Mayukh Sen Contemplates Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s 'Radical Afterlives'

At The Nation, Mayukh Sen writes about the artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and her influence on writers like Cathy Park Hong and Elaine Castillo. In Sen's words, Cha "imagined a form of expression that was situated along the uncomfortable fault lines between modes of art." More: 

Elaine Castillo, a Filipinx American and the author of the acclaimed novel America Is Not the Heart (2018), first came to Cha’s work in her mid-20s through Exilée / Temps Morts: Selected Works (2009), a posthumously published assortment of Cha’s poems, journal entries, and film stills. “At its heart are the subjects that formed so much of Dictée, too,” Castillo said of the book in an e-mail. “Historical and familial trauma, her ambivalence around speech and writing, her razor-sharp awareness of the limitations of language, the things that can’t be put into words, the things that exceed their names.”

In early 2011, Castillo was part of a guerrilla filmmaking crew that called itself the Digital Desperados, composed entirely of women of color. Though her primary medium is the written word, she realized that she didn’t have to limit herself to novels or essays; she could make essay films as Cha did. “Cha’s work showed me how you could be that kind of artist,” Castillo said. “It was a kind of blueprint for how to expand the shapes that ‘writing’ could take.”

Cha’s writing cast a similar spell over Cathy Park Hong. She first encountered Dictée in 1996 as a sophomore at Oberlin studying under the poet Myung Mi Kim, who taught the book alongside the poems of William Carlos Williams. Cha’s work reached out to Hong directly because of its difficulty.

“It wasn’t just about formal innovation for her,” Hong said. “It was like using formal innovation to get at what was silenced, what hasn’t been written about. She was using formal innovation as a way to kind of write about historical atrocities that have happened in Korea.”

Read more at The Nation.