On the Enunciative Boundary of Decolonizing Language: The Imagined Camaraderie of Poets Itō Hiromi and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Abstract

On the surface, Itō Hiromi (b. 1955) and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982) are writers who do not belong in the same category. Although Itō now lives in the United States, she writes in Japanese. Cha was a Korean American writing in English. Both women, however, are experimental poets who defy categorization and who can be seen as “borderline artists” who, in the words of Homi K. Bhabha, “perform . . . a poetics of the open border between cultures . . . display[ing] the ‘interstices’ . . . that [are] part of the history of those peoples whose identities are crafted from the experience of social displacement.”1 Inhabiting personal and poetic spaces outside of the national boundaries within which they were born and initially claimed citizenship, Itō and Cha also trouble the boundaries of their respective national feminisms by traversing and going beyond the realms of “universal, feminist humanitarianism” and “ethnic nationalism” in their works. They refuse any single voice through which to explore the transformation of colonized subjects, making use of multi-vocal narrators instead. In this essay I analyze one such work by each writer. In her 1993 work “Watashi wa anjuhimeko de aru” (I am Anjuhimeko), Itō uses the voice of the miko, or spiritual medium. In Cha’s 1982 Dictée, the female narrator, or diseuse, is taken from French drama.