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In the Shadow of Angkor - (vol. 16, no. 1) - 232 pages, illustrated
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Published twenty-five years after the defeat of the Khmer Rouge regime, In the Shadow of Angkor captures the resurgence of the Cambodian arts community and its efforts to restore a rich literary heritage. In many of the works, the artists defy the decimation of their brothers and sisters by the Khmer Rouge, as well the attempt to erase Cambodia's memory of its history. The range of expression is impressive: the volume includes poetry, short story, film, rap lyrics, and essays, plus interviews with authors and a portfolio of photographs of Cambodia.
Guest editor: Sharon May researched the Khmer Rouge for the Columbia University Center for the Study of Human Rights. Her stories and photographs have appeared in Manoa, International Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, Other Voices, and the books Seeking Shelter: Cambodians in Thailand and The Saving Rain. She is completing a collection of short stories.
Artist: Richard Murai was born, raised, and educated in the San Francisco Bay Area and now teaches creative photography in Northern California. His fascination with sacred sites of the world has taken him to India, Peru, Turkey, Egypt, Russia, Asia, and Western Europe. The photographs in this issue are selections from a continuing project on Angkor Wat. |
"In the Shadow of Angkor does a commendable service to Cambodia's people, reminding the world of the strength of character that has enabled Cambodians to courageously bear witness to intolerable suffering - and now, aided by the renewal of the arts and literature, to begin a nationwide healing. Genocide is not the problem of the people to whom it happened; it is everyone's problem. This wonderfully inspiring book will increase the reader's awareness of the responsibility we all have in ending such recurring tragedies." - Dith Pran, founder and president of The Dith Pran Holocaust Awareness Project and the compiler of Children of Cambodia's Killing Fields: Memoirs by Survivors.
"In the Shadow of Angkor exposes us to the vibrant, multifaceted written culture that flourishes in Cambodia today." - David Chandler, author of A History of Cambodia and Brother Number One: A Political Biography of Pol Pot.
"A beautiful tribute to the Cambodian spirit, this remarkable collection reveals the heartbreaking tragedy and the heart-healing hope that fall within the recent Cambodian experience." - Carol Wagner, author of Soul Survivors: Stories of Women and Children in Cambodia and director of Friendship with Cambodia. |
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| One night, I had an experience. I'm not really superstitious, but I remember I was doing the song "The Year Zero." I was there by myself. And when I was doing that song, I felt a sudden chill in the room. All of a sudden the room got cold. Slowly, I turned off the equipment and then I ran into my house. I don't know what it was. But it happened to me three times when I was working on that album - on the songs "The Year Zero" and "The Letter." It could have been in my head. But when I am rapping, when I'm in front of the microphone, it's just not me anymore. It's like someone else has taken over. |
When I was putting the album together, I didn't know what to name it. I was thinking about the Dalai Lama. I was thinking about drama, trauma, and I made up the word "Dalama." I looked it up in the dictionary, but there was no such word. I thought, I'm going to make up my own word and turn that into the story of my life.
- From "Art of faCt,"
an interview by Sharon May with praCh |
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| Sharon May: You've said, "My story is a love story. It's a story of war, but it's also a story about love." When did you realize that?
Loung Ung: While I was writing the book, and while I was growing up after the war, I thought it was hate that kept me alive. I thought it was hate that kept me strong, that kept my body from dying. Hate and anger. And then in America, as I met Cambodians who had suffered nervous breakdowns, who had a hard time adapting and healing from the war, I came to realize that the hate might have kept my body alive - or assisted in that - but without love, my mind would have been destroyed and my spirituality and soul would not have lived. |
This is why I think my book might have such universal reach: people can't really connect to war, but they can connect to the survival of the spirit. They can connect to the love of a parent or the longing of a child for the parent, and all that love in my family, for my country - and the love my family had for me - really kept my spirit and my soul alive. And for that reason, I'm the person I am today.
Twenty years ago, if you had found me on the streets eating out of garbage cans and asked me where would I be in twenty years, I wouldn't have said I'd be a happy, healthy person. That would have been beyond my wildest dreams.
- From "Surviving the Peace,"
an interview with Loung Ung |
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"Little Brothers, where are you going?" one Khmer Rouge fighter in his early twenties asked politely. They carried very little combat gear, I noticed, and must've been moving from place to place rapidly. Across their chests hung military pouches with three spare AK-47 magazines and Chinese-made grenades, the kind with foot-long wooden handles. On their backs hung cloth tubes about four inches around and packed with uncooked rice. Their largest weapon was a small mortar and B-40 grenade launcher. Of course, I learned the names of such weaponry years later. |
"It's OK. Don't be scared, Little Brothers. We are your friends," he said.
I didn't know what to say or think. I would have revealed all state secrets to him if I had known any.
"Food, food," I said, crying.
They lowered their weapons and spoke in Vietnamese.
- From "Journey into Light"
by Ranachith Ronnie Yimsut |
Every year, when my family finds reason to gather - for a holiday, birthday, graduation, and sometimes just because - when the coconut curry is cooked and smoke swirls heaven-bound from burning incense, the ghosts come home to feed.
Before any guests are allowed to eat, my mother prepares a tray of food, her best dishes - sticky rice, glass noodles fried with banana buds, steamed pork buns, and my father lights a handful of incense sticks. Setting these on an altar, we pray to the spirits of our dead relatives and invite them to the feast. |
These spirits are the ghosts of my uncle, Sao Kim Yan, a math professor; my grandfather, Khan Reang, a rice farmer; my aunt, Koh Kenor, a housewife who was married to a businessman; and so many others who died during the war in our homeland. They are the restless ones who cross oceans and continents to find my family, now safe and comfortable in America. They are the ones who did not make it while they were living.
- From "The Dinner Guests"
by Putsata Reang |
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[Narrator:] In totalitarian regimes, the horror of the terror is that it rules over men and women and deprives them of their true fate. In Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, the Khmer Rouge were the incarnation of a policy that denied all reference to the humanity of those they subjugated. In Pol Pot's Democratic Kampuchea, you could look neither to the right nor to the left but only straight ahead - and even then, if you wanted to survive, you were permitted to notice nothing. Against the madness of the Khmer Rouge regime, Bophana became a heroine in the Cambodian tragedy. Her constant resistance and her striking beauty were equally unacceptable to the butchers of the Cambodian people. Bophana lived in a country where love was an outrage to the revolutionary party.
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[From Bophana's letters:] How many tears will a woman have to shed when they separate her from her beloved husband after spending only two nights together. |
I lie in wait for your return. I wait for news from you.dreadfully.It has been eighty days now and there is still no news. I know and well understand that you and our two families are worried about my problems. But what can we do? It's our karma. Our lifelines show that our lives are to be separated! I also know that in this liberated land, it's the same everywhere. But for me living here in Baray, it's like living among wolves who don't understand human speech, who despise man, who deny human values, wolves who conspire behind our backs.I know only too well.that one day I will be a victim of our enemies here. Do you know, darling, that the villagers of Baray are all afraid of me - .My close friends no longer dare speak to me. I no longer have any hope. I cannot fight against destiny in order to meet you because life has an ending, and when you reach the end, you must know how to let go of life. I'm holding you tight and kissing you from far away.
- from "Bophana: A Cambodian
Tragedy" by Rithy Panh |
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She directed us onto a fairly wide dirt road. A mountain was in the distance, and rice fields passed us on each side of the road. My initial nervousness returned. What if Khan kidnapped us? When I had arrived to do my doctoral fieldwork in 1994, three Western backpackers had just been kidnapped and taken to a Khmer Rouge stronghold in the mountains. Later, they were brutally killed.
"Do you think it's safe?" I asked Ming. "Are you scared?"
She paused and then said with a nervous smile, "Yes, a little scared." I could see that in the backseat Mum was smiling uneasily.
Ming pointed out the window. "There it is. That's the place." Looking to the left, I saw a large blue-and-gold Cambodian pagoda. Though framed by lush green trees, it was dilapidated and filled with broken stone. Two trees towered over the main hall of worship, which was surrounded by naga-serpent balustrades. Several of the naga heads were missing. |
All over Cambodia, religious buildings like this one were turned into interrogation and execution centers. This was one of the ways the Khmer Rouge showed their hatred of religion, which they viewed as both a parasite and an opiate of the masses. If the Khmer Rouge didn't convert a pagoda into a prison, they might raze the building, destroy religious objects, or use the building as a storehouse.
Ming asked, "Do you want to go in?"
"Yes," I replied quickly, both out of curiosity and my desire to buy time to figure out a safe way to meet Khan. We turned onto a gravel road that took us into the temple's dirt courtyard, which had been overtaken by weeds and a few scraggly plants. Two monks sat in a shady alcove to escape the heat. Three children, probably orphans, were playing in the dirt about a hundred yards away from us. Except for them, the pagoda was deserted.
- From "The Perpetrator, the Witness,
and the Victim" by Alex Hinton |
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Kunty paused. Her eyes studied the daisies near her feet as they swayed in the wind. They were the same kind she'd noticed the first day she had walked along this pathway.
"There was a short period in my life when I did things that I now wish I hadn't done," Kunty finally said. "It was during the time when my husband left me, before he came back sick." Kunty spoke slowly, watching the ground with her hands folded. "I thought I would never see him again. I had no way to support my children. After several months, I secretly remarried. I told my parents-in-law the man was my cousin and he moved into the house, in his own room. They didn't say anything, because he helped support us all. But after a while, he started staying away on weekends, and then he left, like my first husband. I thought he was cheating on me. Actually, he was already married to someone else." Kunty turned her face away from Sister Cecelia so that she would not see that she was crying. "I have kept this secret even from my parents." |
Kunty was silent for a long time. She folded and unfolded her hands in her lap. Sister Cecelia remained quiet next to her. "I didn't think my first husband would ever come back. But eventually he did come back and he was very sick."
Kunty couldn't say what she had wanted to ask next. She wanted to ask the nun if she could have caught this disease from her second husband rather than from her first- if it was her adultery that had caused her illness. All this time, she had wondered if it had been her fault.
"I've made a mistake," Kunty finally said. "I thought I wanted to talk, but it doesn't matter now. You see, I have already lost everything that is important to me."
- from "Caged Bird Will Fly"
by Pollie Bith |
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Sharon May: What can be done to help Cambodian writers?
Pal Vannariraks: First, create an NGO whose purpose is to help writers and work with them individually. Second, I'd like to see the government pay more attention to writers.
For women writers, it is even more difficult. We have even less time to write because we have to be housewives, take care of our children and husband. This is one reason why I got divorced. My husband wanted to stop me from writing. He burned my books.
Sharon May: How did that happen? |
Pal Vannariraks: At that time, I wrote too much. Sometimes I didn't have enough time for my family. My sister helped look after the children and the cooking. But my husband was angry; maybe he thought I didn't take care of the household. He collected all my stories and rental books and burned them in front of the house. I didn't dare snatch the books out of the fire. I was afraid he'd become violent. At the time, I had small children. I could hold back my tears when I was hit, cursed, or blamed by my husband, but on the day he burned the books, I cried a lot....
One week after the burning of the books, I won the Seventh of January competition for 1989.
- From "Words Out of the Fire," an
interview with three Cambodian writers |
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| We arrive at Saly's house at night, driving on his moto through a maze of squatter huts and over planked pathways built above a large sewer system. Most of the huts are open in the front and lit with candles, though occasionally one has electricity and a few have televisions. In the dark, the TV looms larger than life. As Saly parks and honks his horn, I realize that I have no way to know where we are or how we got there. At the doorway, we step over a board that blocks the entrance and keeps the baby from going outside. Saly's one-room house is made of cardboard and planks. As I glance at some pictures of women singers, cut out of magazines and hung on the wall, he says, "We are very poor." My heart is beating fast, and I am trying to smile as I nod. His wife, laughing, shows me their baby. |
I touch the baby's cheek and he giggles; he looks like Saly, who is in his thirties but looks younger. The baby has a bandage on his navel, and I remember Saly telling me that he was at the hospital recently. Saly's wife has a dazzling smile. In the glow of a kerosene lamp, we sit down on the floor. There is a mosquito coil nearby and some noodles Saly's wife has prepared. Saly quickly shows me an English tape he has been using to learn the language. The baby enjoys playing with the cassette tape, then Saly takes it away. I thank his wife for letting me have Saly as my driver every day. Saly translates, and she laughs and thanks me. I keep my eyes fixed on her beautiful, glowing face.
- From "Ten Gems on a Thread"
by Catherine Filloux |
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Sharon May: Do you think poetry or writing can help in healing?
U Sam Oeur: In one way, when you sing a happy song, people never feel happy, but when you sing a sad song - like separation from a loved one - people smile, people say this sad song is so beautiful. Poetry is the same way. When we write about loss and wailing, we can heal people's hearts?the people who cannot write, cannot express their pain. When they listen to my poems, they shed tears. So many ladies, several times.after they see my opera, The Krasang Tree, they say, "Thank you, sir; thank you very much." The performance helps them to remember, to cry, to expel, to release the pain they experienced during the Khmer Rouge time. Then they can heal. They don't worry anymore about expressing because I have expressed on their behalf. |
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Sharon May: Did you have any idea when you were young that you would become a poet?
U Sam Oeur: I loved to sing on the back of the water buffalo when I was young: call-and-response songs; a song about myself; a love song.
When we were herding the water buffalo, there was nothing to do, so we'd sing. Just pretend we were geniuses on water buffalo. We felt like giants, but when people looked at us, we were small birds on the water buffalo's back. People hear only the songs, but can't see us. Small as a bird, loud as a giant.
- From "Ambassador of the Silent
World," an interview with U Sam Oeur |
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| Santidevaputra said, "I am the God of Peace. I always practice mindfulness and clear comprehension. Whether you vote for me or not, I rule myself. To rule the universe, you must first rule yourself. To rule yourself, you must be able to rule your own mind. To rule your mind, you must practice mindfulness and clear comprehension." |
All of the gods and goddesses recognized Santidevaputra's strength and elected him unanimously. They understood that peace is the strongest force in the world.
- From "To Rule the Universe"
by Maha Ghosananda |
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