46 pages • 1 hour read
Theresa Hak Kyung ChaDictee
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1982A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Mother Tongue
The first image in Dictee is graffiti written by Korean coal miners. The text states: “Mother, I miss you / I am hungry / I want to go home.” The untranslated language of the “mother tongue” symbolizes the untranslated pain. Rather than translating the text for the reader, Cha instead challenges the reader to view the untranslated text and understand that there is a limitation to the reader’s capacity to understand the experience of people from different cultures, eras, and identities. Cha’s technique of defamiliarization causes the reader to feel displaced and uncertain, even in their own native language, allowing the reader to empathize with the experience of refugees and exiles living in foreign cultures and nations.
Cha’s portrayal of her mother’s exile and sense of alienation and loss mirrors her own in that they both experienced the shift from the use of the “mother tongue” to the use of a new language. The feeling of being alienated from one’s own voice, the aspect of oneself that most would take for granted as personal and self-determined, is expressed in the lyric poem that composes the majority of the “Urania Astronomy” chapter. Hesitant and reluctant speech is connected with the reluctance to feel certain about one’s memories, with the poet writing: “True or not true / not possible to say” (67), then later in the poem, “true or not / true / no longer possible to say” (71). Shifting the line breaks to introduce greater uncertainty, Cha exposes how space can represent both silence and the loss of selfhood through the loss of confidence in one’s connection to language.
Silence is presented both as the loss of speech and the space that allows one to find refuge in the things that remain unspoken, that refuse to fit into the limitations of learned language. The sense of spoken language as constraining is contrasted with the inner freedom of Cha’s lyric poetry: Cha captures moments of fear, alienation, and imprisonment in language alongside the wish for language to represent freedom. Cha presents dictation as paradoxical: She wishes to wrest dictation from authority and violence, and to do so, she must discover the original source of language, language’s capacities outside of the power of nations to enforce certain kinds of speech. The refuge is in the mother tongue: the language of the mother, one that is primary, pure, and closest to the heart.
Mythological Inspiration and Subversion
Cha’s Dictee can be seen as a response to Hesiod’s Theogony, in which the muses are invoked for Hesiod to praise the God, affirming the world in the sense of a theodicy. However, Cha calls on the muses not to affirm the world as it is but to critique it, particularly its patriarchal aspects. Cha alludes to Hesiod in naming each chapter after one of the muses, but she then subverts when she instead attends to the stories of those who were silenced and forgotten by history.
Cha is creating new mythological figures—rather than the divinely feminine who are revered for their traditional characteristics, Cha’s heroines subvert these traditional roles: Even St. Therese speaks of the false understanding that God is a man, writing “God’s thoughts are not men’s thoughts” (105). Cha’s work prioritizes the women’s experiences over their usefulness or subservience within a patriarchal society. Cha’s retelling of Homer’s “Hymn to Demeter” casts Demeter as a rebellious matriarchal figure. Her allusion to the well-known myth connects Demeter and Persephone’s separation to Cha’s personal relationship with her mother, in which political and historical forces intervened and created distance between mother and daughter.
The myth of Demeter and Persephone parallels Cha’s cultural, linguistic, and psychological separation from her mother. Cha is enacting a similar ritual by exploring the distance she and her mother have endured due to their status as exiles. In the case of Demeter and Persephone, the distance is physical; in the case of Cha and her mother, the distance is spiritual, represented via different identities, languages, and life experiences. The idea of yearning for a return to the homeland is described through the harrowing agony of Demeter’s separation from her daughter, but Cha focuses on Demeter’s response to the sorrow in her refusal to simply accept the terms of the contract and in the genesis of the rites of the Eleusinian mysteries. It is by refusing to submit to Zeus’s orders that the mother and daughter are reunited to make the whole world blossom into Spring.
Thresholds
Cha is interested in journeys, but she is most interested in the threshold right before one has arrived. The motif of thresholds symbolizes Cha’s exploration of the moment of transformation, celebrating change and the anticipation of homecoming rather than the state of happiness once one has achieved a state of belonging. The threshold experience also implies the doubling of the identity: the person before the experience and the person after the transformation.
This motif is prominent in the myth of Demeter and Persephone. Feelings of absence and loss of selfhood portray Persephone’s situation, who is a parallel to Cha in that both are immigrants in strange lands: Persephone in the underworld; Cha in the United States. As Persephone anticipates losing her virginity to Hades, Cha writes: “At the fulcrum. At which point in one’s own time flashbacks are possible and / anticipation. / Of the event that occurs once and only once” (144). Persephone is on the threshold of a transformation, and Cha describes this in-between, or liminal, state as symbolically capturing Persephone’s duality as both Goddess of Spring, Demeter’s daughter, and Hades’ wife and Goddess of the Underworld.
The three memories in the chapter “Thalia Comedy” (142-145) explore thresholds. In the first, the threshold is located by the child standing in the doorway and the writer who almost begins to write but does not. In the second memory, the theater is a place of thresholds and transformations, with Cha describing the theater as “between seances” (149). In the third memory, the threshold is the marriage ceremony and virginity. The imagery of veils and the color white and its contrast with the red of blood symbolizes Persephone’s transformation from a child to a woman through her marriage to Hades. This color also recalls pomegranate seeds, which are deep red (Hades gives Persephone pomegranate seeds, which bind her to return to him, as pomegranate seeds symbolize marriage as eternal, and eating in the underworld means that one must return there).
By exploring what the mother and daughter share in the ritual of separation and reunion, Cha is also exploring the liminal space, or the threshold, between departing and arriving. The is demonstrated in the chapter “Polymnia Sacred Poetry,” which features the story of the child retrieving medicine for her mother. At the end of the story, once the child has received the 10 gifts from the magical woman at the well and sees her home in the distance, Cha does not describe the child reviving her mother with medicine. Instead, she ends the story at the moment immediately before arrival: “Through the paper screen door, dusk had entered and the shadow of a small candle was flickering” (170).
