Dictee

In these chapters, Cha retells the myth of Demeter and Persephone through her own lens, injecting concepts of exile, displacement, patriarchal oppression, and critiques of power systems. She also injects post-modernist and modernist literary elements, such as the Laura Claxton letters and the scenes from the theater. The style and tone shift dramatically throughout these chapters, with Cha switching between several forms: poetry, prose-poetry, and the epistolary form.

In the traditional myth of Demeter and Persephone, Hades, god of the underworld, sees Persephone and is enchanted by her beauty. Zeus and Hades hatch a plan for Hades to capture Persephone: They place a beautiful narcissus flower, and when Persephone grabs the flower from the ground, the earth crumbles and Hades pulls her into the underworld. Demeter searches the earth for her beloved daughter but cannot find her. Demeter, the goddess of the harvest, does not tend to the earth, and famine and starvation plague the world as there is no longer any food to eat. Zeus sends Hermes to bring Persephone back to her mother. Hades gives Persephone pomegranate seeds, which bind her to return to him, as pomegranate seeds symbolize marriage as eternal, and eating in the underworld means that one must return there. After negotiations between Zeus and Demeter, it is decided that Persephone will be with her mother for six months (spring and summer) and then return to the underworld for another six months (fall and winter). Demeter wins a partial victory and Persephone returns to her, beginning the Eleusinian mysteries, symbolizing the power of life over death.

In “Elitere Lyric Poetry,” Cha was inspired by Homer’s “Hymn to Demeter” from Homeric Hymns. Demeter and Persephone serve as mythological symbols of the separation of the seasons and the separation of the earth from the underworld. The concept of migration is important, as Persephone is allowed to migrate between the underworld and the earth only due to her mother’s power over earth. Cha focuses on Demeter’s experience of loss not in a stagnant melancholy but through the creative forces that Demeter utilized, which allowed her daughter to return to her for half of the year and gave rise to the Eleusinian mysteries. Rather than depicting Demeter as mourning, Cha envisions Demeter as an active agent reshaping the world around her desires by refusing to accept the terms of the contractual marriage between Persephone and Hades. Demeter was the only god to rebel against Zeus and receive partial appeal because of her power over the earth’s nourishment. In this sense, Demeter is archetypically matriarchal and feminist, and the relationship between Demeter and Persephone is an archetypical image of the everlasting connection between mothers and daughters, which Cha conceives of more broadly as the connection between all women. Cha presents Demeter as a rebellious and courageous figure, similar to the other heroic women that she has described in earlier chapters, and Persephone is not a martyr or victim: They both play a part in the recovery of self and soul that Cha depicts in her poems.

Cha describes the “dead time” (123), meaning the time of mourning in the fall and winter when Demeter and Persephone are separated and the land turns cold and frozen. Cha shifts toward the idea of secrecy and having no voice: “voce velata veiled voice under breath murmuration / render mute strike dumb voiceless tongueless” (127). This introduces the concept of memory and its relationship to language. The poem takes on the stammering style of the “Diseuse” chapter, but the poet continues on: “Resurrect it all over again / bit by bit” (129). The word play of “diseuse” and “disuse,” as in language that has gone unused, and the appeal to “let the […] mother who waits nine days and nine nights to be found” (133) break the spell of dead time and move the world forward toward the spring. Cha connects the dead language to the lost daughter who must rediscover her mother. This occurs as the layers of memory and history are removed and excavated to reach the emotional core of the Eleusinian mystery.

When Demeter brings her daughter back from the land of the dead to that of the living, their reunion makes the world whole again. Cha compares this ritual to the act of speaking, as the ritual contains both words and acts. As language transforms from brokenness to wholeness, the individual becomes whole. For Cha, the wound of being alienated from one’s family, culture, language, or nation is the source of new ways of envisioning the world and the creation of myths. The creative energy does not derive solely from pain but from the will to transcend the suffering and beautify it through the generation of the new narrative.

In terms of poetry techniques, Cha uses different styles in the poems to suggest shifts in tone. The first two poems, “Aller/Retour” (Go/Return) and “Aller” (Go) use more line breaks and shorter lines in a form that is more closely associated with traditional lyric poetry. “Retour,” or “return,” utilizes the entire space of the page in a more prose-poetic format. In addition, Cha switches between English and French. The French portion of “Aller/Retour” (Lines 1-14 of Page 125) is translated into English. The poem repeats the French portion in English on Pages 125-126. In this passage, the difference between being seen and seeing others is described, and the material or medium through which one sees others or is seen by others plays a huge part in how the object or subject is seen. Using images of various materials and descriptions of their opacity and reflectiveness, Cha is calling attention to the many ways stories are told, including via film, visual art, photography, poetry, prose, and myth. Cha is providing justification for her collage-like method of combining various media in book form. 

Cha also includes images and letters throughout these two chapters that interrupt the focus on the myth, including a photo of protestors that introduces the chapter “Elitere Lyric Poetry” on Page 122 and an image of a handprint in stone that closes the chapter on Page 134. The photo of the protestors is from the 1919 Korean Independence Movement demonstration. During this event, several hundred students were attacked by police for protesting against undemocratic elections. Cha includes this photo to connect the mythological and personal with the political, comparing the separation of Korean people during the Japanese occupation with the separation of a mother from her child.

The disruption of one’s way of life through political forces is compared to the mythological forces of the gods who have separated the mother Demeter and the daughter Persephone. The sense of belonging in one’s homeland has been destroyed, and the desire for return to home, or the “motherland,” is symbolized in the myth of Demeter and Persephone. The poem states, “Let the one who is diseuse again sit upon the stone nine days and nine nights. Thus. Making stand again, Eleusis.” (130). Demeter is the “diseuse,” or the one who speaks the words that bring about her daughter’s return from the underworld. However, Persephone is also the “diseuse,” as she is the daughter who “restore[s] spring with her each appearance from beneath the earth” (133). The stone that plays a part in the rite that Demeter performs is symbolized in the image in which a handprint has been imprinted on rock.

In the “Thalia Comedy” chapter, Cha depicts the situation of Persephone as she prepares to wed and lose her virginity to Hades. The style is no longer lyrical and poetic, returning to the stammering staccato of the earlier chapters. Written language emerges as another alternative to speech, with the idea that written language endures and arrests time captured in Cha’s statement that “if she were able to write she could continue to live” (141). Persephone in the underworld longs to keep the memory of her mother alive despite their separation, just as Cha wishes to also.

Cha places the two Laura Claxton letters at a pivotal moment in the book, interrupting the narrative flow with information that appears unrelated to anything else in the chapter or book. Laura Claxton is in her own universe of significance, but Claxton’s world is infused with the same dynamics of loss and doubling. Cha represents this through the form and content of the two letters.

The first letter, which is typewritten, implies mystery and a dead-end: Mr. Reardon’s whereabouts are unknown to both parties, and all that they can do is await further information. This letter focuses on Claxton’s relationship to the missing man, however, the tone is formal and distant. There is no sense of urgency or desperation in the separation between Claxton and Mr. Reardon, and the nature of their relationship is not placed within any context.

The second letter, which is handwritten, is personal and focuses on Claxton’s sister, who is experiencing a mental health crisis. Though the letter’s tone is not necessarily warm, there is a sense of urgency and personal investment in the relationship between Claxton and her sister. The letter writer, who signs off simply as an anonymous “friend,” urges Claxton to write to her sister because the letters will “cheer her up” (148). The letters exist within a different social and historical context, but they prioritize the relationships between women.