Tribunal, a novel
“When we roll out clichés like ‘time will tell’ and ‘the judgment of history,’ we are of course playing with language. Time does not speak, nor does history judge.”
John
W. Dower, Cultures of War
That's Pol Pot, Saloth Sâr, a happy peasant soldier, smiling in the jungle, during the period in which he and his associates and followers in the Khmer Rouge were murdering three million of their countrymen in the name of the revolutionary transformation of Democratic Kampuchea into a Maoist utopia. The photographs of their atrocities--I thought of putting one or two into this short post, but for me they are simply too graphic--feel impossible to reproduce, like pictures of Auschwitz that one suspects appeal to those who are titillated by the sight of corpses, the evidence of unspeakable torture. The perpetrators of Cambodia's self-immolation left us plenty of records, and in this case I prefer to read the story rather than look at images that are beyond comprehension.
I have obsessed over Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge ever since 1970, the year when, with hundreds of thousands of other Americans, I protested the widening of the Vietnam war into a naive and politically neutral country. I marched and sat and wept and was arrested over the invasion and bombing of a country whose history had about it an almost mythic aura, a country dragged with my country's help into madness, into hell. Over the years I have read every book I could acquire, in English and in French, on these events, beginning with William Shawcross's Sideshow and extending to Philip Short's biography of Pol Pot and Elizabeth Becker's When the War Was Over. I have tried to understand what happened in Democratic Kampuchea, without success.
Over the past five years I wrote a novel about Cambodia, a novel that struggles with issues surrounding genocide, long-delayed and imperfect justice, the fragility of memory, the limits of language, and the comfort of forgetting. It was published last week, and I hope you will forgive my small act of self promotion on this site. I have no idea if the book in any way achieves the goal I set for myself, which was to create a fictional narrative that examined the matter of historical judgement, that asked, in essence, if it is better for us to look at the pictures or to look away.
A memorial isn't a memory but a space where we are induced to remember. My novel was written as a memorial, but in the end I couldn't find a way to answer the question I wanted to answer because, as it turns out, there is no language in which to frame it. Perhaps there isn't even a question.
Here's a short passage in which the novel's narrator, in the course of attempting to construct a coherent explanation of his own past (which intersected with the genocide in Cambodia), ruminates on a famous image from another war. I am not able to reproduce the picture by Erich Andres, but it can be viewed on line and is reproduced in Tribunal:
“In
today’s world, personal truth is the only reality. To stand by that truth—to
declare it—is revolutionary.” The writer Hans Erich Nossack, who died just a few years
ago, nearly unknown in America, wrote in Untergang,
his eye-witness account of the firebombing of Hamburg, his city, “Now time sits
down sadly in a corner and feels useless.”
It was in Guernica, in 1939, that airplanes first dropped bombs on
civilians with the purpose of terrorizing—and, of course, killing them. In Hamburg, between visits to libraries, I
went to a gallery to look at the photographs of Erich Andres. One photo shows
twisted corpses turned to charcoal by the fires ignited by incendiary bombs—an
image that is difficult to look at, pornographic in its depiction of violated
human bodies. Another shows the skeleton of a building that reminds me each
time I see it of Ground Zero in Hiroshima.
The one I now remember as I browse among the hopeful words of
theologians and philosophers (the faint gray light barely penetrates these ranges;
I leave the overhead lights off) show living men and women making their way
through a rubble-strewn street amid dusty, diffused light. Two men carry
bicycles on their backs—there is no question of their being able to ride
through the chunks of stone and mortar—while an old woman, whose stripped dress
looks like the forlorn clothing of the condemned at Birkenau, carefully
negotiates the broken street. The line of people
stretches into the vanishing point at the center of the photograph,
which was then hanging on a wall on a side street of Hamburg, a street similar
to the one in the photo, narrow, rebuilt of course, packed with shops and cafés
and pedestrians. I asked the owner of
the gallery, a thick, florid man whose beard was a shade of white I had never
seen before, as white as a cooked egg, if his shop were on the street captured
by Andres’s photograph, the one that had riveted me for a quarter of an hour,
whose texture was as flat and bland as those haunting photographs of the dead
that had just begun to arrive from Cambodia, from the “killing fields” as they are
being called. I spoke German poorly,
though it was a language I had heard growing up, German filling the rooms of
our apartments as aunts and uncles newly arrived from the old country, the old
disgraced country, passed through on their way to new lives, lives, perhaps, of
equal disgrace. German is a language I
love to read but despair of speaking—back then, not cogent in any case, I
choked on the words as I addressed the egg-faced man, and he looked at me with
amusement, perhaps disdain, and said that no, we were standing in an
entirely new and rebuilt part of the city, one that had not been in the
quarters that were destroyed, and that if I wished to visit the older parts of
town I could take the tram or a cab—he pointed to the door to indicate the
direction in which one might find the remainder of the world. I took the hint and left, but I had no real
interest in locating the scene of the photograph that had so arrested me in the
gallery; the effect was felt and registered, the truth of the image burned, as
it turned out, forever into my memory.
Now in whatever city I find myself, as I walk the streets, it is easy to
imagine the graceful brick apartments and shops lying cracked in the dusty air,
the hurrying pedestrians moving like ghosts through the streets they grew up
in, wondering how they would eat or where they might sleep."
Tribunal is available from Amazon beginning on February 17th, and from my publisher, Fomite Press, internet link below. If you read it, I would very much like to receive your responses here, on this site.
Thank you for your continuing support of our blog and our fiction.
George Ovitt (2/15/2020)
http://www.fomitepress.com/our-books.html
[All royalties from the sale of this book will be donated to Doctors Without Borders]
[All royalties from the sale of this book will be donated to Doctors Without Borders]
