With the publication of Khatharya Um's From the Land of Shadows and Vaddey Ratner's Music of the Ghosts, our study of the Cambodian genocide enters a new phase. While both writers acknowledge the work of the Western historians and social scientists that has provided the foundational research on Democratic Kampuchea, largely within the boundaries of their disciplinary perspectives, Um and Ratner address these events from uniquely Cambodian American interdisciplinary perspectives, which until now have been largely absent from the discussion. Um is an academic (the first Cambodian American woman to receive a PhD) and Ratner is a novelist, whose first book, In the Shadow of the Banyan, a fictionalized account of her family's losses during the genocide, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2012. As Khmer-speaking survivors of the genocide, their approach is informed and driven by the personal experience and the quest for answers that are unique to the survivor's perspective. Thus, their work functions on two levels simultaneously. The first is on a highly professional level, as brilliant academic and gifted novelist, respectively. The second is on a personal level, as survivors fully engaged in the painstaking process of healing for themselves and their fellow survivors. An unintended, yet greatly appreciated, benefit of these two books comes from the extraordinary way that they complement and supplement each other. That is, the wide range of topics Um analyzes using a rigorous interdisciplinary approach based on years of primary research with survivors are brought to life beautifully by the characters and events in Ratner's superb novel. The books could be used together in the classroom to great advantage to provide students with a more complete understanding of the genocide that is by nature impossible to represent fully.
In their search for the truth about the causes and legacies of Democratic Kampuchea, both authors place the survivor at the center of their respective inquiries. In doing so, they relocate the survivor from a marginal position in the “shadows” of academic inquiry, where survivors have generally been identified as “victims” in need of rescue, to function as the primary source for understanding the impossible choices that must be made in the process of surviving, where irredeemable loss or death were the only outcomes. In doing so, Um draws upon personal interviews conducted in English and Khmer with over 250 informants, largely from Cambodia's diaspora. In Ratner's novel, the complex issues of language and representation, speech and silence, loss and mourning, diasporic longing and return, memory and time, etc., explicitly discussed by Um's informants, are distilled into an eloquent yet jarring narrative that inspires both our deepest sympathies and our greatest respect for the courage the novel's characters exhibit in their lifelong struggle to reclaim their sense of humanity and ability to love again. This is the basis of the two books’ complementarity and “supplementarity” in the Derridean sense. Used together, the two books give us access to the world inhabited by survivors that had not been available previously.
Interestingly, Um's and Ratner's texts are both organized into three main sections that address the principal questions that haunt survivors in their unrelenting and ultimately unsatisfying search for meaning and truth. The three sections of both books also mimic the disruption to linear time experienced by survivors, whereby traumatic memories of the past intrude on the present moment, disrupting the temporal continuum of normal existence. The first part of Um's book describes the physical conditions of extremity of Democratic Kampuchea, while the second part delves deeper into the past to retrace Cambodia's colonial and postcolonial history, before returning to the present to discuss Cambodia's traumatized diaspora in the third part of the book. The final part is the book's centerpiece, where the core issues of history and memory, loss and longing, death and mourning, exile and return, intergenerational trauma and transnationalism, etc. are revealed and investigated in depth.
Similarly, Ratner's Music of the Ghosts is organized into three “movements,” preceded by a “prelude,” echoing the central theme of music in the novel. Each of the three movements is further divided into short sections of approximately one to ten pages, which function more like musical “notes” or “stanzas” than typical book chapters. The music of traditional Cambodian instruments and the instruments themselves, which embody the pralung or spirit of the culture and the musicians who died, are key to the novel's composition. Music, even a single note, more than literal language, has the ability to communicate essential truths that are beyond the reach of words with their loaded meanings; accessing this truth metaphorically through music is the objective of Ratner's eloquent and elegant lyricism.
As in Um's text, the reader is made aware of the disruption to linear time experienced by survivors, as the novel's two principal characters, Suteera and the Old Musician, who are both genocide survivors a generation apart, experience the intrusion of traumatic memories on the present moment. By piecing together Suteera's and the Old Musician's fragmented memories, as they are haphazardly revealed in the first two movements of the novel (reflecting the uncontrollable nature of traumatic memory), the reader is gradually able to link together the chain of chance events (and “hear” the plaintive melody) that connect the two characters in extraordinary ways. Again, as with Um's text, the first two parts of Ratner's novel prepare the reader for the climactic third and final movement, where the characters do not arrive at a final resolution of the emotional and cognitive dissonance that haunts them. (Ratner is fully aware that doing so would not reflect the survivor's actual experience.) Rather, Suteera and the Old Musician reach a temporary and provisional coming to terms with the past that enables them to continue tentatively to the next stage in their process of healing.
Ironically, Ratner achieves with fiction something essential to the understanding of the survivor's experience that is not achievable with memoirs that are limited by the stringent requirement for historical truth. Similarly, by recentering the survivor's experience from the “shadows” of academic inquiry, Um takes previous analyses of the genocide conducted primarily by Western scholars to a more profound place. To take full advantage of these two important texts, however, the serious student of the causes and legacies of the Cambodian genocide would be remiss to rely on one without the other. The following example illustrates the extraordinary complementarity of the two books. Part one of Um's text delves into the necropolis of Democratic Kampuchea. Here, Um teases out the spatial and temporal variations of living conditions under the Khmer Rouge to understand better what crimes were committed, when and how they were committed, who were the perpetrators, and who were the victims. Deftly weaving survivor narratives with incisive analysis that draws on a range of sources, from Terrence Des Pres's The Survivor to Achille Mbembe's “Necropolis,” Um explains how, during the first year of the autogenocide, conditions could vary from “not too bad” to a “place of death” (Um, p. 31), depending on a variety of factors, from one's class, age, or gender, to the particular Khmer Rouge cadre in charge of one's village. Despite these variations, however, as a result of constant relocations and purges of Khmer Rouge leadership, every member of the population was eventually subjected to conditions of extremity, leading to mass starvation and death, which became pervasive by the end of 1976, a time Um's informant refers to as “the year of the four-legged dog” (Um, p. 40) in reference to those too weak from hunger and overwork to be able to stand.
By this time, the purges of suspected “enemies” of the revolution blamed for the regime's failures to achieve its impossible goals for rice production dramatically increased. Constant surveillance of the population amplified the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror, such that anyone, including so-called “old people,” who had joined the revolution prior to 1975, and in doing so presumably proved their loyalty to the revolution, as well as Khmer Rouge cadres and ranking members of the party, could be arrested at any time and taken to prison, where they would be tortured to confess their purported crimes to undermine the revolution. With the historical context provided by Um's nuanced analysis, we are better prepared to enter the world of the Khmer Rouge prison where two principal characters in Ratner's novel, the Old Musician and Suteera's father, meet again after many years.
The Old Musician and Suteera's father are both musicians and had previously been students in America at the same time during Sihanouk's Sangkum government of the 1950s and 1960s. Their lives have intersected in other extraordinary ways as well. They had both loved the some woman (Suteera's mother) at different times, and they had both joined the revolution in the early 1970s, in the hope of bringing greater freedom and stability to the country after the devastation and mayhem created by US bombing and the Cambodian government's egregious corruption, abuse of power, and ineptitude. After enduring months of interrogation and torture inside the walls of the Khmer Rouge prison (previously part of a Buddhist temple), which resembles the notorious Tuol Sleng prison described in Um's text, the Old Musician and Suteera's father make a solemn pact, according to which one of them must kill the other when the pain and dehumanization from daily torture and abuse makes death preferable to the struggle to stay alive. The obligation to fulfill the pact finally falls on the Old Musician, after Suteera's father's most recent round of torture has left him on the verge of death.
After the removal of the Khmer Rouge from power, the Old Musician carries the guilt of his actions in his conscience for twenty-five years, until Suteera returns to Cambodia from America after receiving his letter, so he can ostensibly give her the instruments her father had left behind. In the process of doing so, he also confesses his crime to her personally: the truth of how her father died. Our intellectual understanding of the causes and legacies that led to the imprisonment of the Old Musician and Suteera's father, along with the impact on Suteera of not knowing how, when, and why her father died, is made possible using Um's From the Land of Shadows, while our understanding of the survivor's process of pursuing the answers to these questions, along with the impossible choices faced by perpetrators and victims, is made possible using Ratner's Music of the Ghosts. Together, the two texts enable us to piece together the fragments available to us to appreciate more fully the survivor's experience in the aftermath of the Cambodian genocide.
