeats language of non-being to show how this relationship drains the woman’s spirit.

“Martyrdom was the dream of my youth and this dream has grown with me within Carmel’s cloisters. But here again, I feel that my dream is a folly, for I cannot confine myself to desiring one kind of martyrdom. To satisfy me I need all.”

This statement from St. Therese of Lisieux depicts her overwhelming love for God and her sense of yearning: The view of martyrdom that St. Therese’s idealized perspective depicts situates her religious commitment within her desire to be immortalized, that is, to live beyond her death. This parallels St. Therese’s story with that of Yu Guan Soon: Despite their radical differences, they both wished from a young age to sacrifice their lives for something greater than themselves. Cha shows how St. Therese’s love expresses itself through acts of self-sacrifice.

“The ink spill thickest before it runs dry before it stops writing at all.”

Cha uses a proverb in the context of Demeter and Persephone’s myth and how myth, language, and memory work together to excavate the past. This metaphor expresses that the greatest sense of urgency and energy immediately precedes the moment one is about to complete something. This sentiment relates to both the return of Persephone and the beginning of spring, as the Eleusinian rites that the cult of Demeter perform allow Persephone to return following the rituals, as well as referring more broadly to the idea of artistic expression as the birth of something new. 

“She says to herself if she were able to write she could continue to live. Says to herself if she would write without ceasing. To herself if by writing she could abolish real time. She would live.”

The unnamed narrator contemplates her relationship to language and specifically notes how written language can outlive oneself. In the first chapter of Dictee, language was a force of oppression, but language is being redeemed through the ritual Cha is describing. The unnamed narrator is arguing that writing would allow her to overcome the seemingly endless progress of time, to step outside of history and observe it rather than being a subject of its violent necessity.

“Each observance prisoner of yet another observance, the illusion of variation hidden in yet another odor yet another shrouding, disguised, superimposed upon. Upon the nakedness. Nakedness as ordinary as common with all nakedness of all others before and all others to come. Like birth like death.”

In a memory depicting the night of a wedding when a bride loses her virginity, the speaker contemplates the connection between death and life. Persephone’s marriage to Hades, God of the Underworld, is inspiration for the contradictions in the bride dressing in many layers of white, the color of which is a symbol of purity, only to be undressed and lose her virginity.

“Before heaven. Before birth and before that. Heaven which in its ultimate unity includes earth within itself. Heaven in its ultimate generosity includes within itself, Earth. Heaven which is not heaven without Earth (inside itself)”

The narrator recounts a memory of entering the theater to view the same film for the second time in two days. She contemplates the constraints of language to express memories that remain buried, the images becoming decayed over time. The imagery of heaven and earth recalls the book’s religious concepts.

“You remain dismembered with the belief that magnolia blooms white even on seemingly dead branches and you wait. You remain apart from the congregation.”

This portion refers to the process of Demeter waiting nine days for the return of her daughter Persephone. The imagery of dead branches refers to the dead of winter, when flowers no longer bloom and Demeter is no longer producing harvest for the earth. However, the image of the magnolia flower blooming luminously represents Demeter’s hope for her daughter’s return and the restoration of harvest and the replenishment of life on earth.

“Maimed. Accident. Stutters. Almost a name. Half a name. Almost a place. Starts. About to. Then stops. Exhale swallowed to a sudden arrest. Pauses. How vast this page. Stillness, the page.”

During the Eleusinian rites, Demeter waits and watches as the earth begins to shift from winter to spring, and the connection between the rituals and language are expressed in Cha’s use of clipped sentences. The style mimics the style of the “Diseuse” chapter, connecting the muse with the reciter who must speak the correct words to complete the ritual and bring her daughter back from the underworld. However, she is not an eloquent speaker either but rather arrested by a sense of trepidation.

“All rise. At once. One by one. Voices absorbed into the bowl of sound. Rise voices shifting upwards circling the bowl’s hollow […] where all memory all echo”

In the finale of the chapter, the progression from Demeter’s singular voice toward a polyphony of voices that speak in harmony shows how the individual and the collective are connected through rituals. The ritual is completed, and mother and daughter are reunited when the many voices speak the same language. Cha emphasizes the power of communication and ritual through the imagery of a bowl encompassing a thunder of voices.

“Words cast each by each to weather

avowed indisputably, to time.

If it should impress, make fossil trace of word,

residue of word, stand as a ruin stands,

simply, as mark

having relinquished itself to time, to distance”

The imagery of ruins connects with the many images of ruins that are sprinkled throughout Dictee. If the words survive, they cast an impression upon the world like a fossil, serving as a record of history.