Radio Chthulucene 87.9 FM

I feel like Dictée is somewhat about a failure of language. About trying to use language to recover, repeatedly. Recover another language, memory, to construct a what if. I read Mary-Kim Arnold’s Litany for the Long Moment last year, and I remember a diagram in that book showing how the characters used to construct sound and meaning in Korean are the vague shape the tongue is supposed to make in the mouth to pronounce the sound. Here’s a random diagram I found on Google Images:

The symbols that make up Hangul also represent a physical manipulation of the mouth. A very physical language. I think about the ways Theresa Hak Kyung Cha reaches into memories of her mother, imagining her mother’s life in Manchuria. The way she embodies her mother through language, almost physically. Language as a sort of physical muscle memory that has passed to Cha via genetics, flesh, her mother. The mouth, conditioned to English, as physically displaced or unable to place itself “correctly” into the other language. 

I remember being in speech therapy. I was in speech therapy from Kindergarten to the end of Sixth grade. We got a new teacher one year and my first lesson with her I couldn’t pronounce the words “girl” or “world” or “whirl.” Without asking, she used her hands to shape my face, correct the position of my jaw and lips. I still could not pronounce the words how she wanted me to pronounce them. I started crying. 

She got fired for that. After the first day. Sometimes I feel bad she got fired. Like I got her fired.

I think about the end of Dictée, how it ends with an image. And the images threaded throughout. Especially the scans of calligraphy and handwriting, which seem to me very potent examples of the physical act of languaging, writing, speaking. The characters and letters of language bridging the gap between sound and image, being a meaningful representation of both. And for Hangul, the written language being a representation of a movement in the body. Dictation and writing then alter how we operate in the world, how one might move their body or how we embody or fail to embody identities tied to language.