Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Dictee

i gotta admit i didn't understand this 100% but you can feel it -- the pain the erasure learning to speak again. amazing language study too

Patricia K

Dictée 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.

Ana Hein

3.5 stars. Did I understand pretty much anything in this book? No. Am I still horribly impressed by it. Absolutely.

Amy L Hamilton

I don't understand/know what I just read, but I enjoyed it.

zoe mae

transcendent... a choreography of speech and diaspora rehearsing memories that have snowed and melted and bled and dusted since forever. dictee's language feels accessed in some other way as if drawn upwards through the snowmelt instead of precipitating. cha demands understanding by rejecting palatability. i hesitate to make any conceptual statements or summaries or worse conclusions.. its really closer to being a memory and than recalling one.. it engages with narrative entirely through memory like a skrim.. a favorite and very close to my heart

Dictee

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