(Re)membering Trauma: Joy Harjo’s Prose Poetry and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee

Abstract

Yook, Sung Hee. “(Re)membering Trauma: Joy Harjo’s Prose Poetry and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee.” Studies in English Language & Literature 42.4 (2016): 71-90. Both Joy Harjo's prose poetry and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee deal with historical memories resulting from traumatic events including colonialism, genocide, displacement, racism, and so on. These two women remember these traumatic histories by writing long poems, which, as Susan Stanford Friedman points out, are a very important tool for marginalized subjects to claim their status of subject and recover agency. Transcending the established binary between lyric and narrative, the lyric narrative and prose poetry used by Harjo and Cha evokes and historicizes their hidden and silenced stories and experiences. This paper is particularly interested in the ways Harjo, a Native American poet, views the past as connected to the present and the future, and Cha, a Korean American avant-garde artist, displays how traumatic memories are formed and characterized through her fragmented, broken, and disintegrated language, attempting to revive traumatic remnants of the past through a diseuse. This paper also emphasizes how Harjo and Cha politically take part in the struggle against the colonial power of the dominant discourses and the symbolic order of reality. (Sookmyung Women’s University)