Cha Cha Cha!

After getting through the first 80 pages or so of _Dictee_ I came to the conclusion that this was not a collection of poetry, rather it is a piece of art in a literary/visual format. In fact, I’m wondering if we’re allowed to call this creative non-fiction? At any rate I was surprised to find Cha’s work taking off on a “new direction,” as Cliff pointed out and after an initial uncomfortable-ness with this reading, I came to appreciate _Dictee_ as… refreshing…after all, it’s very different from the books of poetry we’ve been reading and it’s like nothing I’ve ever read before.
Like most of you in class, I too was trying to figure out what Cha was doing with her language. I like Eve’s suggestion that Cha presents a “disruption of order” and that she “uses language as a form of contestation against the dominant narrative form.” This idea also goes with what Laura just mentioned about Cha “commenting on traditions of speech and language.” I assumed that by writing in this way, Cha forces her readers into comprehending her ideas through her non-linear narrative process.
At first I was having problems with the punctuation and Cha’s overall use of language…but that didn’t really impede my general comprehension of what was being said…or I should say, I have an idea from my own understanding and from reading everyone else’s blogs that Cha is definitely commenting on war, history, gender roles, her culture, religion, language (I’m sure I’m missing a few others)…and she does so in a very multi-textual/multi-media/multi-layered way… I’m interested in the mutli-layered aspect of her work because I was reading something about _Dictee_ on the web last night that mentioned that Cha “transcends the self” in this work…and so, I’m guessing this transcendence can allude to the mutli-layered meanings in this book. What those meaning are, I guess we’ll piece together in our discussion today....

Thanks to all for such insightful blogs!

julia