Dictee

“The delivery. She takes it. Slow. The invoking. All the time now. All the time there is. Always. And all times. The pause. Uttering. Hers now. Hers bare. The utter.”

The unnamed narrator struggles to speak. She is the “diseuse,” or a professional reciter, who guides the reader. By invoking, Cha is suggesting that this speaker who struggles with language is the one who invokes the book’s nine muses. Cha ironically subverts the notion of a diseuse via her ineloquent speaker.

“First Friday. One hour before mass. Mass every First Friday. Dictée first. Every Friday. Before mass. Dictée before. Back in the study hall. It is time. Snaps once. One step right from the desk. Single file. Snaps twice. Follow single line. Move all the way to the right hand side of the wall. Single file.”

The unnamed narrator is a young girl in Catholic school. Cha captures the authoritative and disciplined environment of the school and its dehumanizing effect on the narrator via clipped sentences, repetition, and no references to the people. “Dictée first” refers to the French recitation exercises that tested a student’s mastery of the language. Cha shows how religion, formal education, and language are representations of power and hierarchy.

“Into Their tongue, the counterscript, my confession in Theirs. Into Theirs. To scribe to make hear the words, to make sound the words, the words, the words, the words made flesh.”

Cha connects the body to the spoken word. By referring to the “word,” meaning the word of the religious text (frequently the Bible is called “the word of God”), Cha emphasizes that the narrator’s words are not yet her own, as they are simply repetitions of what she has been taught.