Post on 01-Mar-2023
Laura Fantone
Writing Asian diasporas, envisioning shifting identities in Art
The woman who begins her struggle from language is carrying out a many-sided task:
She is trying not only to ‘express the unexpressable’ (as Barthes says), she writes
(in) the space where the question of saying, of being able to say and of wanting to say is asked.
(Trinh T. Minh-ha, “Framer Framed”)
She — of the interval
In this essay I will analyse visual and written artworks by two contemporary Asian
female artists who immigrated to the United States, post-colonial writers and
filmmakers Trinh T. Minh-ha and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha. This analysis is broadly
intended to contribute to a cultural criticism interested in the politics of migration, exile
and translation. It is an attempt to give some attention to Asian female authors, and to
interrogate the condition of their interpellation, particularly in the West, where they
seem trapped in orientalist discourses and images. I intend to move here towards the
concept of writing diaspora, borrowed from Rey Chow’s essay collection of the same
title.1 In this key text, the cultural critic from Hong Kong asks:
How can women speak? How do women intervene? How can women articulate their difference
without having that difference turned into a cultural ghettoization? 2
Part of the goal of “writing diaspora” is thus to unlearn that submission to one’s ethnicity such as
‘Chineseness’ as the ultimate signified area.3
Following Rey Chow’s invitation to look at discursive strategies of writing diaspora,
this section shifts from the autobiographical writing of Asian American women to a
‘third’ space, a different poetic form. I also refer to the ways in which this third space
1 See Rey Chow, Writing Diaspora: Tactics of Intervention in Contemporary Cultural Studies,
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 16. 2 Ibid. 107.
critically comments on the political notion of a Third World, so often used only to
imply a hierarchy of countries, or in the best case simply political solidarity. In the early
eighties the idea of a Third Cinema began to develop in Latin America, and a few years
later the post-colonial art critique journal Third Text begins to be published. In 1989 the
British journal Framework published a special issue titled “Third Scenario: Theory and
the Politics of Location”, addressing the idea of a third space within a dialogue among
Stuart Hall, Isaac Julien and others4. Another important contribution comes from Pines
and Willemen’s book entitled Questions of Third Cinema.5 In addition to these theories,
my analysis draws specifically from the concept of a third space, as defined by Stuart
Hall and, later, by Homi Bhabha:
[I]t is significant that the productive capacities of this Third Space have a colonial or
postcolonial provenance, … the theoretical recognition of the split-space of enunciation may
open the way to conceptualizing an international culture, based not on the exoticism of
multiculturalism and the diversity of cultures, but on the in-scription and articulation of culture’s
hybridity. .… It is worth noticing here that it is the ‘inter’ – the cutting edge of translation and
negotiation, the in-between space – that carries the burden of the meaning of culture. It is only by
exploring this Third Space that we may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of
ourselves.6
This essay focuses particularly on the poetic and political work that displaces multiple
forms of female, diasporic and non-hegemonic writing, without carrying the weight of a
pre-defined, univocal identity. The work I describe here is especially interesting because
it escapes both the autobiographical and the collective ‘we’, which often ignores
difference in the collective narration of ‘oppressed’ people.
3 Ibid., 25.
4 Stuart Hall, “Theory and the Politics of Location” in Framework , n. 5. 1989.
5 See Jim Pines and Paul Willemen Questions of Third Cinema, (London: BFI, 1989).
6 Homi Bhabha. The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), 39.
It is in this context that Trinh T. Minh-ha entered the debates complicating the history
of dualism in male and female forms of writing, and conceptualizing a third scenario,
which challenges the binary logic we often take for granted7.
Visions of a Third Space
Since the seventies both Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Trinh T. Minh-ha have developed
unique forms of writing, neither literary nor purely visual. Their writings are
interspersed by theory and yet they are neither purely theoretical nor they can
pragmatically be reduced to biography. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Trinh T. Minh-ha
situate themselves in a border zone, molding heterogeneous forms into different
materials: film, calligraphy, and photography.
The two post-colonial artists reflect on contemporary events and relay the colonial
wars in East Asia. They also remember the forced migrations that traversed the Pacific
Ocean and the violence of US 20th
-century imperialism. The works of Theresa Hak
Kyung Cha deal profoundly with exile, the loss of family relationships, the implications
of multi-lingualism and the complex interplay between language and memory. Cha’s
diasporic sensibility appears through her conscious refusal of any dominant element,
favouring instead constant passages, whether inside or outside of the screen, at the
margin of the canvas, or in the spaces of the page, where images or words are mixed.
Real and imaginary stories appear and oscillate at the edges, bordering the invisible,
between history, female stories and multiple subjectivities. The work of Theresa Hak
Kyung Cha develops through a constant crossing of images and juxtapositions of
languages and poetic genres. Cha’s poetics is one of empty spaces, and distances
7 See Trinh T. Minh-ha When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender and Cultural Politics, (New
York: Routledge,1991).
between spaces, where multiple voices dis-member and re-member as a disrupted
storytelling.
These poetic elements cannot, however, be addressed without looking at her
biography. Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was born in Pusan, Korea in 1951, but moved to
Hawaii as a child. Her family took refuge there during the Korean War, and then, in
1962, settled in California, where she grew up, enrolling in a Catholic school, and
having to learn French and attend mass. Later she studied film and art at University of
California Berkeley. She also went on to pursue graduate studies in France. Two
decades after her immigration, she briefly went back to Korea, before getting married
and moving to New York in 1980. Tragically, Cha was murdered in 1982, at the age of
31, just before her first book DICTEE was published (Kim and Alarcõn, 1994). This
premature death made her loss particularly felt in the art world, because of Cha’s
innovative experiments in film making, installations and video Art. Moreover, her book
DICTEE touched upon the themes of death, loss, memory, history and erasure of female
voices, offering a delicate space where the artist and poet was visible and audible only
through traces.
With this final, eery correspondence between the themes of her artistic pursuit
and her sudden death, it clearly appeared that her life was deeply marked by exile, as
was her entire family history. Her parents had to move from Korea to Manchuria in the
Thirties because of the Japanese invasion. At the end of World War II, they went back
to Korea, but the country was devastated by the Korean War, divided in half and ruled
by a dictatorship. In 1963, they left once and for all for the US.
The recurrent theme of exile is illustrated in her work by blank pages and
dismembered words. A fragmented poetics conveys the arbitrary, forced and violent
nature of exile. In her visual poem Exilée, written in French, Cha deconstructed the
word and its spelling, hinting at the practices that were typical of earlier Dadaist and
Surrealist poems:
EXIL
EXILE
ILE
E’
E’E.8
Exile for Cha begins with the obliteration of one’s origin. In the simple act of
translation, a female human being is eroded and fragmented into pieces. The word exile
is broken into three parts, revealing the hidden words, to be (e’ e’’) and island (in
French île). In the fragment of ‘exile’ is ‘ile’, therefore to highlight that the last piece of
exile is isolation. Finally, the last two letters “E’ E” reproduce the French form for a
female noun. The exile becomes gendered as a woman, like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha,
isolated and exiled.
Cha wrote on exile in the late Seventies, prior to much of the theorizing in post-
colonial studies developed by Hall and Bhabha. Her poetics invoke the theoretical
debates on the Third Space, developing from the late Seventies to the Nineties, in art,
literature, film and postcolonial studies.
In 1980, Cha worked on a video installation with the title Exilée, combining images
that were simultaneously broadcasted on a film screen and on a TV screen placed in the
middle of the film screen. At times the film projects one image while the TV is off, and
at other times the TV screen contains small images surrounded only by the large black
space of the film screen. There is a clear dissonance between the two screens, which is
conveyed mostly by the different quality of light that they emit. The video, behind a
feeble glass screen, is contrasted with the greater light emanating by the film screen.
The screen and its material composition have great importance in Cha’s work. They are
a recurring symbolic element, as Trinh T. Minh-ha has subtly noted in an essay that
pays homage to Cha.9
The large, cyclical images are clouds and the final image of the installation is an
empty envelop covered in dust. Exile is evoked in images of small everyday objects, all
casting long shadows. Those small, arbitrary things that constitute one’s memory (a cup,
a mat, a windowpane) express some of the sensations that Cha remembered from when
she left Korea as a child. Empty rooms and light reflecting onto empty surfaces create a
distance from personal memories, removing the subjective element (the people, their
portraits or signature) and displacing the subject of autobiographical narration.
The video shows images belonging to a different place and time, and the soundtrack,
a recorded voice, evokes the shift between the inside of the screen and its outside,
repeating these sentences:
Twice, two times two
One on top below another one
There are many twos in the twohold.10
The voice does not comment directly on the images, but instead suggests the dualistic
relationship between the screens that implies a multitude of doubles.
As stated in a posthumous anthology on Cha’s work11
, Exilée originates from Cha’s
first return trip to Korea, in 1979, seventeen years after her departure. The voyage back
to Korea is evoked in terms of flight duration and time difference. It speaks of a trauma
of loss and displacement, of the distance between Cha and the place where she grew up,
only by repeating a neutral form of measurement:
Following daylight to the end
of daylight
Ten hours twenty three minutes
sixteen hours ahead of this time
8 Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, poem "Exilée Temps Morts," in Hotel, Collection of Written Works by Visual
Artists in R. Williams, ed., (New York: Tanam Press,1980), 113. 9 Trinh T. Minh-ha, “White Spring”, in The Dream of the Audience, Lewallen, Constance, ed., (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2001), 42. Hereafter The Dream. 10
Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha, "Exilée Temps Morts," in Hotel, Collection of Written Works by Visual
Artists in R. Williams, ed. (New York: Tanam Press,1980). 11
Elaine Kim and Alarcõn, Norma, eds., Writing Self, Writing Nation: a Collection of Essays on DICTEE
by Theresa Cha (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1994).
Ten hours twenty three minutes
sixteen hours ahead of this time
Ten hours twenty three minutes
sixteen hours ahead of this time.12
Cha’s poetics often relies on the repetition of words, which appear and disappear in
sequence, changing and breaking in the text. In her book DICTEE, in her video
Videoéme, and in her visual essay on cinema, Commentaire, writing is a way of
interrupting and dividing; words create white and black spaces on the surface of the
page, and spaces make silence audible. According to art critic Constance Lewallen,
Cha’s written work is always also visual, and it has been categorized by critics as “mail
art, work on fabric and paper, photocopies, stencils”.13
Lewallen argues that Cha uses
short sentences and dramatic punctuation, thus giving to her texts an internal rhythm,
which is repetitive, condensed and infinitely expanding at the same time.
An example of this kind of dispersed writing, in which the idea of blank space
and pause are very important, is in the poem Audience Distant Relative, published as a
series of seven lithographies in 1977. Cha chose to leave a white page following each
written page:
From the very moment any voice is conceived whether
physically realized or not
manifested or not
to the very moment (if & when) delivered (p. 12)
12
Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha, "Exilée" video, transcription of the audio track (1980). 13
Lewallen C., Lawrence R., and Minh-ha, Trinh T. editors, The Dream of the Audience: Theresa Hak
Kyung Cha (1951-1982) (Berkeley:University of California PressYork, 2001).
echo
(p. 14)
the in-between-time: from when a sound is made
to when it returns as an echo
no one knows if it was heard,
when it was heard
when it would be heard
if ever at all
but it continues on and on and on
maybe thousand years
someone’s memory
tale
legend
poem
dream.
(p.16) 14
14
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, DICTEE (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1982).
The graphic composition of the poem is marked by intervals and silences; the reader is
invited to look at the distance between words, the empty spaces, that in-between time,
appearing on the first line of the last page of the poem (see above). Cha’s poem is also a
reflection on the distance between the moment of its conception, the moment of its
enunciation and the moment of its reception by a hypothetical audience in different
space and time.
In this distance between thoughts and their expressions one can find traces of Cha’s
sense of memory (someone’s memory) as a personal and collective story (tale, legend,
poem) of a people in exile. At the core there is an indefinite interval, among the multiple
words, stories and distances that assemble an in-between time. Each legend, poem, or
dream can be echoed, found in a distant location, or become lost: “no one knows if it
was heard, when it was heard, when it would be heard, if ever at all, but it continues on
and on and on”15
. The speech act can fail, the narration can be manifested or not (“heard
or not”) so it is always already suspended in an uncertain interval.
In general, the limits of expression, be it vocal, linguistic or written is a central aspect
of Cha’s written and visual work. She stays at the point-zero of enunciation, describing
the conditions of speech for those who live in translation, into a different language that
was imposed on them by colonialism, immigration or both. Cha uses fragments of
different languages, thus leaving open the wound and showing the harshness of a
passage between extremely different languages, and lived places such as Korea, the
United States or France. Lawrence Rinder argues that Cha positions her voice in a
space of otherness vis à vis each language, and uses English unnaturally, as an acquired
and ‘manipulable’ medium.16
The reader is left hanging and drawn to her. Trinh T. Minh-ha describes wonderfully
her sensations in front of Cha’s installations “as if suspended, transported mid-flight by
a feeling of both undefined loss and utter lightness”17
.
The sense of loss, disorientation and lightness also characterizes DICTEE, the most
widely known book written by Cha. At the very beginning of the introductory part of
the text, Theresa Hak Kyung immediately takes us to the trauma of being forcefully
15
Ibid., 106 . 16
Lawrence Rinder, "Korea: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha" in The Dramaturgy of Style: Voice in Short
Fiction (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986).
identified, as when the immigrants must answer to the impossible question: “Who are
you?”:
From a Far
What nationality
or kindred and relation
what blood relation
what ancestry
what race generation
what house clan tribe stock strain
what breed sect gender denomination caste
what stray ejection misplaced
Tertium Quid neither one thing nor the other
Tombe de nues de naturalized
what transplant to dispel upon.18
The poem enacts a repeated interrogation; a questioning of origins, the brutal
necessity to define oneself univocally and clearly (by blood, tribe, caste, gender).
Towards the end, questions shift towards an undefinable being — out of place
(misplaced), ejected (stray ejection), a denaturalized third element (tertium quid), a
transplant that is not reducible to a clearly defined identity. Gradually the poem’s lines
become longer in order to accommodate otherness. Another short-circuiting changes
any far place (afar) into a specific geographic place of origin “a Far”.
The Loss of Names and Memories
In every work by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha one can find a reference to exile and
obliviousness, which involves the loss of names and languages. The stranger is asked to
tell who s/he is — a violent imposition which demands an answer. Such answer can
only reduce the complexity of the subject to a univocal, short utterance: a name. This
name may have been translated so many times that it has become something else,
17
Trinh T. Minh-ha, The Dream of the Audience 2001, 33.
eliding some parts of the memory, or accepting more external attributes to attach to
one’s self. Migration and name loss are recurrent themes of Asian and other non-
European diasporas. For instance, Chinese characters or Arabic must be recomposed
into a different set of symbols. The composition of a name in Asian characters is
untranslatable in English, and this absence in language marks a deep loss for
immigrants.
Cha’s work takes us to the first moment when this name loss takes place. At the
border-crossing point, or at the end of the journey, the first question asked is “Who are
you?” Declaring one’s origin coincides with one’s name loss.
The name and the act of naming recur in many of Cha’s writings. In the edited
volume of poetry Hotel, Cha’s contribution is inspired both in form and content by the
notion of immigration. The immigration form becomes a sign of exile. Filling the form
(simultaneously acknowledging what is left in blank) implies a sudden questioning of
the entirety of one’s life, scrutinized in its most familiar aspects. Our name, so close to
us, is questioned, rendered uncertain, mispronounced, re-written, translated and
sometimes erased. The process of being renamed in a printed form and in a foreign
language is the first loss experienced by the immigrant. Using this everyday form of
questioning as material for a poetry book gives the reader, as Trinh stated, that feeling
of “undefined loss and utter lightness”:
NAME - NOM
SEX- SEXE
BIRTHPLACE – LIEU DE NASSANCE
BIRTHDATE- DATE DE NAISSANCE
WIFE/HUSBAND – EPOUSE/ EPOUX
X X X
MINORS- ENFANT MINEURS
X X X
ISSUE DATE- DATE DE DELIVRANCE
EXPIRES ON – EXPIRE LE
BEFORE NAME
NO NAME
NONE OTHER
NONE OTHER THAN GIVEN
18
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, DICTEE (Berkeley: Third Woman Press, 1982), 20.
LAST ABSENT FIRST
NAME
WITHOUT NAME
A NO NAME
NO NAME
BETWEEN NAME
NAMED. 19
Each line of the poem reminds the reader of how it feels to fill in such a form, and to fit
within strictly defined categories (last name, absent, given name, first name, other,
none). Cha ends her poem with two lines, “between name” and “named”. These words
call attention to what is left of the subject in the spaces between transcription and
translation. The very last word, a lonely past tense named, hints at the subjection to the
process of being named in a forced act of definition — that is a closure and flattening of
a person into one word.
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha comes back in DICTEE (her monographic, experimental
book published in 1982) to the theme of naming and renaming, this time in relation to
the forced renaming of Koreans by the Japanese occupying army. In the Thirties,
Koreans had to change their names to adapt them to the Japanese alphabet. This process
of translation is a recurrent colonialist policy, and is alluded to by Cha in all its brutality
even though she does not use narrative or historical documents. The possibility that an
entire people or nation can be renamed for political reasons is one of the aspects of
colonization that is most acutely alienating:
Some door some night, some window lit some train some
city some nation some peoples
Re Named
utterly by chance by luck by hazard otherwise.
any door any night any window lit any train any city
any nation any peoples some name any name to a
given name.20
19
Ibid., 154. 20
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, "Exilée Temps Morts," in Hotel, Collection of Written
Works by Visual Artists in R. Williams, ed. (New York: Tanam Press,1980),155.
These few lines show the violence of colonization in its impact on everyday life.
They portray an entire people, moved and renamed, scattered and randomly cast on a
diasporic journey. This poem could describe the experience of all colonized nations,
from African countries whose borders were randomly drawn by European generals on
maps, to the Americas, when they were first “discovered” and appropriated by the
Spanish and Portuguese, and were often later renamed by the English and other
colonialist powers. Memories, names of places and peoples become scattered,
suppressed, and amputated. In this poem Cha uses a form of film montage to convey the
discontinuities of memories, and the casual nature of the subconscious. At the end of
another fragmented poetic piece, Temp Mort, Cha connects visuality and memory.
Memory less image less
Scratches rising to bare surface
Incisions to lift incisions to heal.21
Memory here is like a scratched surface, with scars and small rough pieces resisting
the smooth act of forgetting, or the flat and naked passing of time — that dead time
(temp mort) of immigration. Pieces of the past interrupt any smooth linear trajectory
(“scratches rising to bare surface”). This image of memory as a scratched surface is also
evoked in the beginning of the book DICTEE.
Unlike most books, the first even page of DICTEE does not have the copyright
information. It is a black page with a graffiti picture in the middle — a scratched surface
made of stone or plaster. Although the book does not expressly explain what or where
this graffiti picture is, many would be able to recognize it as a historical document of
forced Korean labor in Japan.
Such small traces against the black undistinguished oblivion of memory are
scratches. They are small but deep cuts suggesting strong emotions in a historical
context. In the cut, there is a trace of the unnamed, the displaced people whose names
do not make history. Those names, eroded by time, remain as a persistent trace in the
graffiti. Such persistence shows not only the desperation of the Korean workers, but it
also suggests that there may be a healing function in an opened space between the past
and the future.
21
Ibid., 185.
Memories are a thread running through the whole book. They are fragmented, but
intense moments can be connected across different subjective stories, legends, myths,
hagiographies, diaries and historical references. In DICTEE memory functions visually,
and the process of transforming visual language into a written one is painful, violent and
ultimately impossible. Remembering, between images and words, across languages, is
full of uncertainties, gaps, spaces and closures. For Cha autobiography is impossible,
since the narrating subject is lost in a multiplicity of voices diluted in space and time.
The final notes of DICTEE partially clarify for the reader that parts of the book refer to
the autobiography of St. Thérèse of Lisieux and to the diaries of Theresa Hak Kyung
Cha’s mother. Her writings remind us of an experimental film script, using montage and
shifting languages and making visible the usually hidden conventions of style. In each
story, voice and language are mixed and eroded to the point that only traces of
memories are left, and they are marked by gender.
DICTEE follows an uneven rhythm punctuated by breaks and peaks of intensity. At
times different voices are presented in an opaque interrelation, where it is not clear
whether they belong to the same story or subject. Photos and illustrations are not
commented on in the text, nor are they strictly related to it. Presented as a simple
exercise of repetition, DICTEE develops a complex structure for relaying the voices and
stories of mothers, daughters, muses, wives, and exiles. The title DICTEE probably
refers to the idea of dictation, a purely repetitive form of writing, and a classic
educational tool to impose discipline on the student, leaving her no space for creativity.
The goal is to reproduce exact sounds and words on paper, and that is precisely what
Cha cannot do as an exile or immigrant, living as she does in a multilingual space and in
multiple memory sites.
To read DICTEE is to enter an uncomfortable place, leaving expectations of genres
and structure behind. The need of a specific form of analysis is immediately frustrated
by DICTEE. The whole text appears unfinished; at times too abstract and at other times
too personal, with its calligraphy, handwritten letters and worn-out photos. The
fascination with DICTEE begins with a second or third look, once the viewpoint of the
literary critic is abandoned and the reader is ensnared to the wild rhythm of shifts and
pauses among images, words, calligraphy and film scripts. Cha seeks to question the
inherent structures of language usually taken for granted, and their power over the
speaking subject. By pointing at what is usually left out, Cha seeks a poetic space of
disorientation and simultaneity of forms. She wrote about her own vision:
My video, my film and performance works are … explorations of language structures
inherent in written and spoken material, photographic and filmic images – the creation
of new relationships and meanings in the simultaneity of these forms. 22
The second section of DICTEE is dedicated to Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, and it
opens with a photo of a Korean woman, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s mother. The
subsequent writings are an elaboration of the diaries of the artist’s mother. They are re-
written by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, using the first person voice as if she were her
mother. The reader is quickly lost in the passages of this subjective narration. The
female voices are mixed with historical facts and myths, political rebels with Christian
martyrs and saints. Against the backdrop of Japanese invasion, the personal stories of
migration shaping Cha’s family are reconnected to historical narrations.
Dear Mother,
4. 19. four nineteen, April 19th, eighteen years later. Nothing has changed. I speak in
another tongue now, a second tongue a foreign tongue. All this time we have been
away. But nothing has changed. A stand still.
It is not 6.25. six twenty five. June 25th 1950. Not today. Not this day. There are no
bombs as you had described them. They do not fall.
[excerpt from mother’s diary]
… You knew it would not be in vain. The thirty six years of exile. Thirty six years
multiplied by three hundred and sixty five days. The one day your country would be
your own. This day did finally come. The Japanese were defeated in the world war and
were making their descent back to their country. As soon as you heard you followed
South, you carried not a single piece, not a photograph, nothing to evoke your memory.
From another epic, another history. From the missing narrative. From the multitude of
narratives. Missing. From the chronicles. For another telling for other recitations.
Our destination is fixed on perpetual motion of search. Fixed in its perpetual exile, Here
at my return in eighteen years, the war has not ended …. We are severed in Two by an
abstract enemy an invisible enemy under the title of liberators who have conveniently
named the severance Civil War. Cold War. Stalemate. 23
22
Cha quoted in Lewallen, ed. The Dream, 9. 23
Cha, Dictee, 80-81.
The writing shifts from a personal narration to a letter, and then to an imagined
dialogue with her mother (you). Different female voices compose a story of exile, with
unfinished wars and conflict, by pointing to two different moments of return: Cha’s first
return to Korea and her mother’s first return after being a refugee. Both women were
moved by a colonial order and both stories are outside of an official history— they are
part of a missing narrative. Memory and exile appear again in this passage, in
fragments and repetitions. The story of Cha’s immigration after the Korean War and the
partition connects with the story of her mother. Both are tied to the story of a young
woman, Yu Guan Soon, an anti-Japanese resister who died in 1920 at age 17.24
DICTEE touches upon the mother/daughter relationship in multiple ways. It is a
complex shifting of voices, all part of a common female subconscious, where people,
places, languages, and personal memories can dialogue and be recognized immediately.
The stories of women create another history, outside of the official history and its
archives. The continuity among women’s stories and suffering is rendered by
continuous shifts between the first, second and third person, mixing the voices of a
mother, a daughter, and a third woman.
Mother becomes more and more expansive for she is at once mother, her mother, her
daughter, and the latter’s same-others. Looking through the camera at Her, her sorrow and
her endurance, is looking at a whole generation of Asian women, in their relation to silence
and language. In dealing with the intimate and the autobiographical Cha does not need to
claim the insider’s position of truth ….
Cha looks at her mother/herself from the outside – the way a camera gazes at its subject. 25
Trinh T. Minh-ha met Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in the seventies, and she writes about it
in an essay titled White Spring. As a film-maker, Trinh T. Minh-ha is touched by Cha’s
gift for creating an “opaque transparency” verbally and visually.26
She remarks that
Cha’s writing is never concerned with a defined, clear, transparent object. Her attention
is on passages, traces and ruins of a speaking subject:
Seen and void. Void of view.
Inside outside. As if never.
Seen for the first time
It was, it was the past.
24
Ibid., 25. 25
Trinh in Lewallen, 126. 26
Ibid.,133.
One is deceived
One was deceived of the view
Outside inside stain glass. Opaque. 27
Much of Cha’s poetics is permeated by the interest in opacity and vision, in the
proximity to the ruin, the empty space, the past and a kind of “uneven glass” that allows
contact between the inside and the outside, the matter in-between two elements (silence
and speech, light and darkness on the film screen, wake and dreamtime). She is
concerned with the absence and presence of the female other. There is a closeness
between the two artists, noy just because they both are part of a post-war East-Asian
diaspora; but rather in the way in which they experiment with video and writing; and
both deconstruct their position in multiple languages. Trinh T. Minh-ha conveys her re-
cognition of Cha in White Spring:
It’s a dream, one says waking up in silence, and now? One wonders whether one has
just dreamt a silence or whether silence is the sound of the dream. The entire room
brims with incandescent silence. .… Between reverie and resistance lies a familiar
face: that of the Absent – the artist-poet who assumes the ancient role of both a medium
and a magnetizer. To her falls the magical task of resurrecting voices and looks by
letting shadows appear and speak in her folds. The maker-recipient is bound to dream in
one and in multiplicity … She makes her appearance here as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha,
and she is many. I recognize her tone, the cuts, the wait, the twilight – halfway between
night unearthing and day re-veiling28
. The two lights (not one, not two either) on which
reason and analysis have nothing to say. I recognized that voice – plural and utterly
singular. A blind voice walking barefoot into the hearth of (our) shadows. Through it, I
hear, within a closer range of resonance, the voices of WoMen:29 mothers and
foremothers of Korea, the historical voices of resistance.30
As Trinh T. Minh-ha describes Cha’s installation in a piece called A Ble Wail, she
comments on Cha’s positioning an absent poet, standing between light and dark,
capable of evoking many different voices, languages, and media. She emphasizes Cha’s
twilight sensibility with her use of veils and images of shadows, describing her voice as
blind and multiple (in referring to another performance called Voix-Aveugle). Trinh is
27
Cha, Dictee, 126.
29
The upper case in the word WoMen, can be interpreted as a reference to Helene Cixous’s theories and
practices of writing across boundaries (1997). 30
Trinh, The Dream, 2001, 34.
consciousof the limits of commenting on Cha’s work as “twilight, on which reason and
analysis have nothing to say”. 31
The silences and the shadows have multiple female voices, which refuse to choose
between the clearly marked historical past and the present, between the singular and the
plural, or the colonizer and the colonized. In her closeness to the third space, Trinh T.
Minh-ha appreciates Cha’s capability of seeing “the many twos in the twofold”: 32
The question constantly raised in our times concerns another kind of twoness. .... There
are, as life dictates, many twos; each equipped with their sets of intervals, recesses and
pauses. Many and one between(s). The third term, as I would call it, by which the
creative potential of a new relationship is kept alive, between strategic nationalism and
transnational political alliance. 33
An open conclusion
In the previous examples I illustrated how both Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Trinh
T. Minh-ha respond and refused to be placed in the colonial desire for the Asian other in
the art world. Trinh T. Minh-ha worked for years at the threshold of a post-colonial
visuality. Her work is a critical de-centering of realism, and a deconstruction of ethical
and epistemological premises of the Western colonial canon of documenting and
studying “other” cultures. Both artists exemplify an artistic tension towards a third
political and cultural space, creating a disorienting poetic experience for the Western
educated audience, with clear expectations. Both of them consciously avoid univocality,
or the privileging of one dominant element. Paying attention to the constant passage
between the inside and the outside, their visuality oscillates in a border zone. Their eye
is at the point of passage, in the shadow, between the female subject and history, the
visible and the unheard, and between the real and the imaginary.
These artists’ work resonates with the postcolonial theories proposed by Homi
Bhabha and Stuart Hall, specifically with the ideas of hybridity, in–between-ness and
third space. The works of both Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Trinh T. Minh-ha dislocate
many binaries and stable forms, such as centers and peripheries, male and female,
31
Ibid., 2001, 34. 32
Trinh quotes Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s poem "Exilée Temps Morts”, 1980, 157. 33
Trinh, The Dream, 2001, 40.
written and oral. They themselves live in a constant passage, a translation, or migration
across identities and poetic languages. They leave traces, between the oral and the
written, leaving spaces open rather than consolidating identities (female, Asian or
artistic), yet they express the manifold colonial experiences of translation and
immigration across very different places and languages (Korean and Vietnamese as
mother tongues, translated into both French and English). Such processes of multiple
translations have been called “border writing” by Chicana critic Gloria Anzaldua34
, as
this “border writing” reconfigures the sense of a stable identity and a fixed language,
allowing the emergence of intervals, breaks and fragments.
The poetics reflections moving Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Trinh T. Minh-ha’s
work speak of multiple cultural, historical and biographical ruptures. Their body of
writings, and their bodies in the process of writing become also a process of dispersing
and rarefying the collective subject of the ‘immigrant woman’, who is at the same time
present and absent on the page.
The voices crossing their work are never clearly defined and marked by identity.
Their works smudges clear borders, moving in the vicinity of a diasporic identity or a
‘female form of writing’ (the écriture feminine), without representing it: they eschew
the burden of representing Asia, or Asian women in general, as symbols or official
history of a nation or a people. Their work is located in a third space, neither written
nor simply visual, multi-lingual. It is a third poetic space where images do not complete
or transcend the act of writing, but rather reveal its limits, while expressing an otherness
towards both languages. They both embrace a “third” cultural politics, an hybrid poetics
capable of disorienting Anglophone readers and their pre-existing assumptions on
where and how “the other” should speak. Their work is situated at the edges, which is
not where something stops but, on the contrary, where something begins.
34
Gloria Anzaldua, Border Lands/La Frontera : The New Mestiza, (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Press,
1987).
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