Ashley Wang
Dictee, by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. University of California Press, 2009, 192pp., $17.95.
Through repetition and invention, we learn how to speak in a language our captors will never understand.
— Hanif Abdurraqib
I.
The first time I realized my exile from language, I was standing in the New Haven Union Station, soles stuck to the remains of day-old donut dough.
For two hours in July, the editors of connetic*nt zine and their guests floated around a makeshift stage, circling the patchwork of blankets unfurled around the last bench of Union Station. They made lengthy introductions on the open mic’s theme of “liminal space,” following up the heady jargon with odes to rain and milk.
Often, their words unspooled into unintelligibility, interspersed with the train announcements floating around the station chandelier. I stood, nodding along as each line break and pause in the reader’s voices turned into a fault — split open into alternate temporalities. Hartford in 2 minutes, Stamford in 5 minutes, Grand Central in 3 minutes. Connecticut cities rose up from the earth to fill stanzas, forming molten verses. I snapped after each piece.
The truth is, I could not hear. The readers and poems who stood before us followed no progression. Where I listened for one voice, six burst from the walls. Fanart ekphrasis lay parallel to rubber wheeled gasps next to echos of New York, as the voice overhead pleaded its siren warning. Please stand back…., it trailed — periodic, iterative, unyielding.
II.
The summer I took it upon myself to relearn speech — to pull the roots of old intransitive verbs out of the dirt and dress them in the warm tissue of my throat — I found myself facing a daily onslaught of this phenomenon. I sat in classrooms and watched videos about German etiquette and currywurst, ingesting only the haze of tonality and the verbs couched at the end of sentences. In the glare of the projector screen, I felt myself regress back into the ignorance of infancy. Voices came out the walls, turning maternal, turning alien — German melding into English, then back into German.
Upon my arrival in Germany, the voices multiplied. In Berlin cafés and ticket offices, language broke into a downpour. The deluge of slurred phonemes bathed me clean — gnarled together with my body into one unidentifiable mass. Sometimes, I grabbed, childlike, for sounds that elicited any edge of familiarity, a single German word to salvage from the flood. Like Merrill’s poem, the mad scene followed me everywhere — train cars, strawberry vendors, war memorials. At an avant-garde, metatheatrical play in Berlin, I watched as papers bloomed from a wind machine. The papers were intended to evoke the impossibility of threading a singular truth in autofiction. I did not flinch in their wake. The German constructions for patriarchal oppression and memory blew past my face. I couldn’t hold onto anything but a couple of cognates. The stage burst into grief, spitting out more narrative threads I could not understand. The language rippled. I sat. I bathed. I sat immobile as the stage wept a baptism over a tongueless crowd.
III.
Where else is the crisis of language born but in the womb of a classroom? In her genre-breaking, semi-autobiographical work Dictee, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha maps the origins of speech through the eponymous dictée, a classic French pedagogical tool. In its prescriptivism, the dictée is both the product and reproducer of hierarchies — linguistic, epistemological, and colonial. The student replicates every word, syntactical structure, statement uttered by the instructor, etching sound onto paper. The language turns material, turns graspable substance, and by some miracle, takes root in the student’s cognitive space. It is this project of ingestion that constructs the lattice of the student’s being.
But from the first page, Cha makes it clear that she will not accede to the dictée’s project of mastery. She writes:
Open paragraph It was the first day period
She had come from a far period tonight at dinner
comma the families would ask comma open
quotation marks [...]
Cha’s parodic faith in the gravity of each utterance from an unseen instructor subverts the colonial power relations embedded within the dictée. I believe, she sirens. She makes us believe that she is on her knees, ingesting the sacrament of the dictée, until she spits it right back out.
Regurgitation seems to be the operating mode of Cha’s approach to language. The “diseuse” — Cha’s first embodied narrator, gives us a masterclass:
She mimics the speaking. That might resemble speech.
(Anything at all). Bared noise, groan, bits torn from words.
Since she hesitates to measure the accuracy, she
resorts to mimicking gestures with the mouth….
Here is the mouth throwing up language in its purest form — viscous fluid choked out lips moving in a vague performance of speech. Frankenstein-like, something in the scene resembles body horror — the flash cuts to disembodied parts, Cha’s lens painstakingly hovering over the fleshed groans and gasps necessary to produce an utterance.
In the sticky mass of unbounded, pregrammatical speech, the diseuse falls harder into the Frankensteinian trope, turning more grotesque in her animation:
She would take on their punctuation. She waits
to service this, Theirs. Punctuation. She would
Become, herself, demarcations. Absorb it. Spill it.
A subterranean layer of tumors — other voices — has occupied the diseuse’s body. Stretching, unyielding, only waiting to burst out. Again, the diseuse enters the mirrored mode of dictation, coming into utterance from the classroom of sociality. She may appear more human-like, more eloquent in her bounded, intelligible language, but that is all the more unheimlich. She is a possessed being, the multiplicity of voices embedded in her body’s cavities roaring out all the wrong places.
Just as she gets on her knees in the ritual of linguistic reproduction, her body is repossessed:
Inside her voids. lt does not contain further. Rising
from the empty below, pebble lumps of gas,
Moisture. Begin to flood her. Dissolving her,
Slow, slowed to deliberation. Slow and thick.
This time, the possession comes from an unnamed force that originates from her own body. The weight begins from the uppermost back of her head, pressing downward until her jaw unhinges. She has moved forwards and backwards all at once. Her body is now void of other voices, replaced again with the dripping, thick base mix of unactualized language. Finally, the utterance is hers. Not choked, not other, but solely her own.
In both scenes, Cha threads a meta-narrative for the rest of Dictee — a three-act progression that is not a progression. Having studied French for her entire life, force-fed the language of her country’s colonizers and the memory of her ancestors, she spews the digested chunks of other tongues back onto the page — comma, period, Aller a la ligne.
There are no more sentences, only phrases. There are no phrases, only words. There are no words, only raised flesh. Cha is the monster who has found the key to her own construction, disassembling her own body in pursuit of renewal. In the debris of language, we find Cha — unraveling and reconstructing the self between murmurs.
IV.
Steeped for long enough in the deluge of German, our class was ready to invent an outline to sound. We began the process of regurgitation, filling the classroom with modal verbs and the perfect tense. We teethed the same memorized phrases, each of our mouths mirroring the next. You guys speak German the way my 4-year-old son tries to speak English, the professor said. We confirmed this statement, wide-eyed and naive in our ambition. Inside, the garbled murmur roiled, arrested below our throats: we will read Celan, we will undertake the next generation of hornmaking in Frankfurt, we will arrive in Berlin as our mouths brim with eloquent, accentless German.
Armed with declarative statements, Google-translated summaries of fairy tales, and 100 intransitive verbs, we landed in the new city and walked through our host parents’ doors as oracles. Suddenly there was only one direction to speech. We talked at our audience and never listened for a response. We pronounced our biographies, accustomed to the spiel of identity — that blunt interlocking of our ages and our educational histories and our countries of origin. At the dinner table, I became a machine of cultural comparison, reciting over and over again the word for difference. At times, I substituted my listless repetitions with the word for variety.
When I had spilled everything, exhausted all the possible permutations of half-legible conversations about the value of the humanities with my freelance-historian-host-mom, lovely murmurs draped themselves on our plates. English and Chinese hummed their way into our conversations, splintering faults across the dinner table. Again, I sat silent, stilled by the infiltration of alien, disembodied voices. Murmuring, unborn words lay in my jaw. Out of reach. The buried choked roots of the words murmuring songs to fill the silence. Murmuring a table of songs.
There came a juncture in my surrendered repetition of German, when the pain not to say overpowered. What recourse is there, when the will to speech persists inside the body? When my host mom makes a massive wok bowl of Shanghai scallion noodles, how do I form the shape of gratitude? When an S-Bahn attendant single handedly recovers my phone and ID, how do I tell him he is an angel reborn?
V.
There are two steps.
The first is desecration: simply fucking up. Saying the wrong things at the wrong time, pausing awkwardly after leaning too hard on the scaffolding of cognates. When the prewritten phrases ran out, my utterances lodged as landmines in train stations and checkouts, ruptured the roots of meaning. I made nouns into verbs and cleaved together mystical compound words. Moonmouth. Branchfoot. In the slurry haze of mangled German and half-English, I abandoned logic, returned to the purest of the pure — flashing wild gestures and toothy smiles near restaurant exits. Like Cha, I follow no progression, vacillating between past and present in a coil of warring tenses. I repeat in excess. I repeat. I repeat until I am left only with raised flesh, goosebumps blooming all over.
The second is reconstruction. In the spit-sticky debris of language, I began to enter myself.
I had spent most of my life before this summer learning through dictation, scribbling down British-accented English in the swollen womb of my Hong Kong elementary school. Unlike Cha, my preteen self had not had the courage to thwart this exercise. I copied faithfully. My first short story was an abridged, plagiarized version of Dinosaurs after Dark from the Magic Tree House series. In truth, English — spoken and written in exact equivalence to a textbook — had never been my own. Like Derrida’s French, the language in which I dream is a language that renders me an exile. English commands distance: every word I have uttered in English has been mediated by a genealogy of voices before me. Every instance of desire has existed only as murmur, as song murmuring, as pause resting in the bed of the throat.
As I barreled toward my last week in Berlin, continuing to fail at club doors and restaurants, the murmurs began to coalesce into a new shape. Clean of digressions, of the ability to wander within the sentence, my state of mind in German sharpened toward one of unfettered aspiration. In my stunted fluency, my tongue was forced into simplicity, and from simplicity came a singularity of vision. When we learned the subjunctive and practiced by gnawing on hypothetical futures, I was always resolute. I want to be a writer, I said. I want — a sentence always thwarted in English. In my stubborn repetition of the grammar of the other, I staged a bold reinvention, weaving sentences that came from the deep recesses of the self. My body — fissured across linguistic faults — seemed to emerge anew.
VI.
Still, even in my insistence on brute-forcing through German, my sheer faith in the foreign language’s capacity to make my true self legible, I was subject to its dictates, the rigidity of its grammar. Murmurs unleashed themselves in the porous edges of my speech, but I remained a child of my intermediate German textbook.
How does a mouth, passed through the classrooms of three countries, ever gain a tongue of its own?
Back to the debris of language. Back to Union Station train announcements spilling from the walls’ pores. The white noise of one unyielding voice clashing against five others. The English slipping spit-slick all around me as I managed to pin down one of every six words — libretto, elegy, spring.
When a poet speaks to their audience, it is the first and last time that line will exist. No matter how carefully one listens, there will always be something lost. The spoken poet’s verse is inherently untethered from the page, “pebble lumps of gas” dissolving into the audience. But in the few words that remain resonant — periodic, iterative, unyielding — there is a form of music. Meaning strolls away, a flanéur wandering far from the original text, until all there is left for the audience is the semiotic. We are rendered infants. We cry without knowing why. In the womb of rhythmic babbling and the soft intermingling of maternal, disembodied voices, we are reborn.
In this sense, every poet in the midst of utterance becomes Cha — muse, the mother of language — their speech incommensurable to any fixed text.
There are few things in this life I am certain of except for the following: A phone, thrust toward your ear by a first-time poet at a Liminal Spaces open mic, is a beckoning. The voice memo of vague chirping is, exactly as the poet proclaims, an authentic recording of the Amazon rainforest. The New Haven Union Station is the birthplace of all that is liminal. The floor sticks, only because the other day a field of mangled peaches sprouted from the floorboards. There is a garden of selves to be found in the scattered junkyard of language. Somewhere far beyond the classroom, in the embrace of white noise, there is salvation for those looking to find a new tongue.
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Photo by Patricia Voulgairs