Breakfast With The Dictator: Memory, Atrocity, and Affect

Project MUSE - Theory & Event - Breakfast with the Dictator: Memory, Atrocity, and Affect
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v013/13.4.lim.html[11/10/2012 10:45:33 AM]

Theory & Event
Volume 13, Issue 4,
2010
Breakfast with the Dictator:
Memory, Atrocity, and Affect
Alvin Cheng-Hin Lim (bio)
In early August 2007, I accompanied Frank Cibulka, a Czech political scientist, and Thet
Sambath, a senior journalist with the Phnom Penh Post, to the town of Pailin on the
Cambodian border with Thailand. We were there to meet Nuon Chea, the chief ideologue
of the Khmer Rouge and the regime's Brother Number 2, for an interview. This interview
was to be one of his last before his arrest the following month on charges of crimes
against humanity by the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC),
popularly known as the Khmer Rouge genocide tribunal. For me this interview generated a
conflicted sensory bloc. Noun Chea had suffered a stroke several years earlier, and as
such suffered bodily impediments. Underneath these, his sternness of speech and
demeanor reflected a fanatical discipline that Slavoj iek would probably acknowledge as
that of an authentic revolutionary. I could not fail to recognize that Nuon Chea, under Pol
Pot's Democratic Kampuchea regime, was most certainly not a moderate who sought
"revolution without a revolution," that is, as iek explains, "a revolution deprived of the
excess in which democracy and terror coincide, a revolution respecting social rules,
subordinated to preexisting norms."
1
Despite his physical frailty, this octogenarian, who is
accused of the extermination of almost a third of Cambodia's population, terrified me.
As our interview was at 6 a.m., Nuon Chea invited us to join him and his family for
breakfast. Mrs. Nuon Chea had prepared a simple but quite delicious Sino-Khmer
breakfast. There was fried chicken, sour soup with pork and preserved mustard leaves,
fatty roast pork, and generous helpings of rice. The rich flavors, and the hearty quality and
quantity of the meal all reflected plenitude, and my sense of fear clashed with, but failed to
kill, my gustatory enjoyment. I ended up having three helpings, to the delight of Mrs. Nuon
Chea. Her cooking generated in me a strong sense of nostalgia, which was interesting
because this was the first time I had met her. "Patrick," the neuroscientist who runs the
Very Evolved blog, explains this sensation of false nostalgia as "nostalgia by association."
2
That is, my gustatory enjoyment triggered in my mind my childhood memories of gustatory
enjoyment of family meals. (But of course this breakfast was very different from the family
meals of my childhood.) As J onah Lehrer points out, "our senses of smell and taste are
uniquely sentimental."
3
This is because smell and taste are the only senses that connect directly to the
hippocampus, the center of the brain's long-term memory. Their mark is indelible. All our
other senses (sight, touch and hearing) are first processed by the thalamus, the source of
language and the front door to consciousness. As a result, these senses are much less
efficient at summoning up our past.
4
My gustatory encounter with Nuon Chea the very embodiment of Cambodia's recent
memory of genocide is an instance of the affective intersection of haptic space with
places of memory. Building on Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari's valorization of the haptic
over the tactile on the basis that the former "does not establish an opposition between two
sense organs but rather invites the assumption that the eye itself may fulfill this nonoptical
function,"
5
I interpret haptic space as the ever-changing phenomenological space that the
exterior senses constantly construct and reveal of the world. This essay seeks to explore
such affective intersections of haptic space with places of memory.
Benny Widyono, the "shadow governor" of Siem Reap province under the United
Nations Transitional Authority of Cambodia, describes in his memoirs a similar gustatory
encounter with the Khmer Rouge. In September 1992 Prince Sihanouk and Princess
Monique paid a visit to the Khmer Rouge-held town of Pailin, and Mr. Widyono
accompanied them. As he recounts:
At lunchtime I was invited to join a banquet of Khmer Rouge top brass in honor of the royal
couple. Khieu Samphan, Son Sann and his wife, Dr. and Mrs. Thioun Munn, and I flanked
the Prince and Princess; Pol Pot was conspicuously absent. Ieng Sary's daughter, who
studied in London, prepared a sumptuous lunch: Khmer nouvelle cuisine, including fine
eggshells delicately filled with fluffy dried fish, chicken curry in individual bowls for each
guest with bread, and Cambodian sour soup with dried fish, all washed down with Mouton
Cadet, a Sihanouk favorite.
6
Widyono's gustatory enjoyment reflected plenitude, and indeed Pailin at the time was a
town of plenty, thanks to its natural riches of gem mines and lumber, so much so that "the
civilian population under the Khmer Rouge was more comfortable than civilians in the
adjacent SOC territory. Even the Khmer Rouge soldiers, who were given every chance to
defect, refused to go."
7
However, the plenitude of Pailin at that time was not
representative of life under the Khmer Rouge during the Democratic Kampuchea period. In
September 2005, L'histoire Caf opened opposite Phnom Penh's Tuol Sleng genocide
museum, offering authentic Democratic Kampuchea-era cuisine. The Cambodian
government promptly shut the caf down a fortnight later, because it lacked the proper
license.
8
As the Cambodia Daily reports:
The restaurant serves a $6 fixed-price "Unforgettable Menu" that sacrifices flavor for
historical accuracy: The main course is bland rice gruel, served in a tin bowl. "The Khmer
Rouge gave a person a bit of rice or corn mixed with water and leaves. This kind of food a
person could get only a [serving] in the noon and a [serving] in the evening," the menu
notes.
9
The "historical accuracy" of this meal only goes so far, of course. The simple Khmer
Rouge gruel did not cost $6 during the Democratic Kampuchea period, not least because
Pol Pot's regime had abolished the institutions of money and markets.
10
The gustatory
affect of this authentically revolutionary meal remained potent, however, despite this bald
attempt to extract monetary profit from the memory of pain. Hakpry Agnchealy, the sister
of the caf's owner, reflected: "When I ate, it made me so sad. I do not want to eat this
food again."
11
In our everyday speech, gustatory and olfactory metaphors signal embodied
epistemological moments. For example, we occasionally have to sniff out hidden truths, or
swallow unpleasant, bitter ones. Gustatory and olfactory assemblages are also commonly
deployed in the familial habitus as a means of non-verbal communication. Pauline Nguyen
writes:
A dish of bitter melon soup is a dish of reconciliation. When we quarrel, we cannot speak
the words "I am sorry" we give this bittersweet soup instead. In another instance, the
sharing of a particular meal can offer the sentiment we crave to hear: "It's good to see you
again I've missed you." On rare occasions, too few to forget, I have understood the
longed for words, "Please forgive me."
12
Of the five senses, the gustatory and the olfactory offer the least avenue for
conceptualization, especially when compared with the visual or the sonorous. They are
rooted in chemical interactions between the world and the sense organs, and are less
open than the visual, the sonorous and the tactile to iterations of interpretation and
reflection. J acques Derrida reminds us of the Kantian denigration of the "consuming orality
which as such, as an interested taste or as actual tasting, can have nothing to do with
pure taste."
13
Even so, gustatory and olfactory affects cannot be ignored for they are as
constitutive of haptic space as the other senses, and they also generate a pre-cognitive
narrative from sensation to thought and judgment. For example, Mrs. Nuon Chea's
delicious breakfast created for me a gustatory affect of enjoyment, which in turn created a
pleasurable sensory frame which violently clashed with the fear produced by my
cognizance of Nuon Chea's deep responsibility for the Khmer Rouge genocide.
While the sensory bloc of my breakfast with Nuon Chea was dominated by gustatory
and olfactory affects, that of my visit to the Tuol Sleng genocide museum was dominated
by their visual, sonorous, and tactile counterparts. Under the guidance of Pol Pot, Phnom
Penh's suburban Tuol Svay Prey High School was transformed into S-21, the core of
Democratic Kampuchea's internal surveillance and disciplinary apparatus. The high
school's classrooms were crudely transformed into and deployed as prison cells and
torture chambers. In its manifestation as a charnel house, over 14,000 prisoners were
tortured and killed there.
14
After the defeat of Pol Pot's forces, the Vietnamese occupation
regime transformed S-21 into the Tuol Sleng Museum for Genocidal Crime, which has
since become one of Phnom Penh's most popular tourist destinations. A visit to a memory
site of atrocity like Tuol Sleng raises the question of visitor's ambiguous identity as a
witness to the past or as a voyeur of the other's pain. Philip Gourevitch confronted this
dilemma when he visited Rwanda's Nyarubuye genocide memorial, where the murdered
victims were left unburied as a potent means of commemoration of their atrocious ends.
Echoing Leontius, who was memorably described by Plato in The Republic as unhappily
succumbing to his desire to view the corpses of executed prisoners,
15
Gourevitch
recounts:
The dead at Nyarubuye were, I'm afraid, beautiful. There was no getting around it. The
skeleton is a beautiful thing. The randomness of the fallen forms, the strange tranquility of
their rude exposure, the skull here, the arm bent in some uninterpretable gesture there
these things were beautiful, and their beauty only added to the affront of the place. I
couldn't settle on any meaningful response: revulsion, alarm, sorrow, grief, shame,
incomprehension, sure, but nothing truly meaningful. I just looked, and I took photographs,
because I wondered whether I could really see what I was seeing while I saw it, and I
wanted also an excuse to look a bit more closely.
16
Gourevitch's dilemma has contemporary resonances fueled by the growing popularity of
so-called dark tourism, that is, touristic interest in sites of "death, disaster and atrocity."
17
The commoditization and fetishization of atrocity memorials signals the globalization of the
society of the spectacle, with backpackers and luxury tourists consuming the past pain of
others for their edification. This can be seen in the recent proliferation of cafs,
restaurants, and guesthouses around Tuol Sleng, transforming the genocide memorial into
a profit-oriented tourist space. At a deeper level, Gourevitch's dilemma is inevitable, given
the ontological status of the monument as an event: as Roger Luckhurst notes, "stone no
longer fixes a heroic national narrative in place."
18
Instead the meaning of a monument
consists in its semiological manifold of possible perspectives and vantage points. Sven
Lindqvist, another explorer of historical pain, connects memory sites of atrocity to the
European project of colonialism. Noting that the Victorian liberal theorist Herbert Spenser
had applauded the extermination of those troublesome human populations that stood in
the way of the civilizing projects of Western colonialism,
19
Lindqvist observes that
Germans "have been made sole scapegoats for ideas of extermination that are actually a
common European heritage."
20
Indeed, what memory sites like Tuol Sleng and Nyarubuye
seem to show is that extermination has a properly human, not just a common European,
heritage.
The Tuol Sleng genocide tour offers an unpleasant sensory overload. From the outside,
Tuol Sleng looks exactly like the French colonial-era high school that it was prior to Pol
Pot's ascendance, with its neat rows of low-rise classroom blocks surrounded by green
yards. An unknowing visitor would expect boisterous schoolchildren to suddenly erupt from
the classrooms. Tuol Sleng, however, has long ceased to exist as a school: the first sight
that greeted me inside this non-school was of a row of classrooms that had been
reconfigured as torture chambers. The sight of beds that had been repurposed into devices
of pain created a visceral shock, as did the old photographs of the bloody corpses of
murdered interrogation subjects still bound to the naked bed-frames. These torture cells
are affective machines of terror. Elaine Scarry captures the semiological annihilation of
ordinary objects that have been transformed into instruments of torture:
Made to participate in the annihilation of the prisoners, made to demonstrate that everything
is a weapon, the objects themselves, and with them the fact of civilization, are annihilated:
there is no wall, no window, no door, no bathtub, no refrigerator, no chair, no bed.
21
This semiological annihilation pinpoints the shock and nausea of S-21's torture
chambers: the classrooms are no longer classrooms; the beds are no longer beds they
have been perverted and transformed into places and instruments of pain and death. As
Marco Abel points out, the viewer of violent images possesses the "constitutive ability to
respond before these images represent."
22
My "response-ability," as it were, consists of
my somatic tendency to feel sensory affect prior to conceptualization or representation.
When I first saw these blood-stained non-beds, my pulse began racing like the percussion
of a skor, the traditional Khmer drum, heightening my somatic anticipation for the horrors
to follow. Unlike the gustatory pleasures of my breakfast with Nuon Chea, the sensations I
experienced at S-21 were not at all enjoyable. My sensory overexcitation led me to
contrast the routine anticipation of the students of Tuol Svay Prey High School awaiting
their examinations with the anguished anticipation of S-21's prisoners awaiting their
interrogation sessions. The gaudy displays of the tortures of Hell offered at Singapore's
Haw Par Villa, which I had seen in my childhood, could not compete with the grim
evidence of the actual tortures that went on in S-21. Within singular memory sites of
atrocity like Tuol Sleng or Nyarubuye, imaginary horrors are the pale shadows of the Real.
The Tuol Sleng genocide museum tour is linear, a legacy of the rational architecture of
the original school complex. This rationality was brought to its excess in the rational
transformation of the school into a disciplinary zone of torture and extermination. I arrived
at dim corridors of individual holding cells after leaving the row of torture cells. The Khmer
Rouge constructed these by crudely dividing up the original classrooms: a nightmarish
reterritorialization of striated space. The tactile and visual crudeness of these prison cells,
and their claustrophobic and dim interiors, created a sensory bloc dominated by the affects
of fear and horror. Apart from the tactile and the visual, Tuol Sleng also delivers sonorous
and olfactory affects. Silence dominates these walls: even noisy tourists are shocked into
silence. I recall the absence of even the nervous laughter that would normally be voiced
by tourists in exhibits less uncomfortable than this. But Tuol Sleng, of course, is not like
most tourist attractions.
S-21's security regulations warned prisoners against the utterance of unregulated
sounds. The sixth security regulation, for example, states: "While getting lashes or
electrification you must not cry at all," and the tenth warns: "If you disobey any point of my
regulations, you shall get either ten lashes or five shocks of the electric discharge."
23
Reading these inhuman regulations, I imagined silences punctuated by cycles of screams.
Tuol Sleng's sonorous chill is juxtaposed with the lively soundscape just outside its walls. I
recall being surprised to find boisterous neighborhood children using the former school
grounds as their playground. Outside the museum, predatory tuk tuk and motorcycle taxi
drivers waited patiently, calling out their services to the emotionally drained visitors: I
remember having had to flee from them the rude cacophony of their commercial appeals
jarred unpleasantly with my fresh memories of S-21's mortuary silences.
In the past, the museum offered a display of the victims' clothes. This would have added
an olfactory affect to the sensory bloc experienced by the visitors, generating visceral
nausea. The nausea thus generated would have mirrored the olfactory affect of Rwanda's
genocide memory sites, where visitors can "smell the stench of the bodies, see the rotting
tufts of hair on their heads, and see the machete wounds deep in the skulls."
24
These
displays of the clothes of the dead in Cambodia and Rwanda mirror similar displays of the
remnants of lives of victims in museums commemorating the Shoah. J effrey Ochsner cites
the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum's poignant collections of "ordinary objects
that were taken at the death camps from those about to die objects like shoes,
hairbrushes, toothbrushes, cutlery, scissors, and the like. These things are ordinary;
indeed, they look just like similar objects that we all own and use every day."
25
Indeed,
the affective power of the remnants of ordinary lives arises from their very ordinariness, as
this generates a sense of empathy with the victims, even allowing us to "experience a
partial sense of the fear they must have felt."
26
There seems to be little time or distance between these things and their owners and the
similar things that we own and ourselves. Thus, these offer the opportunity for us to realize
the similar humanity of those who were killed in the death camps and ourselves. They can
become sites for projection (linking objects), and through them we can experience (project)
a close connection to the feeling of the lives of those who died.
27
J ill Bennett, analyzing the artworks of Columbian artist Doris Salcedo, which similarly
consist of remnants of the lives of victims of atrocity, points out that these objects have
undergone a radical reterritorialization of their everyday meanings.
28
Through their violent
resituation in memory sites, these ordinary objects lose their former functional meanings
and are instead transformed into Ochsnerian linking objects: allowing the living spectators
to project onto them a sense of community with the dead.
Having walked past the corridors of prison cells, I next came to Tuol Sleng's displays of
mug-shots of S-21's victims. These walls of photographs of the faces of the condemned
generate a powerful visual affect. While S-21 can be described as a machine of pain and
death, these interior walls of memorial photographs can be described as machines of grief
and sorrow. These images offer an ironic counterpoint to Pierre Bourdieu's account of
middlebrow photographic practice as centered on "solemnizing and immortalizing the high
points of family life."
29
The affective potency of Tuol Sleng's mug-shots can be analyzed
using Roland Barthes' binary of the studium and punctum. The studium consists of the
intentional field of the photographic image, contested and negotiated between the
photographer and the viewer. The punctum, on the other hand, refers to the unintentional
element in the photographic image which interrupts or "punctuates" the studium.
30
The
studia of S-21's mug shots hence consist in Democratic Kampuchea's bureaucratic need
to document and discipline these alleged counterrevolutionaries. Their puncta, on the other
hand, consist in those unintentional elements drops of blood, facial grimaces, marks on
the walls which reveal the human horror (of their impending tortures and murders) these
victims faced, and which generate, almost three decades later, sympathy and the
associated affects of sorrow and grief in the viewers today. These intense emotions stem
from the temporally frozen images of fear and hopelessness that can be discerned on the
faces of these victims.
Consider, for example, Tuol Sleng's infamous mug-shot of Saang, the nom de guerre of
Khmer Rouge cadre Chan Kim Srun, which features her cradling her infant baby.
31
Saang's unkempt hair and swollen eye bags punctuate the ostensive documentary purpose
of the photograph. The shadows of the curtain serving as the backdrop signal to the
viewer the existence of the horrors lying outside the frame of the photograph, which would
soon devour Saang and her baby. According to Prak Khan, a surviving interrogator, the
children of S-21's prisoners would be murdered by being dropped from the prison's
balconies, to "prevent them from being a nuisance."
32
The puncta that signal the horrors
facing Saang and her baby function as the visual boundary which Deleuze argues
separates order from chaos.
33
Indeed, the formality of the disciplinary order of Saang's
mug-shot juxtaposes with the sensual pain expressed through her appearance, signaling
the violent chaos of pain and death soon to come.
In this way the S-21 mug-shots recode the original overcoding generated by what
Deleuze and Guattari describe as the abstract machines of faciality.
34
The face overcodes
the pre-symbolic hermeneutic of the body, allowing the transformation of the subject into a
primal frame of meaning. The S-21 mug-shots, with their studia and puncta, recode the
faces, encoding within them Democratic Kampuchea's sense of righteous justice in
identifying and eliminating Cambodia's race enemies, and also resituating the victims in
the fateful context of eternal murder. Susan Sontag succinctly describes the sense of
nausea generated by these images:
These Cambodian women and men of all ages, including many children, photographed from
a few feet away, usually in half figure, are as in Titian's The Flaying of Marsyas, where
Apollo's knife is eternally about to descend forever looking at death, forever about to be
murdered, forever wronged. And the viewer is in the same position as the lackey behind the
camera; the experience is sickening.
35
Simon O'Sullivan reminds us that affects are "immanent to experience," in that they
consist of the temporal "becomings" of our bodies triggered by sensation.
36
Different
sensations have the power to generate different affects, and "certain encounters will be
more productive, others less so."
37
The visual affect of Tuol Sleng's walls of mug-shots
can hence be productively contrasted with the sonorous affect of recordings of Cambodia's
prerevolutionary music. The vast majority of Cambodia's musicians were murdered during
the Democratic Kampuchea period, forever altering the affective response towards their
works. This music has thus been reterritorialized from a mode of entertainment into a
funereal soundscape of the dead.
38
Consider Sinn Sisamouth's rendition of Quando My Love, for example.
39
As a Khmer
cover version of a classic Italian pop song, the immediate sonorous affect is one of
amusing kitsch. However, when one remembers Sisamouth's terrible death at the hands of
the Khmer Rouge,
40
the song's sonorous affect assumes tragic and elegiac undertones: I
still feel chills whenever I hear Sisamouth's rendition of this song. Viewing photographs of
the dead generates in my opinion a different affect from that of listening to songs sung by
the dead. The latter contains an element of the uncanny that the former lacks. While the
visual affect of viewing a still photograph of the dead is constructed by the mind's
interpretation of the puncta we imagine the violent torture and murder that eternally
await the condemned the sonorous affect of a song sung by the dead is constituted by
the juxtaposition of the knowledge of the violence of the singer's death with the obscene
dynamism of the living rhythms of his recorded performance of the song. In the absence of
a video recording of the event, we have to visually imagine Sisamouth's murder. In
contrast, we don't have to imagine Sisamouth's living voice we immediately hear it
whenever we listen to the recordings of his songs.
The affect created by Tuol Sleng's walls of mug-shots can also be juxtaposed with the
affect created by the wall of names at the USS Arizona memorial in Pearl Harbor. In
contrast to the violence of intense emotions created by the photographs of S-21's victims,
the stately cadences and elegant arrangement of names at the USS Arizona memorial
generate refined emotions of restrained sorrow. The Arizona memorial's arrangement of
names echoes the starkness of Maya Lin's controversial and popular Vietnam Veterans
Memorial. J effrey Ochsner argues that the memorial's affective power arises from its
"space of absence," that is, the "void in which we have the simultaneous experience of
both the absence and the presence of the dead."
41
The inscription of the names of the
dead on the reflective polished walls of the memorial generates an uncanny sensation of
connection between the living viewer and the memorialized deceased.
42
A map of skulls used to be on display adjacent to Tuol Sleng's walls of mug-shots,
marking the linear conclusion of the museum tour. Created from exhumed human remains
from S-21's mass graves, the visual and tactile rawness of this osseous collage generated
in me the sensation of nausea. This map was a material realization of a violent
cartography, which Michael J . Shapiro describes as "an articulation of geographic
imaginaries and antagonisms, based on models of identity-difference."
43
Through its
biopolitical security apparatuses, the xenophobic Pol Pot regime sought to purge
Democratic Kampuchea of the enemy Vietnamese and their Cambodian allies, who were
denounced as kbal yuen khluen khmae, literally "Khmer bodies with Vietnamese heads."
44
Policing agencies like S-21 were hence created to "identify the domestic spaces where
bodies were judged to be dangerous because they are associated with foreign
antagonists."
45
These spaces eventually evolved through the extermination of these
dangerous bodies into the killing fields and mass graves which made manifest the
violent cartography of Democratic Kampuchea. This decaying map of skulls was finally
dismantled in 2002.
46
The raw viscerality of genocide memorials like Tuol Sleng and Nyarubuye stands in
stark contrast to the cerebral abstraction of similar genocide memorials in the West. For
example, Berlin's Monument to the Murdered J ews of Europe consists of "a vast grid of
2,711 concrete pillars whose jostling forms seem to be sinking into the earth."
47
The
economic correlation of Cambodia's and Rwanda's poverty, as opposed to the prosperity of
the West, could explain this; as could S-21's and Nyarubuye's relatively crude
technologies of killing, as contrasted with the industrial apparatuses of genocide deployed
by Nazi Germany.
The genocide memorial art of Vann Nath is also on display at this part of the museum.
Imprisoned and tortured at S-21, Vann Nath was spared execution because of his artistic
skills: the Khmer Rouge assigned him the task of creating portraits of Pol Pot. Stefan
Ruzowitzky's Die Flscher echoes Vann Nath's real-life experiences: the fictional hero's
artistic talents enable him to survive a Nazi concentration camp: the guards commission
him to paint their family portraits.
48
Following the fall of the Khmer Rouge to the
Vietnamese on J anuary 7, 1979, Vann Nath was commissioned by the Vietnamese
occupation regime to document the horrors of S-21.
49
In the resulting series of brutal
paintings, entitled Scenes of Life at S-21, he vividly depicts bodies in pain. Given that
these paintings are displayed right next to the torture instruments they depict including
an apparatus for water-boarding, a torture technique recently utilized by the American
Central Intelligence Agency against al Qaeda suspects
50
they inspired in me an
imagined reliving of the acts of torture, and hence an intense visceral affect of fear and
horror. In terms of affect, Scenes of Life at S-21 resembles Fernando Botero's Abu Ghraib
paintings. Arthur Danto notes that while the leaked Abu Ghraib photographs fail to "bring
us closer to the agonies of the victims," Botero's paintings successfully "establish a
visceral sense of identification with the victims, whose suffering we are compelled to
internalize and make vicariously our own."
51
Susan Sontag argues that S-21's photographed victims "remain an aggregate:
anonymous victims," and that "even if named, unlikely to be known to 'us.'."
52
While this is
probably true of the typical foreign visitor to Tuol Sleng, researchers like David Chandler
have done much to excavate and reveal the identities and histories of these victims.
53
And
what has been revealed has the power to reshape one's response to the visual records of
their suffering and death. As Nic Dunlop explains:
What is not immediately apparent to most visitors to the prison is that Tuol Sleng was
created for rooting out enemies from within the party. The majority of the prisoners were
from the Khmer Rouge's own ranks. This adds an unwelcome moral complication: among
the photographs I now faced there were interrogators as well as guards from the prison
itself, Khmer Rouge who suddenly found their roles reversed during the many purges. The
upside-down world of Tuol Sleng blurred the distinction between the guilty and the
innocent.
54
Tuol Sleng's mug-shots hence undercode the faces of the dead: these images of faces
are incapable of signaling the facticity of past innocence or guilt. I had no way to identify
who, among the condemned, were S-21's former torturers and executioners. Their
numbers were not insignificant: according to the Documentation Center of Cambodia, "at
least 563 members of the staff of Tuol Sleng about one-third of the total were
executed while working there."
55
It was inevitable that the fear and loathing Tuol Sleng inspired in me would be tempered
by my learning of the circumstances of the genesis of the museum. Early in their
occupation of Cambodia, the Vietnamese transformed S-21 into a genocide museum for
the dual purposes of vilifying the Khmer Rouge and valorizing the Vietnamese occupation
army qua liberation force. The Vietnamese regarded the creation of Tuol Sleng as
politically necessary given the geo-political background of the Cold War: the U.S. and
China were offering diplomatic and material support to the ousted Khmer Rouge in order
to oppose the Soviet-backed Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia. To create the museum,
the Vietnamese sent Ung Pech, himself a survivor of S-21, to communist Poland to learn
from the genocide museum at Auschwitz. Under his subsequent directorship of Tuol Sleng,
the ample evidence of Khmer Rouge atrocities was collected and put on public display.
56
The political genesis of the Tuol Sleng genocide museum is illuminated by Pierre Nora's
account of the dialectic between memory and history in the creation of les lieux de
mmoire (places of memory):
Memory is life, borne by living societies founded in its name. It remains in permanent
evolution, open to the dialectic of remembering and forgetting, unconscious of its
successive deformations, vulnerable to manipulation and appropriation, susceptible to being
long dormant and periodically revived. History, on the other hand, is the reconstruction,
always problematic and incomplete, of what is no longer.
57
With many survivors of Democratic Kampuchea choosing not to share with their children
their traumatic memories, there exists Nora's "dialectic of remembering and forgetting" in
Cambodian society of the Khmer Rouge's atrocities. Stphanie Ge and Im Lim observe
that "many youngsters in Cambodia still find it hard to presume true the horrors committed
under the regime of Pol Pot and his henchmen Painful memories of the regime remain
kept behind a wall of silence in many a family."
58
J udith Butler reminds us of the
"vulnerability to the other that is part of bodily life."
59
It is a condition of our existence as
embodied individuals that we remain always open to the external and internal threats of
trauma and disintegration. What these survivors of the Khmer Rouge have experienced is
this existential vulnerability writ large: it is not surprising that many have chosen silence as
a means of coping with their traumatic memories. Institutionally, the history of Democratic
Kampuchea only entered the official school curriculum in May 2009, with the introduction
of a high school history textbook of the period.
60
As Burcu Mnyas points out, "the absent
or limited education since the peace agreement has culminated in sustained myths,
unanswered questions and denial in Cambodian youth."
61
Since its establishment in 2006, the Khmer Rouge genocide tribunal has become a key
site for the unfolding of the "dialectic of remembering and forgetting" in Cambodia. As of
this time of writing, the ECCC has convicted Kaing Guek Eav, a.k.a. Duch, the
commandant of S-21, of war crimes and crimes against humanity, and sentenced him to
35 years in prison. However, in an act that would be interpreted by some genocide
survivors as cruel arithmetic, this sentence was reduced to 19 years for time served and
other factors. Theary Seng, a prominent human rights lawyer who had been orphaned by
the Khmer Rouge, calculated that Duch's 19 year sentence "comes down to serving 11
and half hours per life that he took which is not just comprehensible or acceptable."
62
Chum Mey, one of the few survivors of S-21, unhappily declared that the sentence had re-
victimized all the victims of the Khmer Rouge.
63
For these aggrieved survivors and relatives of victims, the judicial arithmetic had in
effect retroactively recoded their hopeful expectations for justice into what Lauren Berlant
describes as cruel optimism: their lifelong desires for justice, already so hurtful in the long
decades before the establishment of the ECCC, now engenders new pain in the wake of
what they now perceive as the leniency of Duch's sentence.
64
However, this is not the
sole view held by survivors on Duch's sentence. For example, Thet Sambath, the same
Phnom Penh Post journalist who in 2007 had brought Frank Cibulka and me to Pailin to
interview Duch's boss, Nuon Chea, argued that "justice should never be vindictive," and
that "the judges were right to take into account Duch's co-operation with the court and his
statements of remorse." This, despite the fact that Sambath himself had lost both his
parents and his brother to the Khmer Rouge!
65
The coming trials of Nuon Chea and other
top Khmer Rouge leaders promise to generate more confusion and pain among the
surviving victims and the wider Cambodian audience.
One common thread that I found significant in my encounters with memories of atrocity
is the juxtaposition between the painful memory of the atrocious past and the banality of
the living present. As Deleuze points out, "of the present, we must say at every instant that
it 'was,' and of the past, that it 'is,' that it is eternally, for all time."
66
This temporal flow,
which transforms living outrages into glacial memory, encourages the dilution of sensory
affect. This explained the disconcerting slippage between the banality of Nuon Chea as an
elderly man enjoying breakfast, and his past facticity as a genocidal monster; or the
disturbing disconnect between the liveliness of the surroundings of the Tuol Sleng
genocide museum, filled with playful children, begging amputees, and loud tuk tuk and
motorcycle taxi drivers, and the memorials of pain and death lying within.
Many discussions of memorials of historical pain either ignore or gloss over the affective
experience of viewing these exhibits. This lacuna prevents a richer understanding of the
power of these memorials. The growing popularity of 'dark' tourism has increased the
incidence of encounters between haptic space and memorials of historical pain: it is my
hope that this essay has offered a useful contribution towards the line of analysis that
examines this intersection of memory and affect.
Alvin Cheng-Hin Lim
Alvin Cheng-Hin Lim is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, where he
is exploring the intersection of political theory and the area study of Cambodia. He received his MA from the
National University of Singapore, where he applied Martin Buber's philosophy of dialogue to environmental
ethics. Prior to his studies at the University of Hawaii, he taught philosophy for three years at Pannasastra
University in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Alvin can be reached at alvinch@hawaii.edu
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Notes
1. Slavoj iek, In Defence of Lost Causes (New York, NY: Verso, 2008), 163.
2. Patrick, "Neuroscience and Nostalgia," Very Evolved, 19 February 2009,
http://veryevolved.com/2009/02/neuroscience-and-nostalgia/
3. J onah Lehrer, Proust Was A Neuroscientist (New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), 80.
4. Ibid.
5. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by
Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 492.
6. Benny Widyono, Dancing in Shadows: Sihanouk, the Khmer Rouge, and the United Nations in Cambodia
(New York, NY: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008), 87-88.
7. Ibid., 89.
8. "Cambodian police close Khmer Rouge caf," ABC News, 1 October 2005,
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2005/10/01/1472617.htm
9. Samantha Melamed and Thet Sambath, "New Cafe Promises 'Khmer Rouge Experience'," Cambodia
Daily, 30 September 2005, http://www.camnet.com.kh/cambodia.daily/selected_features/cd-30-9-2005.htm.
10. Ben Kiernan, The Pol Pot Regime: Race, Power, and Genocide in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge,
1975-79 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 55-56.
11. Melamed & Sambath, op cit.
12. Pauline Nguyen, Luke Nguyen and Mark J ensen, Secrets of the Red Lantern: Stories and Vietnamese
Recipes from the Heart (Sydney: Murdoch Books, 2007), 13.
13. J acques Derrida, "Economimesis," translated by Richard Klein, Diacritics 11, no. 2 (1981): 16.
14. Seth Mydans, "For Khmer Rouge guard, it was kill or be killed," International Herald Tribune, 1 March
2009, http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/03/01/asia/guard.php
15. Book IV, 439e.
16. Philip Gourevitch, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories
From Rwanda (New York, NY: Picador, 1998), 19.
17. J ohn Lennon and Malcolm Foley, Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster (London: Cengage
Learning EMEA, 2000), 3.
18. Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question (London: Routledge, 2008), 151.
19. Sven Lindqvist, Exterminate All The Brutes: One Man's Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the
Origins of European Genocide, translated by J oan Tate (New York, NY: New Press, 1996), 8-9.
20. Ibid., 9.
21. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York, NY: Oxford
University Press, 1987), 41.
22. Marco Abel, Violent Affect: Literature, Cinema, and Critique after Representation (Lincoln NE: University
of Nebraska Press, 2008), 10.
23. Nic Dunlop, The Lost Executioner: A Journey to the Heart of the Killing Fields (New York, NY: Walker &
Co, 2006), 20-21.
24. Nate Miller, "Genocide Tourism," Down There, 7 J anuary 2007,
http://natedownthere.blogspot.com/2007/01/genocide-tourism.html
25. J effrey Ochsner, "A Space of Loss: The Vietnam Veterans Memorial," Journal of Architectural Education
50, no. 3 (1997): 171.
26. Ibid.
27. Ibid.
28. J ill Bennett, Emphatic Vision: Affect, Trauma, and Contemporary Art (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2005), 62.
29. Pierre Bourdieu, Shaun Whiteside and Luc Boltansky, Photography: A Middle-Brow Art , translated by
Shaun Whiteside (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 19.
30. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, translated by Richard Howard (New York,
NY: Hill and Wang, 1981), 26-27.
31. Dunlop, op cit., 22-23.
32. Ibid., 132.
33. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, translated by Daniel W. Smith (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 83.
34. Deleuze and Guattari, op cit., p. 170.
35. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 61.
36. Simon O'Sullivan, Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari: Thought Beyond Representation (New York,
NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 41.
37. Ibid.
38. Pirozzi, J ohn (Producer). "Don't Think I've Forgotten (Cambodia's Lost Rock And Roll)," YouTube, 3
November 2006, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1epvOrrmvY
39. Sinn Sisamouth (Performer), "Quando My Love," YouTube, 18 August 2008,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXYv5bCXWMI
40. D. Allan Kerr, "Sinn Sisamouth: Cambodian Song-Hero," Seacoast Online, 7 December 2008,
http://www.seacoastonline.com/articles/20081207-OPINION-812070324
41. Ochsner, op cit., 156.
42. Ibid., 164.
43. Michael J . Shapiro, Cinematic Geopolitics (New York, NY: Routledge, 2009), 18.
44. Henri Locard, Pol Pot's Little Red Book: The Sayings of Angkar (Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2004),
179-181.
45. Shapiro, op cit., 19.
46. Ker Munthit. "Cambodia's 'Skull Map' Memorial Comes Down," Seattle Times, 11 March 2002,
http://community.seattletimes.nwsource.com/archive/?date=20020311&slug=skullmap11
47. Nicolai Ouroussoff, "A Forest of Pillars, Recalling the Unimaginable," New York Times, 9 May 2005,
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/09/arts/design/09holo.html
48. Die Flscher, DVD, directed by Stefan Ruzowitzky (2007; Hamburg: Magnolia Filmproduktion, 2007).
49. Ly Boreth, "Devastated Vision(s): The Khmer Rouge Scopic Regime in Cambodia," Art Journal 62, no. 1
(2003): 71-72
50. Greg Miller, "Three were waterboarded, CIA chief confirms," Los Angeles Times, 6 February 2008,
http://articles.latimes.com/2008/feb/06/nation/na-terror6
51. Arthur Danto, "The Body in Pain," The Nation 283, no. 18 (2006): 24.
52. Sontag, op cit.
53. David Chandler, Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot's Secret Prison (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1999).
54. Dunlop, op cit., p. 23.
55. Mydans, op cit.
56. Dunlop, op cit., 183-185.
57. Pierre Nora, "Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mmoire," Representations 26, Spring (1989):
8.
58. Stphanie Ge and Im Lim, "The Khmer Rouge Regime in Cambodia: Half Story, Half History?" Ka-set,
4 November 2008, http://cambodia.ka-set.info/khmer-rouge/cambodia-history-youth-students-school-books-
curriculum081104.html
59. J udith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (New York, NY: Verso, 2004), 29.
60. Cheang Sokha and Georgia Wilkins, "First KR Textbook Launched," Phnom Penh Post . 21 May 2009,
http://www.phnompenhpost.com/index.php/2009052125989/National-news/First-KR-textbook-launched.html
61. Burcu Mnyas, "Genocide in the minds of Cambodian youth: transmitting (hi)stories of genocide to
second and third generations in Cambodia," Journal of Genocide Research 10, no. 3 (2008): 428.
62. "Tribunal Convicts Duch to 19 Years in Prison," VOA Khmer, 26 J uly 2010,
http://www1.voanews.com/khmer-english/news/Tribunal-Convicts-Duch-to-19-Years-in-Prison-
99247124.html
63. Seth Mydans, "Anger in Cambodia over Khmer Rouge Sentence," New York Times. 26 J uly 2010.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/27/world/asia/27cambodia.html
64. Lauren Berlant, "Cruel Optimism," Differences 17, no. 3 (2006): 21.
65. Thet Sambath, "The Khmer Rouge took my family but justice should not be vindictive," The Guardian. 27
J uly 2010. http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2010/jul/27/khmer-rouge-war-crimes-sentence
66. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York, NY:
Zone Books, 1991), p. 55.
Copyright 2010 Alvin Cheng-Hin Lim and The J ohns Hopkins University Press

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