Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee (1982) is a hybrid form of prose poetry, autobiography, ethnography, criticism, and fictional experiments. Cha was a Korean American visual artist, poet, and filmmaker. She was tragically murdered only a week after the book was published. The book went out of print for several years before interest in Cha’s work was revived in the 1990s by feminist authors, such as Norma Alarcón. Cha’s work was honored with an exhibition including her work at the Whitney Biennial in 2022. This guide refers to the University of California Press edition published in 2001.

Plot Summary

The book’s title, Dictee, means “dictation” in French, and this word becomes infused with irony as the book progresses. Referring to Cha’s life first as a Korean child living in China, then as an émigré in the United States learning English and French in Catholic school, the title is symbolic of Cha’s wish to escape from the history of trauma, war, and exile that defines her mother’s and her own life and create a new language which is not merely a repetition, but rather something new that is reflective of a more authentic social reality. Cha explores the concepts of colonialism, martyrdom, the experiences of women, and art.

In each chapter, Cha explores the lives of women under systems of colonial rule and other forms of oppressive governance. The women are martyrs, saints, sinners, and goddesses who rebel against their societies, with different results. Each chapter is titled after one of the nine classical muses, the daughters of Zeus who each ruled over a different category of art or science. However, the contents of the chapters oftentimes subvert the expectations that the chapter titles set: “Thalia Comedy” is not humorous but instead features a series of jumping scenes between a woman in a theater, letters to a mysterious woman named Laura Claxton, and poems about the goddess Persephone, Demeter’s daughter. Using experimental and post-modernist literary and artistic techniques, Cha uses uncaptioned photos, untranslated French, Korean, and Chinese text, and other means of defamiliarizing the contents of the book. Defamiliarization, or the process of making familiar objects strange, allows Cha to penetrate the tropes and cliches of memoir, historical representations of Korean history, and mythology. Cha leads readers to question their assumptions about power, gender, national and ethnic identity, and language.

In “Diseuse,” Cha introduces the narrator, who is a close representation of herself: a girl learning French and English and struggling with the fear of speaking in an unfamiliar language. The child struggles through the rituals of her religious school and feels deeply alienated by the culture of Christianity. In “Clio History,” Cha explores the life of Yu Guan Soon, a Korean woman who died in 1920 at the age of 17 due to rebellion against Japanese imperial rule in Korea in the early-20th century. She died from being tortured by military police following her involvement in student protests in the famous March 1 movement and became a national hero. Cha chronicles her life and the historical context of the era, including quotes from her and historical documents, such as a letter to President Roosevelt. In “Calliope Epic Poetry,” Cha writes the first of several letters to her mother, Hyun Soon Huo, describing her mother’s experiences as a Korean refugee first in China and then in the United States in the mid-20th century. “Urania Astronomy” explores the body and its relationship to speech, language, and memory, with an image of the human body labeled with Chinese characters.

In “Melpomene Tragedy,” Cha introduces a woman who visits the theater to lose herself temporarily in “the absolute darkness” (79). Cha includes another letter to her mother concerning a fight between Cha’s brother and mother that took place before a famous student protest in 1962. Exploring several different dimensions of love, “Erato Love Poetry” includes the return of the woman at the theater as she watches a Carl Dreyer film, Gertrud, about a woman in an unhappy relationship. The chapter also features quotes from the journals of St. Therese of Lisieux, a French nun who was sainted following her death from tuberculosis at the age of 24. Cha writes poetry about the myth of Demeter and Persephone in “Elitere Lyric Poetry” and “Thalia Comedy,” exploring the mythology through a feminist, post-colonial lens. In “Polymnia Sacred Poetry,” Cha fuses Korean shaman mythology with Greek mythology in a story of a young girl venturing to a well to save her mother from grave illness.

The concepts of reunion, mother-daughter relationships, exile, and the transformative power of mythology serve as the guiding threads by which Cha connects these widely varying stories. Cha shows the universality of the experience of homelessness and explores how language can provide a home to those who are without a place of belonging.