Spirits of Dissent: Southeast Asian Memories and Disciplines of Death

Lieutenant Somsy, a lowland Lao man in his sixties, was speaking to me about the protective words, the cham mon that had kept him alive during his term in the Royal Lao Army from the 1950s to the early 1970s.¹ He had walked for six weeks to find the acan, the teacher, who gave him these powerful words. The acan had him jump into a pit of sharpened bamboo and grab a thorny vine that pierced his skin to the bone. Yet when the acan spoke some words and touched the wounds, they healed. Minutes later Somsy began to speak of another memory, a memory of near death from which his cham mon had protected him, a memory of another pit, other barbs, a hole in the ground, covered with barbed wire, where he was held captive in a Pathet Lao prison camp. "Sometimes late at night they took me blindfolded to the jungle, threatened to kill me, ordered me to dig my own grave. If I refused they hit me with the butt of an AK-47." He sketched a diagram of the camp on a scrap of notepaper: the guard tower, the path of the patrols, the route he had crawled on a rainy night after he and his cell mates had managed to unravel a little of the barbed wire over the pit. "I was the first to get out. Two others came through the hole after me. I don't know if they made it. The soldiers saw us then and fired . . . . After we talk about the past, I usually dream about it. I dream I am being shelled by mortars and then I wake up. I have tried to forget many times. I just cannot."

When we met again I asked Somsy if he had had nightmares after our last conversation. He said yes: he had dreamed he was being shot at and suddenly realized he had forgotten his "buddha," the protective amulet he wore around his neck.² Somsy is one of about forty refugees from Laos and Cambodia who spoke with me about death, medicine, and war.³ I learned to worry about the nightmares our conversations could leave in their wake.⁴ One month I had several talks with a Lao couple, the Thaos, who had each lost a first spouse to cancer. When I heard that they had suffered nightmares after my last visit, I imagined that they had relived the terrors of crossing the Mekong into Thailand at night. But no: they had dreamed of the deaths of their first spouses in U.S. hospitals.

In this article I consider how memories of the deaths of loved ones in U.S. hospitals and the aftermath of deaths in U.S. funeral homes can be as disturbing for certain refugees as memories of crossing borders under gunfire or of near death in a prison camp. I suggest that the terror of such memories is related both to the erosion in medical and mortuary institutions of specific spirit relationships and protections, and to experiences of haunting that are shaped by political exile. Stories told by survivors are peopled by the lost spirits of loved ones, the dangerous spirits of those who died by violence, the angry spirits of ancestors, and the adjudicating spirits of the land. How do we make sense of the ghostly figures in these stories without "anthropologizing"⁵ or "psychologizing" them, that is, without reducing them to examples of cultural belief or psychic symbols of trauma? If, as Avery Gordon argues, ghosts and spirits are social figures,⁶ how do we read their concerns for compassionate medical care, proper burials, and respect for spiritual practice? Stories of death in the United States reverberate in wartime memories of mercenary medicine, hauntings by restless dead, and the uncanny power of particular...