Minor Feelings + Dictee
I love logic, facts, clear arguments. But when you’re exploring something that doesn’t fit in neat and tidy categories — such as, say, a person or an identity — simple and straightforward doesn’t necessarily work.
It’s the “I want to tell you about what it’s like to be me from both a personal and wider cultural perspective” that often requires something more. More complex, more challenging, possibly more unsettling.
In January I read about Theresa Hak Kyung Cha in a NYT “Overlooked” column, dedicated to “remarkable people” whose deaths went unreported by the paper. Cha wrote a book called Dictee, published in 1982 right before she was raped and murdered in NYC. She was young (31), which I suppose made me extra alert for some reason. And Dictee swirls around ideas of homeland and identity, borrowing imagery and words and inspiration from her mother, Joan of Arc, the Korean freedom fighter Yu Gwan-sun (subject of another “Overlooked” column), and more. I wanted to read it.
My library copy was finally ready. I read it once. And then I revisited that NYT piece and realized that Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, was quoted. That book sat on my shelf, so I read that too. Hong devotes an entire chapter to Cha and her investigation of the life and death of this artist and writer. This is the one part of the book where Hong, a poet, “[finds] that formal experimentation was getting in the way of documenting facts.”
But overall the majority of Minor Feelings is not “just the facts.” Hong presents stories of her own upbringing, relays moments from others’ lives to illustrate, dives into the comedy of Richard Pryor (this is where the book’s title comes from), and so on. They’re non-chronological facts layered with response, feeling, and history.
I read Dictee again, with Hong’s book in mind. Dictee is often classified as poetry and it’s not really the type of book you sit and leisurely read. With its photos, sentence fragments, non-translated bits in French and Korean, it’s multimedia incarnate.
Read these books in tandem. It’s often when one bends and plays with structure that things become more clear, more vivid.
originally published on instagram