Of Performance and the Persistent Temporality of Trauma: Memory, Art, and Visions

Physical pain has no voice, but when it at last finds a voice, it begins to tell a story.

—Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain

October 11, 2005, Salt Lake City, Utah

My own experience of violence suggests that trauma is forever a painful feeling, a bodily and mental pain that resurfaces unexpectedly. This traumatic experience is a form of obdurate history waiting to be articulated and written about, but it refuses to be written about in the past tense without the unpredictable—and persistent—intervention of the present tense. Interestingly, the experience I had during and after the performance of my text at the "War Capital Trauma" conference resonates with what Raymond Williams advocates in his seminal essay, "Structures of Feeling," on thinking and writing about history, culture, and society in the present tense: "In most description and analysis, culture and society are expressed in an habitual past tense. The strongest barrier to the recognition of human cultural activity is this immediate and regular conversion of experience into finished products."¹ Indeed, the experience of trauma resists being categorized into a "finished product." Memories of traumatic events, both great and small, are often ineffably and surprisingly evoked by body language, images, words, sounds, and silence; trauma always continues to haunt us. As I recall, the emotional experience evoked by my reading and performance was most unexpected, both for me and for the audience. I hope to capture some of the violence, the fragmented (or fractured) sensory experience, and the unpredictable and persistent temporality of trauma and memory with this performative text.

A Wound (Room) of One's Own

Laurie Sears introduces Boreth Ly. He is dressed all in white, the color of mourning in Southeast Asian tradition, and sits in the back of the room. Miriam Bartha starts playing the third movement of Mahler's Symphony No. 4. A slide with the phrase "A Wound (Room) of One's Own" is projected onto a white screen. Boreth approaches the podium and signals Bartha to stop the music. He then begins to read his prepared text.

My journal dated Sunday, April 17, 2005, reads:²

It is 7:52 p.m. and I am sitting in my windowless office at the Simpson Center for the Humanities, University of Washington. I have been awarded a fellowship so I can reflect and write about trauma, arts, and history. It was April 17, 1975, that the Khmer Rouge entered the city of Phnom Penh, the place of my birth—It is exactly thirty years ago. It is hard to imagine that I survive and am now thirty-eight years old. I became a university professor (figure 1). I have worked hard all these years to overcome the horrors I experienced when I was a child. I spent the next twenty years of my life suppressing the painful memories—it is due to a sense of loss that I narrate my personal trauma to myself and to you today. I needed a sense of perspective. My own reflection reminds me of what Anaïs Nin wrote in

Figure 1.

Boreth Ly on a boat along the Mekong River. Photograph by Kara Olsen-Thielding

her journal dated March 1933; she described the frustration and the anger that her friend, Antonin Artaud, felt after a conference at Sorbonne University, when he tried to show the audience a true "theater of the plague." She quotes Artaud as saying:

They always want to hear about; they want to hear an objective conference on the theater and the plague, I want to give them the experience itself, the plague itself, so they will be terrified, and awaken. . . . Because they do not realize they are dead. Their death is total, like deafness and blindness.³

Prelude

Poetic justice? On April 15, 1998, I saw from the comfort of my Berkeley, California, apartment a photograph of Pol Pot's corpse on television. Apparently the man responsible for the genocide of 1.7 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979 had just...