Stupa debates at Tuol Sleng, bomb-crater tours in Kampot, Agent Orange demonstrations in New Zealand; the Indo-Chinese wars (three and counting) may have been completed on the battlefield, but as Vatthana Pholsena and Oliver Tappe’s recent book Interactions With A Violent Past: Reading Post-Conflict Landscapes In Cambodia, Laos And Vietnam shows, conflict over interpretation continues to rage.
Exploring this through the vehicle of landscape, Interactions With A Violent Past brings together a series of studies that shows how meaning and power have contributed to multiple interpretations of the way the impacts of war are remembered in Indochina. Linking the studies is an interest in how these interpretations are expressed through memory, memorials, protest, performance and words, and the ways different groups vie for their representations to be accepted as the pervading understanding of history. These contests are, as the authors point out, inherently political, because the acceptance of one interpretation over others permits access to things as divergent as courts and compensation, while others find themselves excluded.
Unsurprisingly, this is an academic enterprise and Interactions is unlikely to appeal to those seeking some light beach-reading over the August break, with layered jargon (‘polyphonic memoryscapes’, ‘mneminic worlds’) and theories from people with long names persisting throughout the book. But for those seeking to exercise the grey matter, Interactions offers some nice rewards, while providing a whole new way of viewing the Kingdom and the wider Indochina region.
In terms of Cambodia-based research, the chapter by Sina Emde is especially insightful. In his study the author explores the roles of Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek as memorial sites and the part played by the Extraordinary Chambers of the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) as a forum for the expression of memory. Emde starts with the argument that Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek have evolved into economic enterprises that have commercialised the suffering of the past, while providing a distinct state interpretation of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge history.
As a rejoinder to this bleak interpretation, Emde shows how the testimony process for Case 001 (the trial of Duch, see Advisor, April 11 issue) has offered individuals the opportunity to assert their memories, both at the hearings themselves and during court visits to Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek (a consequence of the ECCC process that has been seldom articulated elsewhere). Nevertheless, as Emde writes, the blurring and shifting lines between who were the victims and perpetrators make questions about how to record and remember the past at these sites complex and difficult.
This was demonstrated aptly in the recent debate over the intention to place the names of those who perished at Tuol Sleng on a stupa at the site. Those opposed to the proposal argued that doing so would result in people responsible for Khmer Rouge atrocities, and who were later killed at Tuol Sleng themselves, being recorded alongside those they had helped murder. It’s a deep argument, but through the vehicle of Emde’s research one is given a map to guide the way through the complexities of this and other memorialisation processes underway.
Other chapters feature the ‘landscapes’ of unexploded ordinance, Agent Orange protest, and the impacts of war-driven relocation on indigenous groups in Vietnam. Numerous plates, tables and maps are included in what is a well-presented set of studies, neatly woven together with a good summary introduction at the beginning of the book.
Interactions is one of those reads I describe as a ‘sleeper’: it sits on the shelf in the store and you hardly notice it’s even there, but when you do pick it up and start scanning its pages you receive a pleasant surprise. Give the research between its covers the attention it requires, but be aware: things will never look the same again.
Interactions With A Violent Past: Reading Post-Conflict Landscapes In Cambodia, Laos And Vietnam, edited by Vatthana Pholsena and Oliver Tappe, is now available from Monument Books for $36