“The task of obtaining redress (by vengeance or by forgiveness) will be taken over by forgetting. No one will redress the wrongs that have been done, but all wrongs will be forgotten,” Czech author Milan Kundera writes.Footnote 1 Whether it is possible to forgive, or even to forget, for people who survived the Cambodian genocide and what role artistic practices may play in this process are the challenging questions that art historian Boreth Ly addresses in Traces of Trauma. There is a thriving contemporary art scene in Cambodia that emerged in the 2000s. Its representatives have shown their work at biennials and exhibitions worldwide, opening the way for a new generation of artists in Cambodia and familiarizing the international public with the country's social and environmental issues. Yet, the literature on the subject is still surprisingly limited, especially when it comes to the relationship between art, extreme violence, trauma, and reconstruction. While this topic has been explored more consistently in the performing arts and cinema, the field of visual arts remains underexamined. The existing scholarship includes, for example, the pioneering study of the late Ingrid MuanFootnote 2 and her collaboration with Ly Daravuth on the project The Legacy of Absence in 2000 and, more recently, the work of art historians Pamela Corey, Roger Nelson, and Soko Phay. Ly has written papers, book chapters, and catalogue essays on the subject, and her richly illustrated book is a welcome addition to this growing field.
Building on a wide range of artworks by known and less known artists from Cambodia and the Khmer diaspora, Ly contributes an original perspective that reworks the more familiar configuration of trauma, ideology, and national identity through the interrelated themes of corporeality, gender, and sexuality. To scholars and students in Khmer and Southeast Asian studies who specialize in political science, sociology, or history, Traces of Trauma will offer a remarkable entryway into the complexities of Cambodian postgenocide culture. Art historians, cultural theorists, and memory studies scholars without any specific knowledge of Cambodia will find in Ly's book a fascinating relocation of the concepts central to their research field. The historical background that Ly provides makes the context fully understandable.
In the first two chapters, Ly elaborates an interdisciplinary framework that brings Western theories of social/collective memory, psychoanalysis, and visual culture into conversation with local approaches to trauma. She decenters Euro-American models, which, as she convincingly argues, are not adapted to the Cambodian context, and she proposes a new epistemological terrain for discussing artistic forms of witnessing. Using the Khmer concepts of baksbat (broken courage) and snar (scar, trace), she relocates the site of trauma to the body rather than the mind. She applies this new framework to her discussion of Rithy Panh's movies and Amy Sanford's installations (first chapter), Vandy Rattana's photos and Leang Seckon's multimedia works (second chapter). Importantly, Ly integrates the American bombardments of Cambodia (1969–73) into this picture of violence and suffering. The crimes of the Democratic Kampuchea regime have long overshadowed the US carpet-bombing of Cambodia to destroy Vietnamese communist sanctuaries. Given the short- and long-term material, psychological, and environmental impact of past US policies, Ly's move to bring this historical episode back on the map is a bold and essential one, and it emphasizes the continuum of destruction Cambodians have experienced throughout the twentieth century.
The last two chapters focus on processes of reconstruction. In the fourth chapter, Ly explores interstitial subject positions through the multiple materialities of the ubiquitous traditional scarf krama. She looks into the work of exiled painter You Khin, the installations of Vietnamese-Cambodian artist Le Huy Hoang, and krama-queering initiatives taken by marginalized communities in the context of social protest. Ly's discussion of migrating and repurposed objects and meanings by artists and groups who live in liminal spaces opens to a broader notion of post-traumatic agency. The fifth chapter furthers Ly's analysis of what she identifies thus as new ways of performing Khmer identity. It intertwines the mythical figures of dancers Neang Neak and Mera with the life and work of Princess Buppha Dhevi (1943–2019) and artist/choreographer Sophiline Cheam Shapiro, two women who have contributed, in different ways, to the reinvention of Cambodian traditional dance since 1979. This finalizes Ly's argument of the matrilineal dimension of Khmer culture.
It is with this argument in mind that the third chapter, about the portraiture of Pol Pot at the infamous Khmer Rouge prison S.21, is best understood. This irruption of masculinity in the middle of the book shows both how Democratic Kampuchea tore away the fabric of Khmer cultural identity and how this identity kept being woven nonetheless. While the chapter takes its full meaning with this strategic positioning within the book, it is also a cause of slight frustration. Khmer Rouge visualities remain a largely undertheorized and contentious field of study, and it would have been fascinating to read more of Ly's insight into the matter.
Traces of Trauma is, perhaps first and foremost, a personal meditation on how genocide breaks people's life and what people go through to (try to) piece it back. Ly, herself a survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime, combines her voice with those of the artists she discusses. The complex structure of the book reflects the difficulties of such an undertaking. Traces of Trauma appears at first as a constellation of fragments to be put back together. To some extent, this act of reassembling that the reader is asked to perform mirrors the process that survivors go through as they stitch together pieces of their life and memory to move forward. As such, Ly's book is not only a wonderful reading experience in terms of research and analysis. It is also a very special, intimate, and emotional one. The nuanced picture of the relationship of art, suffering, pain, and survival in postgenocide Cambodia offered by Traces of Trauma is not overly optimistic. Ly warns her readers: closure and healing can never be complete, even in art. Yet, art opens a space for them. That is all it can do, and that is already a lot.
