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  • Cambodian American Memoirs and the Politics of Narrative Strategies
  • Sue J. Kim (bio)

In the last half century or so, the idea that form is not inherently political has perhaps been most powerfully challenged by critiques of narrative realism from two areas: first, trauma studies and, second, poststructuralist-informed ethnic and postcolonial studies. Scholars argue that literary realism, a conventional linear narrative with coherent characters that strives for verisimilitude, is often complicit with various kinds of psychic and political repression. Traumas, Cathy Caruth writes, are "unexpected or overwhelming violent event[s]" that cannot be fully comprehended during or after their occurrence; as a result, in continual failing attempts to master the unmasterable experience, victims of trauma experience "repeated flashbacks, nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena" (1996: 90). Such impossible struggles to understand trauma in language manifest in writing about trauma through disruptions in conventional [End Page 27] order, such as repetition, aporia, and indeterminacy. In other words, rather than relying on linear empiricism—implicit in realist aesthetics—we must attend to narratives of trauma by attending to those disruptions. In Asian American literary studies, the poststructuralist critique of linear, realist narrative has been popularized by Lisa Lowe in Immigrant Acts, who argues that realist aesthetics are frequently complicit in naturalizing the master narratives of the nation-state and imperialism (1996: 104). In contrast, Lowe argues, experimental texts like Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee can be used to disrupt formally and thematically these imperial, linear, teleological models of history.

Both of these critiques of the politics of realistic aesthetics have been, in turn, reappraised in recent years. Greg Forter argues that Caruth's model prioritizes individual over collective trauma over historical periods (e.g., racism, patriarchy) and risks glorifying the aesthetics of trauma as an inherent political good: "It is as if the proposition that we can best know trauma by being traumatized, and that the best kind of text about trauma will therefore transmit trauma 'itself' rather than knowledge about it, makes it possible for critics to embrace an aestheticized despair while construing that embrace as political wisdom" (2007: 282). Similarly, Jinqi Ling and others have argued that Asian American realist narrative traditions are more politically complex than Lowe suggests.

I revisit these debates to provide the broader context in which this essay operates. I concur with the premise of this special section that there are no inherent relationships between narrative strategies and ideologies; how, then, can we better understand this relationship between form and content? Of all these elements—trauma, politics, and narrative—an examination of memoirs by Cambodian American survivors of the Khmer Rouge genocide has much to show us. The texts included in this study have been published in English by major US trade presses, including Haing Ngor's Survival in the Killing Fields (2003; originally published in 1987); Chanrithy Him's When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up under the Khmer Rouge (2000); Loung Ung's First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers (2000) and Lucky Child: A Daughter of Cambodia Reunites with the Sister She Left Behind (2005); and Sichan Siv's Golden Bones: An Extraordinary Journey from Hell in Cambodia to a New Life in America (2008).1 [End Page 28]

While all of these texts are testimonials about the trauma of the Khmer Rouge genocide, they exhibit significant diversity in politics and style. In examining these memoirs, I draw on David Herman's robust definition of narrative as outlined in the introduction to this special section. According to Herman, narratives are representations situated within a specific discourse context, creating a storyworld inhabited by characters of some sort, undergoing events through time. A disruption(s) is introduced into the storyworld, and the representation depicts "the experience of living through this storyworld-in-flux" (Herman 2009: 14). Below I discuss the various discourse contexts of these texts, including witness and testimony as well as therapy and Cold War politics. All of the texts introduce the onset of the Khmer Rouge takeover as the primary disruption, and the descriptions of experiences are particularly visceral during the genocide sections of the narratives. But while the texts display much commonality in depicting the Khmer Rouge's...

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