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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