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185 Chapter 7 Spirit Debt THESE POEMS BY THE CAMBODIAN POET U Sam Oeur and the Hmong poet Mai Neng Moua track the relationship between mourning and physical traces of the dead, lamenting and protesting the loss of remains within a landscape and the missing names on a monument. In different ways, the poems register longing and anger related to an absence of physical connection with the dead. This connection has been broken, the poets infer, by state terror that separated families and destroyed villages and temples; by statesponsoredbombs andlandmines that tore uplandscapes; andby state memorials that honor soldiers in the U.S. armed services while excluding foreign operatives or civilians. What is at stake in this rupture of material engagement with the dead is a break in the reciprocity with ancestors that is understood as essential to life itself. Ironically, just as the ranks of the dead swelled in wartime Laos and Cambodia , reciprocity with their spirits was severely disrupted. In Laos, soldiers were hastily buried or burned by their comrades in the place where they had died. In Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, fabric was so scarce that gravesites were raided for the cloth wrapping the bodies.1 With the destruction of the wats and the murder and forced defrocking of monks by the Khmer Rouge, the dead received scant mourning.Thosewhowere clandestinely executed were simply thrown in mass graves. Even the ashes of those who had been cremated earlier were lost when wats were destroyed. “When the Vietnamese took over,” Sodoeung recalled, “people were supposed to look for their relatives’ bodies and bones. But how could they look?” One young woman, like many others, had lost her entire family. “She didn’t do any ceremony,” Sodoeung said.Then one dayher family sent a message through a neighbor’s dream. “‘If you don’t go to the wat,wewon’thave any food or clothes towear.’ She didn’t believe it, because she was one of the kids who grew up under the communists. Later on she got sick.” Although the Khmer Rouge officially nullified all responsibilities to the dead, their violence, like the violence of the relentless U.S. bombing campaigns that preceded it, simply inflated the debt, prompting the dead to request recompense through bodily forms of haunting. There is still public discussion in Cambodia of whether to cremate the anonymousremainsof thosewhoweresummarilypiledinmassgraves.Meanwhile the unsettled dead pull at emigrants in the United States. “They have regrets,” Sodoeung said. “Every time they go to the wat they say, ‘Iwish I could find where my parents’ grave is, or their ashes, so I could put them in the wat.’“ Sodoeung described the loss of her grandmother’s remains under the Khmer Rouge. “Welefther ash in the temple,” she said. “But then in 1975we didn’t know where her ashes went. The temple was destroyed. My mother thought that maybe we should find my grandmother’s urn, but it was impossible to find.” During the Khmer Rouge regime those very temple grounds hadbeen used as a torture site.The disturbing possibilitywent unspoken that Sodoeung’s grandmother’s ashes now intermingled with this blood-soaked earth, her spirit lost among the hungry ghosts of tortured prisoners. Debts for Survival Yet itwas also the dead, submerged in thelandscape or emerging from it,who offered a haphazard protection during war or state terror. In his memoir of life under the Khmer Rouge the musician Daran Kravanh wrote: “I cannot tell you why or how I survived; I do not know myself. It is like this: love and music and invisible hands, and something that comes out of the society of the living and the dead, for which there are no words” (LaFreniere 2000, 3). In Kravanh’s rumination, the debt to the dead emerges as a form of sociality, less a specific transaction tobe completed than a relationship tobe cultivated. Even if no words can capture this sociality, stories offer glimpses and approximations , singular moments in the interchange of living and dead. When Kravanh first heard his brother play a certain song, he watched his spirit drift out of his body “like steam rising from a bowl of rice”(15). Long after his brother had died, when Kravanh was in trouble, he heard the song again and sensed his brother nearby, offering him protection. As a soldier in the Cambodian army, Charles’s brother sought protection from a spiritknown simply asYeimao (grandma). According tolegend,Yeimao had declared,whenliving, that shewould...

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