An Introduction to The Accused

But how many [writers] have come back from it? A whole national literature is buried there, plunged into oblivion, not only without a tombstone, but without clothes, naked, with only a number tagged to its toe. … Where a peaceful forest could have grown, there remained, after all the felling, only two or three trees spared by chance.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (reception speech for 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature)

A writer in the civil war

1863–1953	French colonization
1953–1970	Independence and autocratic rule of Norodom Sihanouk
1970–1975	US-backed coup d'état and Khmer Republic under General Lon Nol
1975–1979	Fall of Phnom Penh and Khmer Rouge regime

Khun Srun was part of a generation of writers who came to maturity in the late 1960s and early 1970s, during the brief "golden age" of twentieth-century Cambodian literature. To briefly cite the names of this era: Chou Thani, Chhut Khay, Hak Chhay Hok, Koy Sarun, Laing Peng Siek, Nuon Khoeun, Soth Polin,¹ Vong Phoeurn, Yim Guechsè. All were born during World War II. All symbolized the success of the education system established under Prince Norodom Sihanouk.² All were exiled or killed under the Khmer Rouge regime.

Khun Srun was born in 1945 in Takeo province, fifty kilometers south of the capital. His father died when he was eight, and his mother, Chi Eng, a small grocer and devout Buddhist, raised him and his six brothers and sisters.³ An excellent student, Khun Srun left home to attend secondary school in Phnom Penh. While completing his teacher training in the Institut Supérieur de Pédagogie, he passed the mathematics baccalaureate while also studying literature and psychology. He read avidly, and began to write. Galvanized by a growing left-wing protest movement, he entered the political fray in 1967. Srun—an admirer of the ideals of the French Revolution, and a reader of Victor Hugo, Albert Camus, and Jean Paul Sartre—initially saw in General Lon Nol's 1970 coup against Sihanouk the possibility of a new 1789. But he was rapidly disenchanted.⁴ For his opposition to the new regime, he was arrested in 1971 and again in 1973.

Despite imprisonment, he remained committed to his vocations. A professor of mathematics, he served on the commission to create Khmer-language textbooks for schools. He continued to work as a journalist, essayist (on psychology, literature, and philosophy),⁵ novelist, and poet. Faithful to a vanishing socialist orientation that rejected both Lon Nol's right-wing republicanism and the violence of Maoist leftists, and sickened by the carnage of the civil war, he decided to leave Cambodia.

By December 1972, everything was ready for his departure. He had succeeded in obtaining the equivalent of a diploma in literary studies from the Université de Rennes in Haute-Bretagne and planned to settle in France. At the last minute, however, the Interior Ministry forbade him from leaving the country. In 1973, after great soul searching, he decided to join the revolutionary resistance, the Khmer Rouge.

Khun Srun's meteoric literary life was over, but he left behind an unconventional, intimate oeuvre of exceptional literary quality. In just four years, he invented new forms and styles that drew the contours of a brilliant, modern literature. His works include Kumhoenh (My Views I, II, III, 1969–1970), three mixed-genre books of poetry, récits, and philosophical fictions, reissued in 1971 as a single volume, Samrah Chivit (Life Is Beautiful); and two autobiographical books, Lumnov Chong Kraoy (Last Home, 1972) and Chun Choap Chaot (The Accused, 1973). He also wrote a final volume of poetry, Chun Neari Mneak (For a Woman, 1973).⁶

The accused

The Accused is at once prison literature, confession (after Rousseau), a provocative mingling of speculation and contemplation (after Montaigne), and Buddhist meditations on death. The narrator—Khun Srun's literary avatar, Chea Em⁷—wants to leave, find meaning, make a grand leap, reach a land of asylum far from conflict, far from pervasive death. The book is a cry against the civil war raging around Phnom Penh; a cry against life itself...