I Among Enemy Am Enemy: A Review of Monica Sok's A Nail the Evening Hangs On

To the other nations who are not witnesses, who are not subject to the same oppressions, they cannot know. Unfathomable the words, the terminology: enemy, atrocities, conquest, betrayal, invasion, destruction. They exist only in the larger perception of History's recording, that affirmed, admittedly and unmistakably, one enemy nation has disregarded the humanity of another… To the others, these accounts are about (one more) distant land, like (any other) distant land, without any discernable features in the narrative, (all the same) distant like any other.

—Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee

Monica Sok's debut poetry collection, A Nail the Evening Hangs On, reveals atrocities spanning Cambodia from the 1960s through the late '70s, from which the genocide at Tuol Sleng takes central stage. Sok's meticulous documentation of what the speaker's family endured flashes across every poem in this collection, whether she references "old people," "Year Zero," "tonnage," or "family portraits." The poems spread from Phnom Penh in the Mekong Lowlands to Siem Reap in the Northwestern Province to Ratanakiri in the Eastern Province; and they also move from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to New York City, in which Sok herself was raised and received her MFA, respectively. Such landmarks are significant because Yuos Samon, Sok's uncle, was on track to follow a similar trajectory in the '70s—except that he returned to Phnom Penh after moving to the United States, where he was killed during the Cambodian Genocide.

The various voices in this collection consider oral history anew; the speaker follows her family across time and reports what she can piece together from their memories. Sok offers this koan, from her poem "Song of an Orphaned Soldier Clearing Land Mines": "There are things in this world / we must make one another see." In pursuing the things in this world that are Sok's inheritance, she must see. While others visit the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum to "never forget," having taken a sober break from drinking sugar water from halved coconuts, Sok's speaker wanders the halls of the former school building in search of a portrait of her uncle, taken among the 14,000 inmates also captured in portraiture prior to execution: "They buy books from the souvenir shops / and silk scarves and krama / and handmade purses. // But we come here to look for someone."

Anlong Veng, in the Northwest Province of Cambodia, represents not only the scar of the former Khmer Rouge stronghold, but also the first of the killing fields following the fall of the Democratic Kampuchea. In her poem, "Self-Portrait as War Museum Captions," we travel with her through a museum of weapon artifacts from the Khmer Rouge—AK-47's, Howitzer 105mm's, M2A2's, DK 75mm's—wherein tourists pose and play with the US- and Chinese-manufactured artillery on display. A lawn mower outside the war museum "activates the scene of a battlefield." The poem ends, "The young woman rests next to a DK 75mm made in China, found in / Anlong Veng." Much in the way that Sok's speaker enters the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum searching for her uncle, the violence remains alive at the end of this poem. The Dangrek Mountains in Anlong Veng, used as a Khmer Rouge base, hide a forest with still-not-excavated landmines. As Sok's various speakers remain occupied by the psychic pain of inherited trauma ("I could fall over from this too"), the landscape of her home country remains literally pocked and dashed with secret weapons.

In Hannah Arendt's On Violence, she examines the rise of the "New Left" in the post-World War II Boomer generation and the misinterpretation and corruption of Marxist and Hegelian teachings as they relate to grave midcentury violences. Written on the heels of the Cambodian Civil War, Arendt offers this helpful reminder in times of war: "If we look on history in terms...