War, Genocide, and Justice: Cambodian American Memory Work

Epilogue: Remembering the Forgetting

· 181 ·· epILoGue · Remembering the Forgetting To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it really was.” It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger. —Walter benjamin, “theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections I often think about our leaving and all we left behind imagined our lives without this exodus dreamt of days when I could speak to Loss to tell her we didn’t choose to leave leaving chose us. —anida yoeu ali, “visiting Loss,” 2005 If, as Lisa Yoneyama maintains, the “process of remembering . . . necessarily entails the forgetting of the forgetfulness,” then Anida Yoeu Ali’s “Visiting Loss” (2005) poetically encompasses a contested matrix of disremembered histories, Khmer Rouge politics, refugee memory, and unstable citizenships.1 A “Cambodian American Muslim transnational,” Ali is a Chicago-based 1.5-generation poet/performer/visual artist who left Cambodia soon after the 1979 dissolution of Democratic Kampuchea.2 An eleven-stanza composition, Ali’s “Visiting Loss” details the refugee artist ’s first return to her country of origin after a twenty-five-year absence.3 Lyrical and autobiographical, epic and elegiac, “Visiting Loss” employs a stream-of-consciousness narration evident in enjambed lines, imagistic stanzas, and affective vignettes.4 While its title foreshadows a mournful journey punctuated by unresolved grief and uneasy reclamation, the poem’s subsequent stanzas instantiate—via form, function, and tone— a complicated Cambodian American cartography delimited by statesanctioned violence, involuntary relocation, and forgetful politics. In so doing, Ali’s “Visiting Loss” engages the central aims and agendas of 182 ePiLoGue Cambodian American memory work, a critical mode of cultural labor that brings into dialogue genocide remembrance, collected memory, and juridical activism. With direct allusions to Khmer Rouge atrocity, free-verse treatments of labor camps, and poignant descriptions of border-crossing refugees, “Visiting Loss” accesses an intergenerational remembrance comprised of parental recollections, childhood accounts, and present-day memory politics. As the poem progresses, “Visiting Loss” becomes an increasingly more intimate contemplation of the historical, judicial, and sociocultural legacies of the Khmer Rouge era. Situated against Cambodia’s Killing Fields, which carry with them a particular history of tribunal machinations and belated justice, Ali’s epic poem pointedly adheres to the transnational remembrance parameters of Cambodian American memory work. Illustratively, the poem begins with an after-the-fact, familial (and familiar ) characterization of Democratic Kampuchea and refugee loss. As Ali asserts, given: 20 million refugees given: individuals who return home are not the same people they were when they left given: nearly every single family in Cambodia suffered losses during the time of the Khmer Rouge prove: the journey never ends for the refugee prove: survivors must learn to live with the absence of 2 million prove: it is absence that propels the living to remember.5 Set within a contemporary imaginary of human rights and international law, Ali’s mention of “givens” and “proves” assumes an immediate evidentiary (and prosecutorial) register. Indeed, it is through this schema that Ali codifies Khmer Rouge crimes by way of numbers, familial experiences, and “the absence of 2 million.” At the same time, Ali’s opening statement of “20 million refugees” concisely characterizes displaced subjectivities in the aftermath of the American War in Vietnam, cold war realpolitik, and forced relocation. These quantifiable losses and impacts—concomitantly situated along a before, during, and after Khmer Rouge temporality and axis—collide with qualitative, less discernible legacies made plain in unending, largely unreconciled refugee journeys. Structurally, these same givens and proves ePiLoGue 183 foreground a vexed Cambodian American selfhood metaphorically configured by (and initially comprehended through) geometry. Greek for “earth measurement,” geometry as a distinct disciplinary mode intersects with a cartographical agenda composed of transnational locations and refugee histories. Whereas Euclidian geometry systemizes the relationship between lines and points, it analogously encompasses the evaluation of surfaces, shapes, and angles. Befitting this geometric matrix, Ali’s “Visiting Loss” connects “20 million refugees” to a “journey [that] never ends,” links individual survivors to “the absence of 2 million,” and fixes “losses during the time of the Khmer Rouge” to an “absence that propels the living to remember.” Furthermore, the tactical placement of givens and proves prefigures a set of specific circumstances that quickly give way to less tangible experiences of survivor loss. Such melancholic frames—which render palpable senses of constant mourning and unresolved loss—are apparent...