Customer Reviews

Dictee

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This book baffles me but I can't help coming back to it time and again. It makes my brain turn flip-flops and, in doing so, realize faculties of thought, imagination and empathy that I never knew existed. Cha's work is amazing, original, extremely insightful and interesting, bleak, defiant. As college reading lists "discover" the works of Asian American women writers (many of whom, like Amy Tan, are immensely popular but regularly problematized by scholars in Asian American studies), Theresa Cha must not be overlooked or forgotten.

The poet Charles Simic says, "Long drawn-out works conflict with the fragmentariness of our consciousness. What is recorded in a notebook is the sense of the unique and unrepeatable experience of the rare moments of clarity."

Dictee is this kind of book, a collection in nine parts of mixed writing styles including short passages in French and English, jounal entries, stories and dreams, even a handwritten letter. And more. Theresa Hak Cha's book, which has been callled both fiction and autobiography, also contains photographs, film stills, diagrams, and other black and white images. "Electic" only begins to describe the structure and style of Dictee.

Cha's writing doesn't come without risk--Dictee seems thematically and structurally difficult. But it's with this style, actually a process-of-writing style, that Cha shows us how her mind works. It's in her "fragmentariness" that elements of profound meaning rise to the surface, what Simic meant by "rare moments of clarity." Cha's imagination on the page, her explorations into language and poetic lyricism--with connections to nationalist and feminist themes--help us feel her genuine struggle with Korea as a victim of the Cold War. This message is her legacy; it's a kind of Presence in her writing. And we sense her triumph.

The autobiographical work of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, "Dictee," is both a challenging and unique experience to read. Her provocative blend of prose, poetry, narrative and historical pieces, among other genres, reveal a voice that purposely avoids a "typical" patriarchial discourse that is refreshing although disarming. Her words, contextually somewhat difficult for the (this) reader not previously aware of the complexities and truths of Korean history (both in Korea and America), are at once powerful and insightful...poetic, yet raw. Cha is able to use her gift to offer a glimpse into one woman's history and journey; one that ended much too soon on this planet for this talented artist.

This book can be hard to follow at times; Cha uses mixed media to convey the very intracacies of her feelings on postcolonialism, postmodernism, language, and identity. There are French exercises, images of Joan of Arc (Dreyer's film version), an acupuncture chart, photocopied pages of letters--all interspersed throughout Cha's actual prose. This is an abstract piece, and I recommend "Writing Self, Writing Nation," the companion book with essays written by Asian American studies scholars to help guide you through it. "DICTEE" is an important work in Korean American literature, as it ascends from the normal prose and attempts to mediate the Korean American identity with text.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee is well crafted, yet difficult. It examines life experience from the perspective of Korean women.Poetry, narrative and other text structures are employed. Language is used forcefully and in thought provoking ways to build the unique form of this book. Dictee poses questions and provides a lens from which to view the Korean immigrant experience, as well as, the history of political struggle in Korea. Reading Dictee is a wothwhile experience that will expand a reader's vision.

As occurs in other genres of 'ecriture feminine', this text experiments rather than controls. It is a dictee, but does not dictate.

Throughout Dictee, so unlike the narratives of domestic "realism" or poems of pastoral experience that continue dominate the American majority market not to mention the sterile formalism of deconstructive language writing, this other haunting the poem is primarily "the mother."

But this means dictations from the mother tongue all the more so, Korean writing and speaking as if displaced and spoken from afar in San Francisco and Honolulu or, worse, yet, New York City and Paris through the art worlds.

Korean, not French, not English. These others inhabiting the voice laden text of Dictee, as if dictating to and speaking through the self dispossessed narrator, are at first the Muses, but seemingly desiccated into an estranged cast of classical genres and sacred codes: Clio/History, Calliope/Epic Poetry, Urania/Astronomy, Melpomene/Tragedy, Erato/Love Poetry and so on.

This Greek cast records an estrangement, a fall into language and genre as other and later. Sappho, too, is invoked as a first mother, a muse, a poet of the sublime urging emulation, worship, but threatening uncanny (un-homely) disaster on the home-front of the poet's fragile one small- voiced life.

Lessons as "dictations" abound, as the force of language is instrumentalized and lost from godhead or feminine possession in childhood, as later brutally estranged from higher auspices or any pretense of truth: "The people of this country are less happy than the people of yours" (8), reads one glibly colonialist language lesson.

Confessions and communions encode the innermost discourse of the self: the system of Catholicism, throughout, serves as a foreign but intimately inward sacramental language (hic meum corpus est means a lot to such saints from Joan of Arc to John [Cha] of the Cross) disturbing the self into a quest for sacred otherness: "In waiting. To receive. Him" (13).

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha as Saint Therese, this becomes a sublime obsession as a play with martyrdom.

The tongues having fallen into disuse, "diseuse," language cannot reclaim the sacred nor poetry its ancient vocation. Enter a call from beyond the grave, a 'dictation': "she accept pages sent care of never to be seen never to be known if name if name be known if name only seen heard spoke read cannot be never she hide all" (15). This work has had, will have, a huge uncanny afterlife since being sent in the cosmic mail in 1982 to give life and renewal to the present as present presence in us all. Pax.

You don't have to be Korean , or a woman, or have rare patience for "difficult" prose to enjoy this invention. A wise friend gave it to me for Christmas, I disappeared into it, lost several days and nights, and gained a literary universe.

Dictee is a seminal work that has strongly influenced those poets lucky enough to have read it in the decades since it first appeared. It has had an underground reputation for decades, and now is beginning to be known to the mainstream. Yes, Dictee is rooted in the specifics of her family's immigrant experience, in the specifics of Korea and of America, in the specifics of gender, but it explodes across time, space and cultures, it transcends form, and ultimately it transforms the reader's consciousness of what can be done with writing and how you can perceive your life. I am tempted to say "if Cha had lived longer she would have been one of our major writers" but in fact she *is* one of the major writers of the second half of the 20th century, on the strength of this one work alone. I am delighted that Dictee is soon to appear in an addition with more of Cha's work.

This is an incredible book. Cha tells the story of her mother's life in Korea and her life in America (and Korea) using ideographs, French language-study tools, poetry, stream-of-consciousness prose, and photographs. It's a very easy read, but if you want it harder, you could easily spend years wallowing in its exquisite language, especially if you're fond of Benveniste.

This book is confusing, frustrating, consuming and utterly breathtaking. It is a shattered mirror w/ pieces of riddles, poetry, cold photos of mothers and unsung heroines & nonsense; a true reflection of a woman. And like a woman, it takes work to truly understand its essence. Discovering what is hidden within Cha's deliberate chaos is like discovering the most sacred thoughts a woman possess. What makes this book unique is not so much the unconventional style but its dominating force to be absolutely nonconforming, such as the wildness that goes on in a woman's mind. It's not meant to be dissected and place into some kind of scientific formula of understanding. It's meant to be subjective, delicate and complex. Digest its intricacy and savor each page with delight. -Scribbling Ibis, 3/17/05