Dictee and Disruption

Hi Everyone,

It strikes me that the last sentence of the quotation from Trinh T. Minh-ha used in Spahr’s chapter speaks to possible reasons Cha may have had for choosing a textual and visual collage format for __Dictee__: “Clarity is a means of subjection, a quality both of official, taught language and of correct writing, two old mates of power: together they flow, together they flower, vertically to impose an order." Cha writes about and against this subjection from a post-colonial viewpoint by disrupting traditionally imposed narrative order. For example, relatively early on in the book comes an invocation to the Muse to tell us a story “beginning wherever you wish” (7, 11). Another example of Cha’s disruption of the traditional order of telling a story comes in the “Erato: Love Poetry” section where the pieces are interwoven by skipping a page before continuing the narrative. The indoctrinating power of “taught language and of correct writing” are emphasized in the dictation and translation passages, which include moral sayings such as “Be industrious: the more one works, the better one succeeds,” and “The harder the task, the more honorable the labor” (8). Yet by choosing these sentences as examples to translate Cha not only points to ways in which language can be used as a form of domination, but also shows a way in which language can be a form of contestation. Perhaps Minh-ha has hit upon a possible reason of Cha’s for choosing to leave out captions for the photographs, something I wondered about when trying to piece together the book.
Thanks,
Eve