Upon exploring the implications of a national identity, literature has been able to substantiate the individual experiences of those whose race, class and or citizenship status automatically places them on the outside of the dominant ‘American’ national discourse. Through the portraits of immigration, displacement and disruption that this literature brings to life, the idea of an essential, all embracing national identity is further complicated. The written experiences of these ‘alternate’, ‘other’ narratives negate in many ways the idea that a true national identity actually exists. Through the creation of an alternate space, writers are able to negotiate a place in which their own, seemingly foreign stories become central to the greater picture of this nation. In Teresa Hak Kyung’s Dictee, this space of expression and realization comes about not only through the use of the literary representation, but also through the interruption of visual representations. Through her multidimensional text and visual images, Cha creates a book that, like the experiences of the marginalized, can not be placed into a neat and comfortable category. Cha’s book, like her personal experiences, is a both a testament as well as a resistance to the division, forced assimilation and generic reproduction that comes from the utilization of perfect, orderly categories of national identification.
Dictation, or Dictee, is the theme of domination that forces voices like Cha’s to operate on a level of invisibility in order to avoid the generic representations and ‘essentialisms’ that the dominant discourse has manipulated for the comfort of the masses. For this reason, Cha writes in a disruptive and often incoherent manner in order to demonstrate the discomfort that comes from attempting to fit into such imposed and homogeneous identities;
“ She allows herself caught in their threading, anonymously in their thick motion in the weight of their utterance. When the amplification stops, there might be an echo. She might make the attempt then…She waits inside the pause. Inside her. Now. This very moment. Now. She takes rapidly the air, in gulfs, in preparation for the distances to come. The pause ends. The voice wraps another layer. Thicker now even. From the waiting. The wait from the pain to say. To not to. Say” (4).
The woman in this passage is hyper aware of her inability to replicate the exact sound of the foreign language that is being forced upon her. The attention she pays to the pauses and air intake that is an inherent part of speaking makes the reader aware that this is a very unnatural way for her to speak. In this painful process of adopting a foreign tongue through forced, colonial occupation, she becomes subsumed into “their utterances”, making her own voice “anonymous”. Being made aware of the destructive and violent nature of the imposition of such a foreign language, the reader realizes her own visual discomfort that comes from attempting to read and contextualize such a grammatically incorrect passage. Through this connection to the text, Cha allows the reader to begin to interpret the plot-less story of occupation, war and displacement on their own terms, bringing to her novel a personal and original understanding.
This idea of originality is very much a part of Cha’s own critique of an essential narrative. This is because a representative narrative negates the possibility for difference and tolerance. To understand a complex and individual history, imbedded in a more collective history of political and social struggle, one must be open to individual voices that makes a sole, national identity seem impossibly unrealistic. Cha uses the language of religious occupation to demonstrate how dictated identity (i.e. culture and language) forces the occupied to deny their own worth and existence;
“God has made me in his own likeness. In his Own Image in His Own resemblance, in His Own copy, In His Own Counterfeit Presentment, in His Duplicate…Pleasure in the image pleasure in the copy pleasure in the projection of likeness…Acquiesce, to the correspondence. Acquiesce, to the messenger…Theirs. Into their tongue, the counter-script, my confession in Theirs” (18).
The language of this passage is an imitation of a confessional. Upon asserting her devotion to this imposed and foreign religion, the speaker professes her delight in becoming a carbon copy of God’s image. Yet one must keep in mind that this submission to the language of Christianity is also a reproduction for the sake of adopting a strange faith. Consequently, the confession of this person obliterates her own words and voice. It is a reproduction of what she has been told, not what she personally wishes to communicate. Through this reproduction of a confessional, in which Cha makes the reader aware that it is only a textual representation of a religious sacrament by using a question and answer format, the individuality of the confessor is dissolved into rhetoric that displaces her individual voice. This personal confession then becomes yet another way in which the nation- state penetrates and mediates the experiences of the occupied individual.
Cha expresses this complicated relationship between individual and national experience by illuminating her own life under the shadow of occupation through images of Korean nationalism. Preceding the section Epic Poetry/Calliope, in which Cha remembers and recreates her personal history through the discussion of her mother, Cha opens the section of History/Clio with a picture of Yu Guan Soon. By placing these two sections together, Cha is able to parallel the nationalist experience of the revolutionary woman Yu Guan Soon, to the personal experience of her own mother. Both Soon and her mother provide the reader with yet another contradiction to the idea of nation and citizenship. These women, in Korea, China and the United States, are not the ‘essential’ citizens because they are female. As demonstrated in her description of Soon, Cha describes the difficulty in establishing a voice in a place where gender dictates personal worth; “There is already a nationally organized movement, who do not accept her seriousness, her place as a young woman, they attempt to dissuade her” (30). In the nationalist discourse of Korea, and even the U.S., the ideal citizen is inseparable from the male figure of domination and control. Therefore, Soon must overcome this in order to push her own resistant identity into a space of the nation in which she tries to reclaim. By using images of women, Cha is able to renegotiate this space of citizenship and national identity to include herself, her mother, and her country’s revolutionary ‘mothers’. Her mother, like Yu Guan Soon, resists through her life’s work, both the nationalist patriarchal notions of citizenship, and the occupation of her land, “ You are the first woman teacher to come to this village in six years. A male teacher greets you, he addresses you in Japanese. Japan has already occupied Korea and is attempting the occupation of China. Even in their small village the signs of their presence is felt”(48). Although her job as a teacher is dictated by the patriarchy of colonial occupation and war, Cha’s mother is able to set aside a space for herself in this male dominated world simply by virtue of her being there. In addition to breaking molds of gender and citizenship, there is a way in which both Yu Guan Soon and Cha’s mother continue to be agents of this lost culture, resisting against homogeneity by their very existence and remembrance through Cha.
For this reason, the work of Cha, especially this book, becomes yet another way in which the reality of this forgotten and manipulated past can reclaim a space of recognition and validation. Taking into account her personal experience of displacement and loss, one should understand through her deliberate warnings against reproduction and generic representations, that this personal story is not representative of the whole. The collective experience of this history is as diverse and complex as the structure of the narrative itself. What Cha wants the reader to realize, is that through the personal, the national picture gains importance and recognition. Building a national perspective and identity then becomes a task of the individual, giving flesh to the abstract and forgettable;
“You see the shape the form the same you see the unchangeable and the unchanged the same you smell filtered edited through progress and westernization …You are one same particle. You leave you come back to the shell left empty all this time. To claim to reclaim, the space. Into the mouth the wound the entry is reverse and back each organ artery gland pace element, implanted, housed skin upon skin, membrane, vessel, waters, dams, ducts, canals, bridges” (57).
As noted in this passage, the reclamation of space, after forced assimilation into western notions of citizenship and nationalism, allows for the rebuilding of life and community. Slowly, through the physical as well as mental return to this motherland, the possibility for reclaiming a space of visibility is realized as it allows for the recreation of life itself. The “organ, artery, gland” of this national experience comes to life in an undeniable state of the physical.
Through this realization, Cha’s opening line, “ May I write words more naked than flesh, stronger than bone, more resilient than sinew, sensitive than nerve” becomes a manifestation of a text that incorporates feeling, memory and imagination as an integral part of the realization of national identity. Reading the text through the literary and artistic, the reader understands that the task of interpretation is a necessary engagement of the personal, physical and mental. Through this understanding, Cha ultimately demonstrates how the idea of an essential identity and experience kills and destroys the individual bloodlines of history just as colonization and imperialism obliterates a people.
