Dictee

The book begins with a quote attributed to Sappho, a famous poet from Ancient Greece. The quote is: “May I write words more naked than flesh, stronger than bone, more resilient than sinew, sensitive than nerve” (i). Sappho is called “the tenth muse,” a description that aligns with the chapter titles, as each chapter is named after one of the nine muses of Ancient Greek mythology. However, the quote is not from Sappho; Cha created this quote. Cha’s choice to attribute her own quote to a famous woman poet emphasizes the concept of communality of creation.

Rather than subscribing to the masculine view of the lone genius as the sole creator of works of art, Cha highlights the aspect of creation that is communal, meaning that the act of creating artistic objects arises from a set of societal conditions and is never achieved in isolation from either the past or present. In a sense, Cha is paying homage to Sappho as a great inspiration of hers, citing her as a way of proclaiming Sappho as a foundational source for her own originality. The quote emphasizes the barriers that a writer or speaker faces when employing written and spoken language to describe the embodied, or lived, experiences of people.