Cha and Reyes: Yearning and Reflection

Both Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and Kimberly Reyes’ works, Dictée and Vanishing Point, respectively, trace along the scattered lines that the experience of a woman of color promises. Although these works vary in execution and focus, both poets incorporate a profound element of “haunting” that lingers after reading.

Much of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée is impressed upon by the reality of Japanese occupation and the Korean War. Upon opening the book, an image of a stone carving reads in Korean, “Mother, I miss you, I’m hungry, I want to go home to my native place.” This carving is one of the most profound examples of haunting as it gauges the brutality superimposed onto the Korean people during Japanese occupation. The ethos dominating this image prepares the striking theme of yearning for “Korean history, language, and cultural identity, which were all outlawed” that pervades Cha’s writing (Kim, 9). Yearning manifests in Cha’s decision to assume the positions and perspectives of Guan Soon–a seventeen-year-old revolutionary martyred in pursuit of her country’s freedom–and her mother, who was expelled to Manchuria. Both perspectives pine for liberation, for refuge.

While reading, it becomes clear that the notion of “yearning” is, in itself, a conjuration of haunting. For Soon and Cha’s mother, the memory of Korea and its people, language, and culture gnaws away at their livelihoods. How, in being barred from speaking her mother tongue, could her mother be content (Cha, 45)? How, in acknowledging her nation’s imprisonment, could Soon not act (Cha, 37)?

Dictée champions its poignant and evocative nature by breathing life into the martyr’s point of view. Guan Soon, Ahn Joong Kun, her own brother…Cha speaks to the plight of Korean longing for freedom by erecting multiple examples of people who yearned for their memories of Korea and its people, language, and culture so much that they thrusted their lives forward. A more explicit example of Cha’s reverence for the martyr is evidenced by her understanding of “the eternity of one act” and the sacrifice of “one existence…for the history of one nation…of one people” (Cha, 37).

“There is no surrendering you are chosen to fail to be martyred to shed blood to be set an example one who has defied one who has chosen to defy and was to be set an example to be martyred an animal useless betrayer to the cause to the welfare to peace to harmony to progress.” (Cha, 83)

While in the vein of martyrdom, another keystone moment of Cha’s work was when she detailed her brother’s murder during a student demonstration. Following her brother’s death, Cha recalls that “it rained for several days.” Still, after multiple days of rain, “the stone pavement stained where [he] fell remained dark” (Cha, 85). This imagery strongly communicates not only the indelibility of loss, but also of sacrifice.

Although Kimberly Reyes doesn’t primarily use Vanishing Point to address the horrors and bloodthirst of war and occupation, Reyes does impress the reality of misogynoir into her work, along with how the current condition aligns with centuries of slavery and subjugation. One of the most striking examples of “haunting” in this work is her poem “We’re Going to Save Us” and the succeeding FBI sketches. In “We’re Going to Save Us,” Reyes contends that, because of a shared indifference and apathy towards Black and Indigenous Women of Color (BIWOC) by the world, Black and Indigenous women aren’t listened to or advocated for–even in death. A piece of evidence from The New York Times verifies this claim, stating that “African-American, Native American and Alaska Native women die of pregnancy-related causes at a rate about three times higher than those of white women” (Reyes, 33). Reyes provides another haunting facet of evidence by including a quote and sketches by Samuel Little, America’s most prolific serial killer. “We’re Going to Save Us” opens with Little’s purport that “God put [him] on Earth to do what [he] did” because “He made [him],” and ends with a few of the murderer’s sketches of his victims (Reyes, 32-35). With this, Reyes silently concludes that, because the majority of Little’s victims were black women, he was able to evade justice for nearly 40 years. Samuel Little ultimately claimed the lives of 93 women between the years 1970 and 2005.

Reyes holds true to Vanishing Point’s thought-provoking DNA with poem “An é Éireannach ata ionat?” (“Are you Irish?”) The opening quote, from Michael W Twitty, sort of answers the title by asserting that “[his] family, like most black American families, has not one but several white ancestors–men who took advantage of their access to young enslaved women” (Reyes, 83). “An é Éireannach ata ionat?” brings attention to Reyes’ Irish ancestry while also speaking to the ubiquity of rape and torture enslaved Africans were subjected to for centuries that made her Irish ancestry possible. Her description of slavery as “pride forcibly wrung out,” of “chains & labor laundries,” and of “generations of premature goodbyes” (Reyes, 83-84) echoes June Jordan in her essay, “The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetry in America.” In Jordan’s essay, she writes of slave women’s standing as “legally spread legs for rape by the master/the master’s son/the master’s overseer/the master’s visiting nephew: to be nothing human nothing family nothing from nowhere nothing that screams nothing that weeps nothing that dreams nothing that keeps anything/anyone deep in [their] heart” (Jordan, 1). Both poets grasp the violence guaranteed for black women during slavery and forge an understanding of how that violence carried over into the experience for black women now.

Although Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictée and Kimberly Reyes’ Vanishing Point diverge in execution and focus, both poets incorporate a profound element of “haunting” that lingers after discussing the violence, yearning, and other harsh realities women of color endure.