Returning to Phnom Penh in order to fly out of it, the question presented itself again: did I want to visit sites where the Khmer Rouge’s genocide had been memorialised? Nearby: Tuol Sleng, also known as S21, a school-turned-detention centre. Not far: the mass graves of the Killing Fields.
I weighed two viewpoints gathered earlier. A dear one, who does not believe in what I believe, looked me seriously in the eyes and used words like “dark aura”, cautioning me to consider whether I really wanted to enter such scapes, as one to whom land, water, leaf and memory sing. Meanwhile, my travel companion, whose original approach had been about the necessity of visiting places of massacre and torture to enable reflection on humanity’s capacity for atrocity, conceded: “What your friend and I both carefully avoided telling you about were the trees against which infants’ heads were dashed. Those trees are still standing there.”
I looked them up: chankiri trees, including the Killing Tree, used to end bloodlines, so that children would not later avenge the murders of their families.
“I am Ilankai Tamil,” I’d reminded my companion in an earlier discussion about these historic sites, alluding to his positionality as someone who has no intimate connection to — and my cultural proximity to — certain kinds of violence.
But that morning, I sat uncomfortably with questions of how one truly honours victims and survivors, and whether or not my heightened inherent sensitivity alongside my personal history meant that I could choose to be exempt from experiencing such horrific locations. I spoke of how I could not, even with all that cultural proximity, imagine going to Mullivaikkal except if invited by those remembering their beloved dead. That I wasn’t sure if I, a person of relative privilege in that context, should just go there. That there are ways that respect, and ways that only regard. That I wanted to bear witness to what had happened in Cambodia, but I was not sure — and that I felt some shame about this.
The previous night, I had received a third perspective: an Ilankai Tamil friend, intuitive and tender too, admitted she had not felt right in S21, had not gone on to the Killing Fields thereafter.
In my readings, I had encountered something I continue to turn over in my mind, even now that I’ve travelled on to another destination, having sealed my choice not to go, not this time. Rain and other natural conditions shift the earth at the Killing Fields, and even nearly half a century on, bones still surface here and there. These are human remains, so I hold the metaphor gently: nothing stays buried, not what we fear, not even what we thought we released. The thunderous wars in the heart, the terrible things in the world.
As I parse these thoughts, a genocide is happening in Palestine. Another in Darfur. A newly discovered mass grave in Chemmani, Sri Lanka, yields evidence of brutal events in the mid-1990s. Let the truth rise, I invocate. Some of us will look it in the eye immediately. Some of us will bear witness, slowly, but without turning away.