Hidden Words

Translated by Sophie Seita

Dictee explores the same obsessions and methods that charac­terize Cha’s mail art: fragmentary, translingual language pointing to the failure of translation; documentary material questioning the possibility of singular memory; conversations that straddle multiple artistic mediums. In both the stamp and the book, Cha makes traceable what it means to be someone who has a language that is not “the right one,” not their own, not original or real—a language that exists only on a fantasized, distant, handmade stamp. A stamp perhaps like: home. Like: nation. Like: mother tongue.

When we use the term mother tongue, which language are we referring to? Just as the stamped image exists in an in-between realm, adrift and unbelonging, Dictee also demonstrates the failure to construct possible identifications through the actual language of the mother. Cha’s own mother, Cha Hyung Soon, grew up as a refugee in Manchuria, moving between the language of exile (Chinese), that of occupation (Japanese), and that of her ancestral country (Korean). For Cha, the search for heritage, for the place of the mother and her language, is not a search for a state of mono­lingual belonging. Rather: her rebellious longing is itself a form of latent asylum, a place unto itself.

From the very beginning, I knew that language was not to be found at home. Language was never in when I called. She wrote me joyously clumsy dispatches. One such note said Kochanie, the Polish word for darling. Then Gift, the German word for poison. Then the English word irritated, which doesn’t mean German irri­tiert (confused)—oh, false friends. These dispatches carried stamps in which I was multiply mirrored and hidden, a kind of redoubling that had to do with the invisible movement from Ost to Post-. Or with the fact that my inherited language was also the language of the Stasi, the East German secret police. Or with the fact that it was the language that my grandmother taught to Polish children as a young teacher in Silesia.

One could say that Cha’s failed translations and broken lan­guages have an emancipatory function. Her work shows that family ties lie dormant in the hidden word, away from the lan­guage of inscription and registration. It shows that, in our bro­ken, repetitive time, people can change identities, mothers become nations, nations become maids, and daughters become ferries. It shows that writing that radically interrogates the conditions of our linguistic and subjective becoming can make possible new, alternative, and more just forms of collective imagination. We take dictation, which we translate into new languages, words that we will become—words for others to receive.

Sophie Seita is a London-based artist, writer, and researcher whose work explores text in its various translations into book objects, performances, videos, or other languages and embodiments. More information on her performances, publications, and collaborations can be found at www.sophieseita.com.