Theresa and I

Interview with Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, author of the novel Dictee.

We meet by the north side of the river in the early afternoon, two hours before

the sun has set. She is bathed in white lengths of silk and cotton. Her hair a tangled

mass exposed and cascading over her shoulders, its ends trails along the edge of

the blanket she has folded her self on. Through the tiny holes of the mesh that

covers half of her face her lips protrude, they are soft with flecks of dried skin around

the edges. She is conscious of this. I navigate to find her eyes but she avoids my

stare, while making room for me as I approach to join her. The wind is cool it washes

over us. We remain silent. I feel the heat from both bodies as the sun descends

slowly behind her. It’s light interrupting the tendrils of her hair, they dance together

rhythmically almost violent. I break the silence.

HB: Why here?

THKC: I like being near water. When I miss her I come to the water.

HB: Who is she?

THKC: My mother. She is neither in heaven or hell. I think this world has trapped her. No

rest for her spirit.

HB: Are you trapped as well?

THYC: I won’t call it trapped, I recognize it, this departure. But in many ways I am freer. I

can flutter around and bear witness to tongues that I recognize.

HB: So do you belong now?

THKC: I have never belonged, not even in death. I am less concerned now. No reason

to fight.

HB: French, English, Japanese or Korean?

THKC: Forever my mother tongue. I revolt against the others still. It pains me to intrude

on conversations at times.

HB: Do you want to know how you died?

THKC: I saw stranger and a gun.

HB: About as much as I know. Tell me about Joan of Arc?

THKC: I think we are both Martyrs. Martyrdom was the dream of my youth; if things were

different I would present my neck to the sword and whisper at the stake “Oh Jesus”.

HB: So you believe in God?

THKC: He is the only one that can resuscitate our dead tongues. I was never without faith.

HB: Dictee is the kind of study that occurs eons before the throat opens up to make a sound.

THKC: It was about a mapping of each guttural syllable, each provocation and stutter. It

was my desire to give voice to the parts of me that were choking and suffocating. It was

the permission I granted my body as female. It was remembering the mouth, and the

choreography of our diaphragms and heart. About learning to really speak for the first

time. It was a kind gesture to offer transparency, to absorb all color, motion and memory,

and tell the collectives story and mine.

HB: This choreography this dance of words you perform constantly moves about in time

and space, it is a little Diasporic dance. I can barely keep up with your steps.

THKC: I think you can’t keep up because you are practicing restraint. I use revisions,

gaps and diversions to talk, I want to expose the myth of ever understand

someone outside your being, needless to say someone outside your culture and

economy.

HB: But I understand you. I think I understand you. At times I am not sure. I understand

when you write, say, think: “You are moving inside. Inside the stillness. Its slowness

makes almost imperceptible the movement. Pauses. Pauses hardly rest. New

movement, ending only to extend into the next movement. You say this is how Heaven

should be. You say this is how it must be death. ‘

THKC: Memoryless, Dreamless. I can’t dream, I still have my memories. You dream, tell

me about the last dream you had?

HB: It came in bits and pieces, my sister I haven’t seen her in three years was

walking across a length of wood that separated one side of an old wharf from

its Plantation House. It was a beach we visited a lot as children. She kept going

back and forth between the wharf and the wood dock of the house. She eventually

walked into the garden filled with bougainvilleas and disappeared. I raced down

from the hill to look for her but couldn’t find her. I spotted her in a wooden rowboat

and raced to the end of the wharf, whoever she was with turned the boat around and

came for me. I got in, there were a lot of people in the boat hundreds in this tiny boat.

It was afloat before I got on but when I did we started to sink. Slowly. The man

kept rowing us back out into the open ocean. My sister was in the bow and she

was looking back at me, I remember reaching over and touching the water, it

was cold and had hundreds of hawksbill turtles. They were surfacing and diving,

fins touching each other. So many. I jumped into the water with them. The boat

didn’t sink.

THKC: Sounds as though you are far from home as well.

HB: I manage. I can’t imagine not ever dreaming.

THKC: You get used to it.

HB: I doubt that.

Silence

The sun is sinking behind her now; she has taken off the cloth around her face and his

now gesturing with its material between her fingers. Twilight is coming with haste; the

sky bleeds a confusion of reds, oranges, gingers, yellows, blues and whites. It cascades

into a crescendo of purple darkness. She unwraps her body from the white cloth and

gets up from the ground. She stretches her lithe frame and goes down to the waterfront.

She bends over and let her fingers disrupt its flow. She looks over to me, I walk to meet

her.

HB: What do you think about history, your story?

THKC: I think of it as a confused collage, multiple voices and inter-textual relationships, a

mix of quotations, translations, languages, images, its construction I liken to part auto

biography, biography, personal diary, ethnography, auto ethnography and part

translation. It all intermingles and become a suture of unmixed wholes. I am an unmixed

whole. I was.

HB: What’s your favorite word?

THKC: Love.

HB: You strike me as a romantic.

THKC: I don’t want history to repeat into oblivion.

It is now dark I can barely make out her frame before me. She sits at the edge of the

river, it is mossy and stony. It’s water cold; I bend down to roll up the hem of my trousers

and suspend my feet into the darkness. She is drawn into the darkness, then the white,

and the black. Her shadow moves across, dark shapes and dark light.

I am alone at the river’s edge.