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Dictee
Dictee is the best-known work of the versatile and important Korean American artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. A classic work of autobiography that transcends the self, Dictée is the story of several women: the Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Soon, Joan of Arc, Demeter and Persephone, Cha's mother Hyung Soon Huo (a Korean born in Manchuria to first-generation Korean exiles), and Cha herself. The elements that unite these women are suffering and the transcendence of suffering. The book is divided into nine parts structured around the Greek Muses. Cha deploys a variety of texts, documents, images, and forms of address and inquiry to explore issues of dislocation and the fragmentation of memory. The result is a work of power, complexity, and enduring beauty.
192 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1982
About the author
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
10 books117 followersMost famous for her experimental memoir/novel, Dictee, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha is a Korean American writer, filmmaker and performance artist. She was born in Pusan, Korea, during the Korean War, but relocated with her parents to San Francisco, California. The interdisciplinary nature of Dictee, which combines narrative, poetry, movie stills, family photos and an array of other genres and forms, and written in various languages, reflects her own varied education. She attended the University of California at Berkeley, where she earned both an M.F.A. and M.A. (in Comparative Literature). She later relocated to Paris, France, where she studied film and brushed elbows with a number of well-known French filmmakers. Her life was cut tragically short when, in 1982, just a few days after the publication of Dictee, she was raped and murdered by a stranger in New York City. Dictee received little critical attention until the 1990s, when it was republished by the Third World Press, but it is now regarded as a classic work of autobiography and a powerful commentary upon American hybridity.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 387 reviews
September 28, 2020
GR has this book marked by me as read. I'm sure I haven't read it because I've tried several times (unsuccessfully) in the past to read it.
Well, this time I finished it. In fact, I couldn't put it down. The language was mesmerizing and (what I was able to understand) was intriguing. However, I was frustrated by the fact that there was so much I didn't understand. So, even though I finished it this time, it's clearly a first reading.
So it's difficult for me to review this. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was born in Korea during the Korean War and moved to the United States with her parents. The book is, about other things, her struggle with identity as a Korean-American. This is demonstrated (in part) through a series of mock language lessons.
The book is also about Korea's struggle for independence, recounting the story of young Korean woman's brief life as a revolutionary. Again, language is key as the Japanese forbid Koreans to speak their language. As always with Imperial states, language is a primary site of struggle. The English did it in their colonies, the U.S. banned the use of Native American languages by Native Americans--always language is a key to identity and Imperialists look to dismantle the identity of the people they colonize. The author also recounts her own mother's painful struggle with the effort to keep her language alive, even at the risk of imprisonment.
The book is political but also socio-political. I always am interested in where the two intersect and Hak Kyung Cha was certainly formed in that cauldron.
The book is a mix of autobiography and history, poetry and narrative. It is endless interesting and beautiful. Tragically, Kyung Cha was murdered (by a stranger) shortly after the publication of this, her major work.
Often the language in this book is fractured, vividly demonstrating the effect displacement and war has had on language. I was able to detect themes even when I was not able to really understand what was taking place.
For me, the language in this book was amazing and the narrative passages I understood of great interest. It left me wanting to read this book that clearly contained levels I was not able to access in a first reading.
A challenging but exceptional read that will, I think, stay with me.
Well, this time I finished it. In fact, I couldn't put it down. The language was mesmerizing and (what I was able to understand) was intriguing. However, I was frustrated by the fact that there was so much I didn't understand. So, even though I finished it this time, it's clearly a first reading.
So it's difficult for me to review this. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was born in Korea during the Korean War and moved to the United States with her parents. The book is, about other things, her struggle with identity as a Korean-American. This is demonstrated (in part) through a series of mock language lessons.
The book is also about Korea's struggle for independence, recounting the story of young Korean woman's brief life as a revolutionary. Again, language is key as the Japanese forbid Koreans to speak their language. As always with Imperial states, language is a primary site of struggle. The English did it in their colonies, the U.S. banned the use of Native American languages by Native Americans--always language is a key to identity and Imperialists look to dismantle the identity of the people they colonize. The author also recounts her own mother's painful struggle with the effort to keep her language alive, even at the risk of imprisonment.
The book is political but also socio-political. I always am interested in where the two intersect and Hak Kyung Cha was certainly formed in that cauldron.
The book is a mix of autobiography and history, poetry and narrative. It is endless interesting and beautiful. Tragically, Kyung Cha was murdered (by a stranger) shortly after the publication of this, her major work.
Often the language in this book is fractured, vividly demonstrating the effect displacement and war has had on language. I was able to detect themes even when I was not able to really understand what was taking place.
For me, the language in this book was amazing and the narrative passages I understood of great interest. It left me wanting to read this book that clearly contained levels I was not able to access in a first reading.
A challenging but exceptional read that will, I think, stay with me.
March 15, 2016
It was difficult to get a handle on this, either because it's (a) above my intellectual pay-grade, (b) designed to resist easy interpretation, or (c) just not particularly good. I don't think (c) is right, because I read happily and quickly, but I found myself on shaky ground a lot of the time.
Now, DICTEE a lot of things at once and in some ways, I thought it was best when (predictable fiction writer statement coming) it was diving fully into the experimental (loved the incorporated art) or hewing closest to narrative. I most liked the photocopied cursive letter on 147-149, which was one of the two or three most straightforward sequences - that's the trick of putting the most directly narrative segment into an experimental form and getting away with generating interest out of melodrama because it looks funky. Beyond that, I gravitated toward the sequence with the brother dying (84), or the lovely CALLIOPE chapter in tribute to her mother, and the allusions to her Catholic childhood. Those sections sung, and it was a challenge not to skim through the murk to get to them. But I think it's worth talking about the inscrutability of Cha as well, because I think it's probably the point of the work.
One breadcrumb: I became very interested in the intermittently broken English - look at the french/english translation on 66-67 and her varying treatment of impossible for one of the clearer hints that she's timing her mistakes cannily. I did some searching and found this pretty good essay (https://bayareapublicschool.org/wp-co...) on the intentional inscrutability of the book - I was particularly drawn to this block quote:
"As Trinh T. Minh Ha argues...the insistence on a literature of clarity (which is what an emphasis on a literature of identity formation necessarily is) "is a means of subjection, a quality both of official, taught language and of correct writing, two old mates of power: together they flow, together they flower, vertically, to impose an order."
That makes a lot of sense. When I think of dictation, (the essay points this out), I think of the old French method of education, when students would parrot back at the teacher, not knowing what they were saying, until they got it right. This is an image that recurs frequently in the book, both literally and figuratively. We hear about many issues of colonialism and silenced resistance. Though the book didn't revolve around men - a nice change of pace - they lurk in the dictatorships (another inferred meaning of dictee) that dominate the edges and prevent women and indigenous peoples from maintaining their forms of expression.
And then, of course, Catholicism is patriarchal too, and also involves a call/response mechanism for learning, the catechism, that is deconstructed early and often. Throw in all the imagery of people losing their tongues (a constant theme), and something interesting is going on here w/r/t representation and speech. And looping back to good old T.T.M.H. (a ghost from my phd aspirant days), that seems to be a statement about feminism. I've been thinking a lot about what it is to write from the fringe - and experimental female writers were, unfortunately, a fringe for much of the century - and the argument that mistakes and quirks and fractures resist order and carry revolutionary potential is very smart. And then starting with an incorrectly attributed Sappho quote and getting one of the muses' names wrong is further stirring the pot.
The best example of this: Dictee opens with that photograph of graffiti written in korean on a coal mine wall. It apparently says: "I miss you mother. I am hungry. I want to go home." The most unvarnished emotion in this book is untranslated, unread, a shout in the dark that probably went unheard. That feels right to me.
Now, DICTEE a lot of things at once and in some ways, I thought it was best when (predictable fiction writer statement coming) it was diving fully into the experimental (loved the incorporated art) or hewing closest to narrative. I most liked the photocopied cursive letter on 147-149, which was one of the two or three most straightforward sequences - that's the trick of putting the most directly narrative segment into an experimental form and getting away with generating interest out of melodrama because it looks funky. Beyond that, I gravitated toward the sequence with the brother dying (84), or the lovely CALLIOPE chapter in tribute to her mother, and the allusions to her Catholic childhood. Those sections sung, and it was a challenge not to skim through the murk to get to them. But I think it's worth talking about the inscrutability of Cha as well, because I think it's probably the point of the work.
One breadcrumb: I became very interested in the intermittently broken English - look at the french/english translation on 66-67 and her varying treatment of impossible for one of the clearer hints that she's timing her mistakes cannily. I did some searching and found this pretty good essay (https://bayareapublicschool.org/wp-co...) on the intentional inscrutability of the book - I was particularly drawn to this block quote:
"As Trinh T. Minh Ha argues...the insistence on a literature of clarity (which is what an emphasis on a literature of identity formation necessarily is) "is a means of subjection, a quality both of official, taught language and of correct writing, two old mates of power: together they flow, together they flower, vertically, to impose an order."
That makes a lot of sense. When I think of dictation, (the essay points this out), I think of the old French method of education, when students would parrot back at the teacher, not knowing what they were saying, until they got it right. This is an image that recurs frequently in the book, both literally and figuratively. We hear about many issues of colonialism and silenced resistance. Though the book didn't revolve around men - a nice change of pace - they lurk in the dictatorships (another inferred meaning of dictee) that dominate the edges and prevent women and indigenous peoples from maintaining their forms of expression.
And then, of course, Catholicism is patriarchal too, and also involves a call/response mechanism for learning, the catechism, that is deconstructed early and often. Throw in all the imagery of people losing their tongues (a constant theme), and something interesting is going on here w/r/t representation and speech. And looping back to good old T.T.M.H. (a ghost from my phd aspirant days), that seems to be a statement about feminism. I've been thinking a lot about what it is to write from the fringe - and experimental female writers were, unfortunately, a fringe for much of the century - and the argument that mistakes and quirks and fractures resist order and carry revolutionary potential is very smart. And then starting with an incorrectly attributed Sappho quote and getting one of the muses' names wrong is further stirring the pot.
The best example of this: Dictee opens with that photograph of graffiti written in korean on a coal mine wall. It apparently says: "I miss you mother. I am hungry. I want to go home." The most unvarnished emotion in this book is untranslated, unread, a shout in the dark that probably went unheard. That feels right to me.
July 13, 2023
The most famous of the work produced by writer and performance artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, widely discussed and dissected it’s not a book that opens itself up to its readers in any straightforward sense. More poetry than prose, Cha’s fragmented structure, her constant shifts from Korean to English to French, her inclusion of unnamed images – sometimes deliberately obscured as if under erasure – reflect her background in avant-garde art. Cha mixes instances of memory with the imagined and the historical to express thoughts about Korea’s past, as well as her own, displaced identity - born in Korea she later grew up in America. But Cha goes beyond what’s personal or intimate to her to reflect on other women’s lives, mingling images of her own life and her mother’s to reflect on women whose lives were marked by suffering and resistance, sacrificial yet militant figures from Joan of Arc to Yu Guan Soon the Korean independence fighter who died from the impact of torture as a result of her defiance of Japan’s takeover of Korea. Cha’s inventive, challenging approach to her material reflects her ongoing fascination with language, its possibilities and its limitations – its inability to fully convey the physical as well as its origins within and through the body. Cha organises her “novel” by invoking the muses, each section is a reinvention of, and a response to, a specific muse. It’s a moving, stirring, exceptionally intense piece that somehow transcends the boundaries of the page, often more experience than text – and sometimes reminiscent of Duras in her more experimental phases. It’s also a haunted work, hard not to read it without remembering that Cha was raped and murdered around the time this first appeared in the early 1980s, still present in her words but already vanished like her other female subjects, but like them although she may have vanished, she remains unvanquished.
April 27, 2016
4.5/5
From A FarI know I shall write a book, but not yet. I know it shall be experimental, political, and grotesque. I see myself gouging any and all that pertains out of university libraries and sitting amidst the booty, taxidermied with stuffed in papers and mayhaps bulleted with the post-its, I've grown fonder of the flitting graffitis during the course of my current occupation. I see myself rejecting the exigencies of tact, universality, and New Critcism, for to discuss that line comprising Dictee and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha one needs a haunting and a hell to pay that neither commercializes for profit nor solipsizes into ivory tower onanism can convey. Four stars, five stars, a star of doom that struck a woman of color writer down in the streets and blows wide the best suppression of literature and of life. What dreams I have I rarely remember, what nightmares comprise is memorial insertion, and horror's this fact of history to which I will give all that is required.
What nationality
or what kindred and relation
what blood relation
what blood ties of blood
what ancestry
what race generation
what house clan tribe stock strain
what lineage extraction
what breed sect gender denomination caste
what stray ejection misplaced
Tertium Quid neither one thing nor the other
Tombe des nues de naturalized
what transplant to dispel upon
Some will not know age. Some not age. Time stops. Time will stop for some. For them especially. Eternal time. No age. Time fixes for some. Their image, the memory of them is not given to deterioration, unlike the captured image that extracts from the soul precisely by reproducing, multiplying itself. Their countenance evokes not the hallowed beauty, beauty from seasonal decay, evokes not the inevitable, not death, but the dy-ing.Male martyrdom is accomplished, female martyrdom is assumed. How many authors are you aware of who were snatched up by their memento mori material just as said material was being revealed beyond the page. We could argue against gender dichotomy, postcolonialism, what was she doing existing without a chaperone, how was she dressed, etc, etc, etc, but analyses that ignores the origins is worse than useless. Chinese, epiglottis, the Roman Catholic Church, revolutionary sacrifice, cinematic framing, violence, ownership, blood, stone, voice. We could argue each of these concepts into oblivion so long as we subsequently committed to never engaging with each of them ever again. We could pass off this experiment as too obsessed with silence, with rhythm of breath, with lies and religion and history, too angry, too eerie, too vague and too difficult. Something embodied by a sundering and a void, laid out in images both cited and not, communication enacting an imprint if not understanding. The marrow of the matter is we cannot argue into oblivion death. We cannot argue into the void execution. Talk, is cheap, life is short, and no matter how many papers I write I am alive, and Cha is not. A knife thrust in the canon, and look how it defended.
There is no surrendering you are chosen to fail to be martyred to shed blood to be set and example one who has chosen to defy and was set to be set an example to be martyred an animal useless betrayer to the cause to the welfare to peace to harmony to progress.The muses are female because they exist to be used. Circumstance rendered yet another name tied to the stake of the archive that happens to be strung on tenterhooks over Korea, Japan, France, the United States, womanhood, the New Testament, words on a screen, writing on a page, ghosts in the shell, girl in the well. Lies have power, but extinction does it better. Interest has wonders, but dictee is best.
Suffice more than that. SHE opposes Her.
She against her.
More than that. Refuses to become discard
decomposed oblivion.
From its memory dust escapes the particles still
material still respiration move. Dead air stagnant
water still exhales mist. Pure hazard igniting flaming itself with the slightest of friction like firefly. The loss that should burn. Not burn, illuminate. Illuminate by losing. Lighten by loss.
Yet it loses not.
Her name. First the whole name. Then syllable by syllable counting each inside the mouth. Make them rise they rise repeatedly without ever making visible
lips never open to utter them.
Mere names only names without the image not hers
hers alone not the whole of her and even the image
would not be the entire
her fraction her invalid that inhabits that rise
voluntarily like flint
pure hazard dead substance to fire.
Others anonymous her detachments take her place. Anonymous against her. Suffice that should be nation against nation suffice that should have been divided into two which once was whole. Suffice that should diminish human breaths only too quickly. Suffice Melpomene. Nation against nation multiplied nations against nations against themselves. Own. Repels her rejects her expels her from her own. Her own is, in, of, through, all others, hers. Her own who is offspring and mother, Demeter and Sibyl.
Violation of her by giving name to the betrayal, all possible names, interchangeable names, to remedy, to justify the violation. Of her. Own. Unbegotten. Name. Name only. Name without substance. The everlasting, Forever. Without end.
Deceptions all the while. No devils here. Nor gods. Labyrinth of deceptions. No enduring time. Self-devouring. Devouring itself. Perishing all the while. Insect that eats its own mate.
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 exorcise 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.
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November 23, 2017Dictee enlarges the notion of what a book is...because it is ephemeral, fragile, fierce and indelible, because it is subversive, because it yearns and is luminous. --Carole Maso
I read criticism. That's how I find the books I want to read. In Paradoxical Resolutions: American Fiction since James Joyce I discovered Dunfords Travels Everywheres a book which it would appear is not only BURIED but nonEXISTent. To name just one extreme example. My favorite kind of criticism is probably what which would be called genre criticism ; recognizing a general style/manner of approaching the question of writing fiction within a somewhat significant sample size. For instance, you've got LeClair's important study of excess in a certain direction of fiction writing in the Usofa :: The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction. Or you've got this recent one, The Cruft of Fiction: Mega-Novels and the Science of Paying Attention which attempts to account for so many novelists seemingly including so much un=usefull information in their texts. So I like this kind of criticism which attempts to take a sort of mid=range brush to literary practice and attempt to understand this general trend.
That's why I was so excited to encounter Flore Chevaillier's two books of criticism (they're on their way as we speak ; thank you Friend=Ash). She seems to be of the few who are knowledgeable of the kind of fiction for which the likes of Danielewski and Federman et al are only the tip of the iceberg ; a kind of fiction which, generally, "looks like 21st century fiction" (to paraphr. Moore). There's her The Body of Writing: An Erotics of Contemporary American Fiction which covers Joseph McElroy’s Plus, Carole Maso’s AVA, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s DICTEE, and Steve Tomasula’s VAS. So you see, I couldn't not read DICTEE when it finds itself in such illustrious company.
But what is the novel like? It's short. It's lovely. It's evocative. But it is not conceptual and therefore I'd prefer to remain mute in the face of its experience, not render it into concepts. Let it live and breath and please to encourage you to pick it up for a fine afternoon and see what writing really can be like and has been like.
March 23, 2017
it is hard to give this book a rating, harder still to string together two sentences about it. the violence of language, the pain of speech, an attempt to decipher the undecipherable, an attempt to understand personal trauma parallel to national trauma, a decolonizing text, the strangeness and sadness of all human life
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August 6, 2022wow. this is a really strange, difficult, beautiful book. as soon as i finished dictée i went and read the surprisingly large body of criticism surrounding it, not because i wanted it explained, but because i had no idea what a discussion of this text would look like. where do you start? what's your point of entry?
dictée reads more like a visual or spatial text than a novel. it stubbornly resists typical methods of textual interpretation. i knew nothing about its form when i went into it, which led to a lot of frustration on my part. the fragmentary sentences at the beginning seem to elide their subjects, and the repetition jars and distances the reader. but the flashes of lucidity further down the track hint to the reader that this is a deliberate, meaningful strategy to both challenge a colonial gaze and to provoke a linguistic "othering" of the reader, as they attempt to navigate a liminal space between comprehension and unintelligibility. it certainly encouraged me to approach the book on its own terms.
given i know next to nothing about korean history and the experience of korean-american women, i am not really the one to speak on dictée's broader context/conceptual underpinnings. but it's a beautiful, very unique book that incorporates cinema/contemporary art in a way i've never seen in a novel.
dictée reads more like a visual or spatial text than a novel. it stubbornly resists typical methods of textual interpretation. i knew nothing about its form when i went into it, which led to a lot of frustration on my part. the fragmentary sentences at the beginning seem to elide their subjects, and the repetition jars and distances the reader. but the flashes of lucidity further down the track hint to the reader that this is a deliberate, meaningful strategy to both challenge a colonial gaze and to provoke a linguistic "othering" of the reader, as they attempt to navigate a liminal space between comprehension and unintelligibility. it certainly encouraged me to approach the book on its own terms.
given i know next to nothing about korean history and the experience of korean-american women, i am not really the one to speak on dictée's broader context/conceptual underpinnings. but it's a beautiful, very unique book that incorporates cinema/contemporary art in a way i've never seen in a novel.
September 16, 2017
I'm normally a fan of experimental styles, but most of this book went right over my head...
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May 18, 2016this was so hard, i had to put this down every ten pages or so. this book gave me some of the wildest nightmares (my subconscious isn't very subtle) - an embodied language, a dream of history, living in the pause, writing herself, myself, into and out of that space.. [...]
December 28, 2007
A masterpiece. How she died was unbearably cruel and unbelievably strange...what was it...the day after this book came out? On the street by a stranger's brutal hand? Intolerable to think of it...it's too punishing...and the work is so humane, so transcendently beautiful, trying (in an almost Promethean gesture) to heal the pain history inflicts on the individual.
October 17, 2021
“To name it now so as not to repeat history in oblivion. To extract each fragment by each fragment from the word from the image another word another image the reply that will not repeat history in oblivion.”Cha was a writer who worked in many art forms, mining, it would seem, their various strengths to push boundaries and try to express/capture the inexpressible. A favorite professor recommended this book to me in the late '90s and it took a Pandemic-inspired buying spree for me to finally pick up a copy. I no longer remembered why it was recommended to me, nor what it was about, so I came to it with no history and no real expectations.
Cha uses the nine Greek muses as a structural divide for the parts of this book and, like most of her art as I'm given to understand, it defies easy categorization. She blends poetry, language (English with a scattering of French), prose, biography, photography, hand-written letters, illustrations, and memoir. Loosely, it is the story of several women (Cha, her mother, the Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Soon, Joan of Arc, Demeter, and Persephone), but conceptually feels tied together by tackling marginalization, erasure, colonialism, and feminism. It's a challenging book but its word play is both mesmerizing and powerful. At times, like a prayer uttered as faith wanes; at others, poetic with a wonderfully forceful staccato (achieved as Cha breaks up the rhythm and structure of the writing with frequent use of periods).
I read the book as experimental in a way that felt more raw and honest than conceptual/performative--aware of the limits of language and attempting to move beyond them. Sadly, it would seem Cha's book and her art met with the same sort of marginalization/erasure she grappled with due to her being murdered shortly after its publication. Unbeknownst to me, she seems to be having a bit of a renaissance and has played an influential role in a number of younger/existing writers (see recent, insightful articles about her in The Nation and Hyperallergic, as well as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha: Avant Dictee, a 2018 art exhibit).
“It stays. All chronology lost, indecipherable, the passage of time, until it is forgotten. Forgotten how it stays, how it endures.”
----------------------------------------
TWO WORDS I LOOKED UP AFTER READING THIS
diseuse | relume
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February 25, 2021NO ENTENDÍ NADA.
¿Cómo lo califico?
#Monolingüe #Longcovid
¿Cómo lo califico?
#Monolingüe #Longcovid
October 7, 2010
Either Theresa Hak Jyung Cha has written a book of gibberish -- narrative, poetry, movie stills, personal documents, family photos, Japanese characters, Korean history, Greek mythology, all intermixed, their correlation unexplained -- or she has written a book so profound it defies human interpretation.
I'm inclined to believe the latter.
Many people have tried to read Cha's "poetics" against those of other authors, like Maxine Hong Kingston, but the book Dictee most reminds me of is Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera. Both written in the 1980s, in the wake of the movement toward American multiculturalism. Both written by women whose experiences as Americans are largely defined by their inability to "fit" prescribed categories. Both written in multiple languages, the authors refusing to translate their experiences for easy digestion by monolingual (white) American readers. Dictee is a text about borderlands.
Or so I choose to believe. I confess that I admire Cha's experimentation without even partially understanding it, and should you find it unreadable, I wouldn't fault you. For a book of so few pages (less than two-hundred), it requires an awful lot of patience and suspension of disbelief. Unfortunately, Cha wasn't ever able to elucidate her purpose in Dictee; she was murdered by a stranger in New York City just a few days after it was published. Weirdly, her book anticipates her tragic and untimely death: "Dead tongue," she says. "The ink spills thickest before it runs dry before it stops writing at all."
I'm inclined to believe the latter.
Many people have tried to read Cha's "poetics" against those of other authors, like Maxine Hong Kingston, but the book Dictee most reminds me of is Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera. Both written in the 1980s, in the wake of the movement toward American multiculturalism. Both written by women whose experiences as Americans are largely defined by their inability to "fit" prescribed categories. Both written in multiple languages, the authors refusing to translate their experiences for easy digestion by monolingual (white) American readers. Dictee is a text about borderlands.
Or so I choose to believe. I confess that I admire Cha's experimentation without even partially understanding it, and should you find it unreadable, I wouldn't fault you. For a book of so few pages (less than two-hundred), it requires an awful lot of patience and suspension of disbelief. Unfortunately, Cha wasn't ever able to elucidate her purpose in Dictee; she was murdered by a stranger in New York City just a few days after it was published. Weirdly, her book anticipates her tragic and untimely death: "Dead tongue," she says. "The ink spills thickest before it runs dry before it stops writing at all."
September 1, 2015
Reading this wouldn't have been so hard if I hadn't built such high expectations for it. Trinh T. Minh-ha wrote about this fragmented, lyrical, unhinged exploration into Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's memories and family and gender and race. It seemed like everything I love, interspersed with French poetry and dedicated in turn to each of the nine muses.
"La langue dedans. La bouche dedans
la gorge dedans
le poumon l’organe seul"
But the reiteration of sentence fragments, mostly detached from scene or story, eventually numbed my brain. The first time I read something like: "It murmurs inside. It murmurs. Inside is the pain of speech the pain to say. Larger still. Greater than is the pain not to say. To not say. Says nothing against the pain to speak. It festers inside. The wound, liquid, dust. Must break. Must void." -- I will be excited. But I can't sustain interest for an entire book of it.
"La langue dedans. La bouche dedans
la gorge dedans
le poumon l’organe seul"
But the reiteration of sentence fragments, mostly detached from scene or story, eventually numbed my brain. The first time I read something like: "It murmurs inside. It murmurs. Inside is the pain of speech the pain to say. Larger still. Greater than is the pain not to say. To not say. Says nothing against the pain to speak. It festers inside. The wound, liquid, dust. Must break. Must void." -- I will be excited. But I can't sustain interest for an entire book of it.
November 22, 2022
I saw an exhibit of the author at the Whitney Bienniale and thought it was the most thought provoking piece in the entire exhibit. And here you have similar great, complex art, of incredible beauty, depth, richness, and ineluctable obscurity.
A pastiche of items, poems, prose, photographs, things in French, Korean and Chinese words and lettering, it’s very difficult to describe. There are many messages going on here, feminist ideas, thoughts about war and occupation, stories, some seems distant some closely tied in. It’s more similar to modern art than traditional poetry or prose, it’s like reading a work of art.
Exceptionally brilliant, it make the tragic and horrific murder of this young artist just that much more painful to read about.
A pastiche of items, poems, prose, photographs, things in French, Korean and Chinese words and lettering, it’s very difficult to describe. There are many messages going on here, feminist ideas, thoughts about war and occupation, stories, some seems distant some closely tied in. It’s more similar to modern art than traditional poetry or prose, it’s like reading a work of art.
Exceptionally brilliant, it make the tragic and horrific murder of this young artist just that much more painful to read about.
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January 20, 2023At times I felt I wasn’t getting it, and at others, I felt it was teaching me to read it. I love it when the work builds capacity. I also enjoy it when I have no idea wtf is going on, but at the same time I trust the author.
June 26, 2007
A modernist classic and a must read.
Read
November 10, 2022hm i think i am too dumb or maybe i’m not in a place where i’m able to fully grasp it the way the author intended. i’ll revisit in a couple years
April 1, 2020
I’m not going to pretend I understand all of this or even most of it, but I found it all really beautiful and haunting in the way really impenetrable poetry can be beautiful and haunting. It would be very inaccurate to call this a memoir like the back cover does, but it’s somewhere between that, poetry, history, and totally abstracted experimental prose. To give an example of what this looks like:
“Some will not know age. Some not age. Time stops. Time will stop for some. For them especially. Eternal time. No age. Time fixes for some. Their image, the memory of them is not given to deterioration, unlike the captured image that extracts from the soul precisely by reproducing, multiplying itself.”
Which is comparatively very straightforward and easy to follow when you consider passages like:
“Finally. View. This view. What is it finally.
Finally. Seen. All. Seen. Finally. Again.
Immediate. Seen. All. All the time.
Over and over. Again and again.
Seen and void. Void of view.
Inside outside. As if never.”
and then THAT is relatively clear compared to the passages that are a mix of French and English or just fully in French.
All that said, the complexity of it all I think makes it a more rewarding reading experience! Each chapter adopts a different writing style and a different subject. There’s a chapter about the history of the Japanese occupation of Korea that’s in plain prose, a chapter about Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Soo that mixes prose and poetry, and four or five chapters about her (Theresa Hak Kyung Cha) and her mother that range from verse poetry to “Greek comedy” to love poem.
My favorite chapter was love poems because it reminded me a lot of Marguerite Duras (I’m sorry even when I’m not reading Marguerite I think about reading Marguerite!!!) in the spare, repetitive poetic prose of which I am famously a big fan. That chapter has you alternating reading paragraphs on the left and right pages and I thought that device was really interesting!
Anyway, big fan, felt like an impressionistic history of post-war Korea and how colonialism influences individuals and shapes their lives and their perception of their lives.
“Some will not know age. Some not age. Time stops. Time will stop for some. For them especially. Eternal time. No age. Time fixes for some. Their image, the memory of them is not given to deterioration, unlike the captured image that extracts from the soul precisely by reproducing, multiplying itself.”
Which is comparatively very straightforward and easy to follow when you consider passages like:
“Finally. View. This view. What is it finally.
Finally. Seen. All. Seen. Finally. Again.
Immediate. Seen. All. All the time.
Over and over. Again and again.
Seen and void. Void of view.
Inside outside. As if never.”
and then THAT is relatively clear compared to the passages that are a mix of French and English or just fully in French.
All that said, the complexity of it all I think makes it a more rewarding reading experience! Each chapter adopts a different writing style and a different subject. There’s a chapter about the history of the Japanese occupation of Korea that’s in plain prose, a chapter about Korean revolutionary Yu Guan Soo that mixes prose and poetry, and four or five chapters about her (Theresa Hak Kyung Cha) and her mother that range from verse poetry to “Greek comedy” to love poem.
My favorite chapter was love poems because it reminded me a lot of Marguerite Duras (I’m sorry even when I’m not reading Marguerite I think about reading Marguerite!!!) in the spare, repetitive poetic prose of which I am famously a big fan. That chapter has you alternating reading paragraphs on the left and right pages and I thought that device was really interesting!
Anyway, big fan, felt like an impressionistic history of post-war Korea and how colonialism influences individuals and shapes their lives and their perception of their lives.
April 29, 2014
Ok, so the review thing up there says, "What did you think?" Hold on, I'll take a picture:
See?
So what I should write in this review is what I thought of this book, right. Problem is, I don't know what to think. I was caught off guard with no clue what to think. Truly impenetrable, Dictee almost seems to be wholly against using language to communicate in the ways I'm used to. This of course is terribly disarming. I'm caught between complete confusion and a little unsettled. There is no comfort zone in this book. Yet, somehow, there is something of beauty in it. This is especially evident in the Erato Love Poetry section, which is the most normal (I think) part of the book. Images appear and fade away in ways you can't put your finger on, like in a silent movie. This is wonderful! Cha has created a mode of literature I've never seen before, and I think it works. I still don't know what to think. Maybe later I'll come back and fix this review. I don't know. Maybe the point of all this is that there is something entirely incommunicable at the center of Dictee. It cannot be explained, or reviewed. Whatever. ? stars
See?
So what I should write in this review is what I thought of this book, right. Problem is, I don't know what to think. I was caught off guard with no clue what to think. Truly impenetrable, Dictee almost seems to be wholly against using language to communicate in the ways I'm used to. This of course is terribly disarming. I'm caught between complete confusion and a little unsettled. There is no comfort zone in this book. Yet, somehow, there is something of beauty in it. This is especially evident in the Erato Love Poetry section, which is the most normal (I think) part of the book. Images appear and fade away in ways you can't put your finger on, like in a silent movie. This is wonderful! Cha has created a mode of literature I've never seen before, and I think it works. I still don't know what to think. Maybe later I'll come back and fix this review. I don't know. Maybe the point of all this is that there is something entirely incommunicable at the center of Dictee. It cannot be explained, or reviewed. Whatever. ? stars
February 14, 2013
You are this
close to this much
close to it.
I don't think we have many ideas about what closeness is, about how space translates between the interior and exterior, how TIME translates between those spaces. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha has a search, a spill of searching through body spaces and body time and the history of bodies that are moved/spoken with through force. An incredible piece of electro constant murmuring that deserves our vivid and loving attention.
close to this much
close to it.
I don't think we have many ideas about what closeness is, about how space translates between the interior and exterior, how TIME translates between those spaces. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha has a search, a spill of searching through body spaces and body time and the history of bodies that are moved/spoken with through force. An incredible piece of electro constant murmuring that deserves our vivid and loving attention.
Read
July 20, 2023a calling, an incantation, searching for what doesn't yet exist - only in memory, in body, in words.
July 4, 2022
4th text in me and melissa's read aloud series. this one was by far the most gorgeous and most pleasing to read aloud, you can feel the words in your mouth and the rhythm which at times flows and at other times is forced using punctuation into this more staccato form. history, speaking, speaking as history, speaking as writing, speaking as remembering, biography, autobiography, writing of the self as actualisation of the self, writing of the self as erasure of the self, womanhood, womanhood as common ground, womanhood as a country that you come from (to paraphrase yanyi), womanhood made by country, womanhood destroyed by country, birth, being, living, growing, dying, remembering, being remembered, forgetting, being forgotten, sky, earth, water, bowl, sound, word, void.
April 18, 2015
amazing book. sayumi takahashi characterizes this text as an artist's book, a genre employed by artists (not poets, though in my head there's little difference) to defy the book's limitations and to challenge the codex's colonial history, typifications, and material violence. a friend argues that dictee's conception of the self is liberal, i.e. that there's a self underneath social constraints and limitations placed upon it, that our selves do not falter as a tangible entity given external forces.
i'm not sure what the implications are of a liberal self, except that I feel that cha effectively uses it to interrogate colonialism, to embody its effects in that self. maybe having a coherent self beneath incoherent conceptions of self implies the possibility for coherent resistance...
i'm not sure what the implications are of a liberal self, except that I feel that cha effectively uses it to interrogate colonialism, to embody its effects in that self. maybe having a coherent self beneath incoherent conceptions of self implies the possibility for coherent resistance...
February 6, 2017
i read this book in a house empty of all furniture save for a few tables and a mattress. was suffering because of a lack of malleable tangible communication because all the words in the world were coming loose and thank god for this book for talking not about all the things we couldn't say but of showing the ways in which silence takes place and moves through the body and punctuates the page, again, again, again. i read it out with a strangely placed urgency, loud in a room that echoed, and i laughed and laughed and laughed.
April 1, 2022
The more I read it, the more genius it is
April 30, 2024
Want to start it over again as soon as I finished. I experienced this more than I understood it, admittedly. I was wrapped up in the force of the language; despite how abstract some of the passages were, they are still somehow so sensual that I could feel their effect and place it on my body.
May 13, 2023
2.5 stars
This book was too avant-garde for me
This book was too avant-garde for me
February 22, 2023
READING VLOG
When I think of this book, I think of an uncurated Sophie Calle show.
Sophie Calle once had a show at Fort Mason in San Francisco that was essentially a retrospective of Calle's work. I came in without following a map, hurdling from image to image, text to text that neither began or ended. It didn't matter. You simply needed to surrender yourself to Calle's memories, remembering with her the ways in which memory works. A thought here, a regret there. An idea neither here nor there, but over there, memory-adjacent.
To try to decipher 𝘋𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘦𝘦 is to automatically fail at your reading of the work. Here, 학경 creates the very terror and joy of the birth of language. It is the space before which language becomes. Words, sentences, a cry for help, a story. It is the space in which dreams and nightmares dwell on the past of the Korean War and what it means to be a woman saying all the unsayable to her own mother. Part memoir, part exhibition, conventions are broken here. Images. Caligraphy that takes up whole pages. Spaces bigger than others between words. Familial words jumbled together to let you re-examine their origins. This is an art exhibit. Examining things carefully, going out of order, coming back to it only to get a completely different interpretation.
Language is mixed. It's very interesting to see her own translations of her own poetry between French and English.
Tout ensemble un. Une.
vs.
All assembled as one. Just one.
Why did she not use "juste une"? Why simply "une"? And in English, why is "just" necessary in englais mais pas en francais? What is lacking for there not to be 𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘵 enough?
Assembled and ensemble share similarities and was such a smart way to look at roots of the same worth while remaining in faith with her own voice, her own creation.
When you come into this, surrender yourself to the passage of time and words. Let them work on their own, mull in your mind. Take time, step away, when needed, and come back when the words have formed a language unfamiliar, yet trying. You're not here to understand for comprehension. You are here to breathe alongside Theresa's own breathing, her offkey hums that somehow shape into a song.
When I think of this book, I think of an uncurated Sophie Calle show.
Sophie Calle once had a show at Fort Mason in San Francisco that was essentially a retrospective of Calle's work. I came in without following a map, hurdling from image to image, text to text that neither began or ended. It didn't matter. You simply needed to surrender yourself to Calle's memories, remembering with her the ways in which memory works. A thought here, a regret there. An idea neither here nor there, but over there, memory-adjacent.
To try to decipher 𝘋𝘪𝘤𝘵𝘦𝘦 is to automatically fail at your reading of the work. Here, 학경 creates the very terror and joy of the birth of language. It is the space before which language becomes. Words, sentences, a cry for help, a story. It is the space in which dreams and nightmares dwell on the past of the Korean War and what it means to be a woman saying all the unsayable to her own mother. Part memoir, part exhibition, conventions are broken here. Images. Caligraphy that takes up whole pages. Spaces bigger than others between words. Familial words jumbled together to let you re-examine their origins. This is an art exhibit. Examining things carefully, going out of order, coming back to it only to get a completely different interpretation.
Language is mixed. It's very interesting to see her own translations of her own poetry between French and English.
Tout ensemble un. Une.
vs.
All assembled as one. Just one.
Why did she not use "juste une"? Why simply "une"? And in English, why is "just" necessary in englais mais pas en francais? What is lacking for there not to be 𝘫𝘶𝘴𝘵 enough?
Assembled and ensemble share similarities and was such a smart way to look at roots of the same worth while remaining in faith with her own voice, her own creation.
When you come into this, surrender yourself to the passage of time and words. Let them work on their own, mull in your mind. Take time, step away, when needed, and come back when the words have formed a language unfamiliar, yet trying. You're not here to understand for comprehension. You are here to breathe alongside Theresa's own breathing, her offkey hums that somehow shape into a song.
December 2, 2021
My getting Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's book from the library was completely by chance. I had a vague idea of the content of the book, seeing it listed under the feminism section in a bookstore and attending a conference where her name had passed briefly, and I didn't know what to expect. I got more than I could ever imagine.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's book is unlike anything I have ever read. I can't sort it into a genre or say this book is A and not B. Dictee is everything. From feminism to war, from marriage to motherhood, from belonging to not belonging, from identity to the loss of identity, from having a nation to being completely devoid of any notional identity... From seeing a nation as your own to being a complete stranger in the middle of your own country... From one language to another.
Cha's language is a completely different language. It's not because she uses different sentence structures or incorporates French within her English chapters. It's because she uses the language in a completely new way. This book is something else because people don't use language this way. This is unusual - ly beautiful.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's book is unlike anything I have ever read. I can't sort it into a genre or say this book is A and not B. Dictee is everything. From feminism to war, from marriage to motherhood, from belonging to not belonging, from identity to the loss of identity, from having a nation to being completely devoid of any notional identity... From seeing a nation as your own to being a complete stranger in the middle of your own country... From one language to another.
Cha's language is a completely different language. It's not because she uses different sentence structures or incorporates French within her English chapters. It's because she uses the language in a completely new way. This book is something else because people don't use language this way. This is unusual - ly beautiful.
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