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I ‘ve been reading Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing by Helene Cixous and in the section, “The School of the Dead,” she quotes Kafka: “I think we ought to only read the books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading for? . . . [W]e need the books that affect us like disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone that we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into the forests far from everyone, like a suicide. a book must be an axe for the frozen sea inside us” (Cixous 17).  She then poses the question, “Why are such books rare?” (Cixous 18) These books are rare “[b]ecause those who write the books that hurt us also suffer . . . and this is frightening” (Cixous 18). Both writer and reader go through a kind of suffering while reading such a rare a book. Last week I mentioned Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s book Dictee, that I read for my Graduate Seminar In Literature, “Marginalia: Otherness in Verse.” This is a rare book. This is a book that affected me like a disaster, that I underlined and made notes obsessively in the margins, that left me wounded after reading it.

To be wounded by a book is to feel physically exhausted after reading it, and not in the grad-school-oh-my-goodness-I-have-3oo pages-to-read sense. I mean, exhausted, as in, life-changing, as in this book has left its mark on me. These are the books that I gasped out loud while reading for the first time. I can think of a few that I’ve read since my time in the program: Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse and The Pleasure of the Text, Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and Kiki Petrosino’s Fort Red Border, to name a few. These books got under my skin and made me want to write, made me want to read and made me question something about myself as a writer and in some instances made me question the world around me. They left an open wound, left me exposed, left me thinking.

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While reading page after page of Dictee, I underlined and dogeared corners and scribbled in my notebook. I wanted to commit the lines I was reading to memory, wanted to return to them later, wanted to get at their core.  I found myself asking the question,  “What is it that I can write, that I should write, that will wound my reader, that will wound me?” Dictee taught me about my own voice, about my body, about my writing. It’s a collection of poetry and prose poetry, amongst other forms. It is physical, asking you to switch between forms within the span of a page, asking you to read punctuation in a way that commands you to be aware of the written language, to be aware of what is unspoken in language, to assess the white space in language. The opening poem writes the punctuation into the sentence: “It was the first day   period / She dad come for a far    period     tonight at dinner / comma” (1). Cha immediately calls attention to the commands of punctuation and forces her reader to speak them out loud, which for me was jarring. It caused disorder, disrupted the language that I was used to and caused me to read inside the sentences, to assess a language that I am already familiar with and to rethink it. This formal choice coupled with the subject matter of the book, several stories of women (Joan of Arc, Cha, Cha’s mother, Demeter and Persephone, amongst others), their physical dislocations, and their loss of language was, for me, violent. Violent in the way that it shook me and compelled me to think and to absorb and, most importantly, to write.

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Quotes from the following texts:

Cha, Theresa Hak Kyung. Dictee. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Cixous, Helene. Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.