Witnessing Cambodia’s Disappeared

Representing the first two sustained literary treatments of the Cambodian genocide in Canadian literature, Kim Echlin’s The Disappeared and Madeleine Thien’s Dogs at the Perimeter employ the genre of fiction to contribute to the testimonial archive of the atrocities committed by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge regime while simultaneously deconstructing the foreignness of this historical trauma in relation to Canada’s past. Mobilizing an aesthetics of entwined responsibility that claims Cambodia’s history as a part of Canada’s international history, the novels of Echlin and Thien prompt a consideration of the role of novels written by non- Cambodians in confronting issues of Western complicity in foreign human rights abuses and in mediating questions about alternative epistemologies of healing and trauma recovery in the aftermath of mass violence. This essay suggests that the failure of justice and accountability that has characterized Cambodia’s international human rights movement speaks to the urgency and importance of such acts of literary responsibility.