Art Journal
Moira Roth, Traveling Companions/Fractured Worlds, Part 4 Oan Hon (Lost Souls), Lament for Cambodia, Hiroshima, Kosovo, and East Timor, May-September, 1999
June 15, 1999, Berkeley, CaliforniaEarly in the morning, while walking in the Berkeley hills in sunlight and peace, we wander off the beaten path to climb through dense undergrowth. Boreth Ly, who now lives in Berkeley but had lived through the Cambodian Khmer Rouge regime as a child, says to me, "Instinctively I still watch out for mines when walking in a place like this."
May 8, 1999, Phnom Penh, Cambodia
We enter.
Early morning sunlight.
Blaring radios.
One can easily see and hear the world outside through the barbed wire of the low walls in this shabbily preserved space.
No one else is here when we arrive but B. L., my traveling companion, and myself. Later, other visitors appear, including a journalist who is writing on the ghosts reported to inhabit this space.
In the center are flowering trees and gravestones, and a gallow-like contraption with hooks hanging from the bar. B. tells me that people were strung here upside-down, their heads ducked in water.
I have never been to the former concentration camps in Europehave only read about them and seen film footageand so this is the first time I am physically in a space where genocide has occurred.
Standing here I hear the cocks crowing. Sounds of cicadas. Countryside sounds in the middle of the city.
Sunlight.
The Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide was a former high school in Phnom Phenh, renamed S-21 when it became the main interrogation-extermination center for the Khmer Rouge in March 1976. Only seven inmates survived when the prison was closed by the Vietnamese at the beginning of 1979.
On the outside of Building A I read in English (there is also a Khmer version) a bleak list of the ten Security Regulations:
1. You must answer accordingly to my questions. Donât turn them away.
2. Donât try to hide the facts by making pretexts about this and that. You are strictly prohibited to contest me.
3. Donât be a fool for you are a chap who dare to thwart the revolution.
4. You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect.
5. Don't tell me either about your immoralities or the essence of the revolution.
6. While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.
7. Do nothing, sit still and wait for my orders. If there is no order, keep quiet. When I ask you to do something, you must do it right away without protesting.
8. Donât make pretexts about Kampuchea Krom in order to hide your jaw of traitor.
9. If you don't follow all the above rules, you shall get many lashes of the electric wire.
10. If you disobey any point of my regulations, you will get either ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge.
I?
You?
As if there are only two people in the worldthe torturer and the tortured.
Deuch (or Duch as his name is sometimes spelled), the head of Tuol Sleng, not only oversaw the torture and consequent death of some 16,000 people, but actively participated in these horrors.
In the Phnom Penh Post (April 30-May 13,1999) there is a color photograph of him smiling directly at the camera, with his two hands on the shoulders of an equally smiling child. It was taken at the Thai border earlier in the month before he was arrested. In the interview with the Postâs journalist, Deuch explains, "Whoever was arrested must die. . . . We had the responsibility to interrogate and give the confessions to the central committee of the party."
Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, 1975-79 (1996): "By early 1977 Tuol Sleng employed at least 111 wardens . . . eighty two [of them] were aged seventeen to twenty one." On January 7, 1979 the Vietnamese invaded Phnom Penh, and the Khmer Rouge leaders fled: "But probably the last to abandon the city was Deuch. He was still in Tuol Sleng at noon, an hour after the fall. He had built up such a large archive of prison records and Îconfessionsâ that he was unable to destroy much of it; he left over one hundred thousand pages of testimony to his activities since 1974. . . . [and saw] to the execution of the several surviving prisoners, some of the chained to their beds."
On the lower floor of the three-storied Building A are rooms with barred windows.
We walk through the doors.
Each has a dirty bed and rusty objectsshackles, chains, and locks. On the walls are grisly photographs.
We walk toward Building B, which is full of photographs, paintings, and torture instruments.
I stand outside the building in the sunlight for a while, crying and listening to the cicadas, and the sound of motorbikes in the nearby street.
Then I go inside.
Photograph after photographsome in groups, some paired, "before" and "after."
Everyone bears a numbermen, women, and children.
No. 40 is a man with horrified staring eyes.
No. 375 is a child in a patterned shirt with dulled eyes.
In Building C, there is a narrow high-backed chair. It is the chair that victims were placed in for their photographs.
If you look carefully, you see that their arms are pulled behind them, as they are all bound.
In Seth Mydansâ "Smiles Were Rare" (New York Times, January 24, 1999), I read that Nhem Elin was the chief photographer for the Khmer Rouge. Party officials had decided that he should be sent to China to study photography because during the Khmer Rouge regime merely to own a camera, "an evidence of an educated past," could lead to death, and "only a handful of officially approved photographers recorded officially approved subjects for those four years." When Elin returns from China, he is assigned to Tuol Sleng where he photographs 7,000 prisoners.
"All the subjects died. Only the portraits survived."
In another room are paintings of torture, and beneath them the torture instruments themselves.
Meticulously detailed canvases in what reminds me of a Soviet Realist tradition.
Vann Nathâs paintings are totally focused. Totally horrifying in what they show of the tortured and the torturers.
A man in a cell.
A room of people lying down.
A man being ducked in water, and another man strung up.
A child being torn away from his mother.
A blindfolded man, his arms and legs pulled up behind his back, while his throat is being cut.
Nails and fingers being torn off.
Nipples being cut.
Whippings.
A dead body being carried on a pole.
In one painting a man is plunged into a bath of water, and in front of this canvas is exhibited the actual torture bath.
Before the painter Vann Nath is given the job of portraying Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge leader, he was in Tuol Sleng for thirty days, shackled all the time. In his 1998 autobiography, A Cambodian Prison Portrait: One Year in the Khmer Rougeâs S-21, he writes: "I never expected to survive this hell. I spent exactly one year in S-21. On January 7, 1978 I was thrust there not knowing why I was arrested. On January 7, 1979, I escaped."
At the end of 1979, when S-21 was re-opened as the Museum of Genocide, Vann Nath returns to work here for a year painting from memory scenes of torture.
As we stand outside again in the sunlight of the prison-museumâs garden, B. says to me, "Choosing a school was such a clever site. Education, indoctrination, reeducation."
We leave and the rest of the day I think of death and torture.
Of ghosts that stay in such places until put to rest.
Of the creation of memorial spaces.
Of rituals for the dead.
June 15, 1999, Berkeley, California
I have begun to correspond by e-mail with Dinh Q. L, who has recently started to make work about Tuol Sleng and Angkor.
L, whose childhood was spent in Vietnam in a town near the Vietnamese-Cambodian borderwhich was invaded by the Khmer Rougenow travels back and forth between Los Angeles and Vietnam.
He writes: "On every trip back to Vietnam I would bring a handful of American soil. I would mix the soil in the heavily silt water of the Mekong River as a way to spread this handful of soil throughout Vietnam. By doing this, I hope to help the wandering souls of all the American MIAs lost in the jungle of Vietnam to have some sense of home.
Hopefully, this will help them to rest in peace. I feel that in order for Vietnam to heal from the war, we need to help all the oan hon, lost souls, from the war to find some peace."
May 9, 1999, Phnom Penh, Cambodia
Today by strange chance, I meet Vann Nath, the Tuol Sleng artist whom I had already read about last year in the New York Times, at an opening of Situations, a small gallery which is showing a series of commissioned large paintings by another Cambodian artist, Pech Song, depicting Cambodian history over the last thirty years.
Vann Nath tells me he is physically not well, and is no longer doing art.
For all his gentle, indeed singularly calm, composure, Vann Nath reminds me of Kien, the central character of The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh, a North Vietnamese writerI had bought the English translation of his novel a few days ago while in Siem Reap in Northern Cambodia, visiting the nearby Angkor monuments.
Kien returns to the Jungle of Screaming Souls, where he had spent time in the 27th Youth Brigade during the Vietnam War itself. Bao Ninh served in this same battalion, and out of its five hundred soldiers in 1969, only ten, including himself, survived.
oan hon, lost souls
Kien is part of a 1976 "Missing in Action" body-collecting team after the end of the war. The experience stirs his memories of being there during the war, of his companions who had died there.
"Kien was told that passing this area at night one could hear birds crying like human beings."
oan hon, lost souls
The Sorrow of War ends with Kien in his Hanoi apartment beginning to burn his manuscript, a huge pile of unnumbered pages. He is stopped by a lonely, mute woman, who rescues most of the pages and subsequently gives themKien has left Hanoi and never returnsto a man who becomes the keeper of the manuscript. At first this man attempts to order the novelâs pages, and to make consistent the shifts in the narrative and characters; then he relinquishes such an attempt at control.
He realizes that he has known Kien during the war: "We shared a common sorrow, the immense sorrow of war . . . [and] . . . while copying the pages and rereading them, I was astonished to recognize inside his story were ideas and feelings and even situations of mine."
oan hon, lost souls
When Bao Ninhâs novel comes out in 1991, it is widely read and praised in Vietnamese literary circles for its truthful discussion of the Vietnam War. No one before has ever been allowed to talk publicly about the horrors and disenchantments of that war, and the book eventually wins the highest governmentâs literary prize in Vietnam. A few months later, however, the government insists not only that the prize be withdrawn, but also that the judges,who had awarded the prize, must denounce the book publicly. Since then the government has not allowed The Sorrow of War to be republished in Vietnam.
May 10, 1999, The Killing Fields, Choeung Ek, CambodiaWe ride by motorbike out of Phnom Penh, past wayside stalls of vegetables and rice fields, along paved roads which turn into a series of dirt roads, and, finally, to Choeung Ek, nine miles south of the capital.
April is the hottest month in Cambodia, and though we arrive early, the sun is already blazing.
Blaring music from a nearby village greets us, and later we hear mantra chantings on the same loudspeaker.
Green foliage and hollowed earth are dappled in sunlight.
Beyond the graves is a barbed wire fence and, beyond that, tended fields.
The graves are sparsely marked in Khmer and English.
"No. 6. Mass grave of 450 victims."
"No. 7. Mass grave of 165 victims without heads."
The elegant slim white-yellow-and-gray pagoda, with its steep roof and spire, houses the skulls of the victims from the exhumed graves. In 1980, 86 out of the 129 graves are unearthed, and 8,985 corpses are found, their skulls placed in the several-story-high pagoda, which has been built in the form of a traditional stupa used for housing the Buddhaâs relics.Shelf upon shelf (ten glass-and-wood shelves in all) contain piles of skulls.
Occasional bleak labels.
Cobwebs.
A musty smell.
There is a terrible literal transparency to this monument.
One can stare through the dirty panes of glass and past the shelves of skulls to the field beyond the site.
Or one can force oneself to look at the skulls, crane oneâs head to see the top shelf, think of the victims, and pray for their souls.We light incense sticks.
B. tells me that many Cambodians feel that this huge pyramid of skulls should be taken down and cremated, because without cremation the souls will not be able to continue on their journey according to Buddhist beliefs.
oan hon, lost souls
Others, including many foreigners, feel the skull monument is important as a highly visual symbol of the genocide rule of the Khmer Rouge, in which more than one million Cambodians were killed in the four years, 1975-79.
May 21, 1999, Berkeley, California
I return from Cambodia to California on May 13, and today the New York Times publishes Seth Mydansâ "Choeung Ek Journal."
The text begins with a description of a rite that has just taken place in the Killing Fields.
Facing its pagoda, a group of young women chanted a dirge to an audience of a thousand people, ending with: "O Cambodia, do you remember? Do you remember your bitter history?"
But Mydans addresses, too, the tricky politics of this ceremony, describing the rite as "a convulsion of memory mixed with the pragmatic agendas of the moment."
Several of the top Khmer Rouge officials are free, having recently been given de facto amnesties by Hun Senâs government, and Mydans quotes a source suggesting that this rite had been revived as "a gesture aimed at placating the United Nations and some Western countries."
June 24, 1999, Berkeley, California
After writing this text intensely, hour after hourdrawing from notes in the extensive journal I kept while in CambodiaI wander restlessly around Berkeley, still thinking about Cambodia, and finally discover and buy Letters from the End of the World.
This is the first eyewitness account of the bombing of the city of Hiroshima.
Written by Toyofumi Ogura (a historian at Hiroshima University), it is in the form of thirteen letters to his wife, Fumiyo, who had died of radiation a couple of weeks after the bombing: "I had been seized with the desire to inform her of the events leading up to and following her death." This book is published in Japan in 1948, and in 1997 translated into English.
In the last text (August 6, 1946) of Letters from the End of the World Ogura describes the now-famous shadow imprint of a body on the steps of a bank building only five hundred meters from the bombâs epicenter: "Someone was sitting on one of the lower steps taking a rest, apparently with an elbow propped on his knees and his chin lowered onto his cupped hand."
Ogura concludes his letter with the mute lesson of this "thinker" image, which, he writes,will surely warn "people of every nation, including Japan, not to perpetuate another Hiroshima."
July 1, 1999, Berkeley, California
For days, images of shadows, ghosts, and death have been circling in my mind.
And questions about the erasure of memories.
Not only questions about attempts of public erasuresuch as the act of censorship directed against Bao Ninhâs The Sorrow of War in Vietnam, or other equivalences in this country and in Europebut questions about erasures of memory within a given individual.
I know, for example, that if I were not writing this essay, my memory of Cambodia would be easily swamped by the current bombardment of information on Kosovo horrors which has, in turn, so dramatically displaced media attention on the situation of refugees in Africa.
While in Cambodia, I read in the Cambodia Daily (May 12, 1999) a reprint of a New York Times article entitled "Kosovo May Hurt Aid for African Refugee Crisis," a discussion of the "donor fatigue" toward African refugees who number over seven million. "Today six out of the ten countries that produce the most refugees are in Africa: Angola, Burundi, Eritrea, Sierra Leone, Somalia and Sudan."
On the front page of the New York Times today is an article, "Kosovoâs Living Delay Burial So Its Dead Can Bear Witness," and a photograph of four Kosovo Albanian women, weeping, as they identify "the decomposing bodies of their relatives after investigators for the international war crimes tribunal exhumed them from a mass grave."
Thousands of other Albanians want to wait for these investigators before burying their dead, but "the reality . . . is that investigators from the tribunal will do a thorough investigation of only a handful of sites. There are simply too many graves, tribunal officials say."
oan hon, lost souls
September 12, 1999, Berkeley, California
This morning I sit in the caf that I go to each day. It is the one that Boreth Le and I sat in as we planned our trip to Cambodia months ago, and it is here, as always, that I read the New York Times.
News of East Timor is now regularly on its front pages.
On August 30, 1999, the inhabitantssome 800,000of East Timor vote for their independence from Indonesia (which had invaded and annexed their country in 1975), and this is followed by days of killing, looting, and burning by local militia who oppose the countryâs impending independence.
Tens of thousands of refugees.
Martial law.
Yesterday, Saturday, September 11, a high-powered United Nations delegation arrives for a brief visit to Dili, the capital of East Timor, which Seth Mydans describes as now "a largely abandoned town, which one diplomat compared to Phnom Penh in Cambodia after it was emptied of its residents by the Khmer Rouge in 1975."
A United Nations delegateabout to hurry back to the airport in a well-guarded convoyhears a quiet voice behind him.
"Donât forget East Timor," the voice says.
The man stops and looks. A woman holding a small child in her arms, looks back at him.
Donât forget East Timor
Don't forget Kosovo
Donât forget Hiroshima
Donât forget Cambodia
The admonition of this woman in East Timor becomes a litany for me as I sit in the Berkeley cafe
Donât forget
Donât forget
Donât forget
Her voice
Her quiet voice
Voice
Dedicated to Boreth Le.
Parts of this text were performed with a group of musiciansPauline Oliveros (accordion), India Cooke (violin), Karolyn Van Putten (voice), Abbie Conant (trombone) and Maggi Payne (flute)in "Rituals, Improvisations, Texts, and Sounds," an evening of events held at Mills College In Oakland, California, on September 18, 1999.
