Truth Telling and Cambodia

How do we tell our truth and what is the role of the listener?

We spend a few days drafting essays about our lives -- personal stories of big moments and snapshots. Students think about moments that shaped who they are or are becoming like the loss of a grandparent, the day they found out their parents were divorcing, and a memory with someone special. And for the snapshot, students capture a moment eating their favorite food (or least favorite), a moment in their favorite place to be, or a time when they realized something about themselves or life.

After drafting about our lives, I ask them to take a look at the lives of people in Cambodia. This is not as fractured as it sounds; we have been stories, mostly fiction, about people from all over the world. Because our computer lab was filled (and I have not worked with our new iPads yet), I pulled a variety of stories related to Cambodia --6 different articles -- and had each student read one and render it into a poem. Then, students got into groups to share what they read and their poems while others took notes -- history, people, life, music, religion, economy, ____. In just a matter of an hour, students, who were now familiar with getting to know other cultures and no longer making a spectacle of differences, had a sense of the poverty and richness in Cambodia, the rural and city life, a few principles of Buddhism, the food staples, and the classic musical instruments of the people,

Loung Ung, "Writing the Truth": Loung Ung is a survivor of the killing fields of Cambodia when some 1/7 million Cambodians died at the hands of Pol Pit and the Khmer Rouge Regim. Ung was born in 1970 in Phnom Penh, and by 1978, the Khmer Rouge had killed her parents and two of her siblings, and she was forced to train to be a child soldier. In this clip, Ung talks about the "four little words" that prompted her to write the memoir, First They Killed My Father, published in 2000.

In this unit, students will think about truth telling and bear witness as they write their own memoirs and read that of Loung Ung. We think about someone, a survivor, who willingly relives or perhaps really witnesses for the first time in storytelling, and we think about another who is that survivor's companion  in the moments they experience the text together. In other words, the reader is a secondary witness, also bearing witness to the events, trauma, atrocity seeking an understanding of that which is unimaginable and, perhaps, unknowable, but no less impacts a way of being in the world.

To helps us think about this concept, and by "us" I mean ELA (English Language Arts) 8th graders, we read a post on a blog "Talking Wounds" that summarizes several points that I first read in Shoshana Felman's Testimony. This blog is written by visual artist Marilene Oliver and human rights philosopher Sophie Oliver who collaborate on a project that "seeks to explore ways of ethically discussing and representing human rights atrocities."  Below is a copy of the post that I read with my students:

Bearing witness to the witness: some thoughts on hearing wounds talk
May 15, 2011 § 2 CommentsTalking wounds.
Can wounds talk? Pain is often a great silencer; unshareable and often uncommunicable, it frequently cuts us off from others. But it is also true that, as in the story of Tancred and the tree, wounds never stop speaking, seeking out listeners who will hear them or, if such a thing is possible, heal them.  Holocaust survivor Primo Levi writes in if this is a Man of his recurring nightmare: the ‘ever repeated scene of the unlistened-to story’. The dream expresses a fear he says is common to survivors, and which is connected to the need to ‘tell our story to the rest, to make the rest participate in it’ (1987: 15.) The plea of the survivor, then, is to be heard, it is a request that we, who did not have to suffer the trauma of the surviving the Holocaust, bear witness to the witnesses of atrocity. It is a request that was for a long time painfully denied, but which has in recent years found itself at the heart of a burgeoning interest in trauma and, along with it, an emerging ethics of witnessing. For Cathy Caruth, for example, the call of the ‘crying wound’ of trauma represents an ethical address of the other to the self that ‘demands a listening and a response’ (1996: 9). Similarly, in the psychoanalytic model of trauma testimony described in Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s by now seminal study Bearing witness or the Vicissitudes of Listening, ‘it takes two to witness the unconscious’ (1992: 15). Holocaust testimony is here described as a performative act that can be understood not as a statement of truth but as ‘a mode of truth’s realisation’, in which the witness to the witness is an active participant. For Laub, the listener is an ‘enabler of testimony’, he or she is ‘party to the creation of knowledge’ (Felman and Laub 1992: 15). The listener, as the ‘enabler of testimony’ is what makes possible the process by which ‘the narrator (the survivor) reclaims his position as a witness’ (Felman and Laub 1992: 85). To witness then, is no solitary act; the wound that talks always seeks the secondary witness that will hear it. French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard has also theorised this relationship in his succinct and oft-cited formula for a ‘testimonial pact’. Among the conditions necessary for successful and politically useful testifying Lyotard notes the importance of ‘an addressee, not only willing to listen and accept the reality of the referent, but also worthy of being spoken to’ (Nance 2006: 87).In his model the listener – who actively and ethically listens, recognising the voice and subjectivity of the testifier in the process – is not merely an additional benefit, (s)he is a vital element without which the testimony would not exist. Put simply, it is only in the company of a (worthy) listener that my story can be told. This is perhaps no great revelation, and indeed the notion of an audience as a necessary part of the act of witnessing is nothing new. One of the earliest categories of witness, the martyr (etymologically linked to the modern term witness, via the Greek martur, itself said to be linked to the Indo-European word for ‘remember’), is a case in point.  In early modern stories of sainthood – often called the pious pornography of the middle ages – the martyrs bear witness to their faith in God always and necessarily in front of an audience. The martyr becomes a saint by virtue of her tortured, gruesome, bleeding body: flesh and limbs are torn apart, breasts are sliced off, and nubile young girls are set to boil in vats of hot oil. But this body does not suffer in isolation, for the witnessing body of the martyr is in all senses a site of performance and spectacle – of the pagan torturer’s power (which is undermined), of the faith and endurance of the saint, of the miraculous blessing and protection of God, and of the sublime nature of suffering and abjection. As with every spectacle, the audience is crucial to the success of the act. Without the belief of the audience, both within the narrative (the pagan spectators who convert to Christianity, the God who observes and intervenes), and without (the medieval layperson who reveres relics and images of exotic martyred flesh) the saint would quite simply not be a saint. As Blondheim and Liebes put it, in biblical witnessing, ‘the witness is the addressee, not the medium. It is the collective which performs the witnessing’ (Blondheim and Liebes 2009: 115). If Judaeo-Christian storytelling is not as popular as it once was, the principle of religious witnessing seems to be making a come-back in the secular creeds of trauma, memory and human rights discourse. The entreaty made to us by survivors who tell their stories or historians who construct their museums and mausoleums in remembrance of the ugliest of pasts is, indeed, as Levi put it, an entreaty to participate in a community of collective remembering in which witnessing the witness becomes an ethical imperative. So what does this mean for us? What should it alter about the way in which we regard the wounds that speak to us every day – in books, films, or artworks; through the museums and memorials that we visit; or even in the news as we eat our dinner? For me the first step is to begin to think of ourselves in this position of reader/spectator/visitor/viewer less as the passive receivers of media projections and more as active listeners, as secondary witnesses whose role in the production of memory and its meanings is far from obsolete. This is on the one hand an empowering move: as active listeners we are also free to question the narratives constructed by these media projections of the past into the present; to do so is critical in all senses of the term, for to challenge something is also to engage in it. This does not, however, mean that by becoming active listeners we should or would callously join the league of deniers; for when we accept our role as active participants in the ongoing conversation with the traumas of the past, we also enter into that testimonial pact that Lyotard has outlined. We commit also to partake of an ethics of listening by which we are positioned first and foremost as witnesses to the witness. Through this commitment we acknowledge our responsibility of recognition towards the original witness who, like so many of those survivors of the holocaust who have so graciously given us the gift of their terrible stories, are no longer there to tell their stories, but whose wounds nonetheless continue to speak, and must continue to be heard.

We read the first chapter of First They Killed My Father for narratorial style primarily. I want students to see that there is storytelling here -- sensory language, imagery, thoughts, feelings and observations, dialogue, poetic language, and perspective. Students hear the voice of five year old Loung, and they see how she representing herself as a precocious, middle class, tomboy-ish child who can't seem to please her mother but shares a special bond with her father. Students begin a text-based discussion journal to note aspects of the story that they think are worth discussing. After reading, students convert their notes into interpretive questions, and we hold a fishbowl/socratic seminar where a group of students go to the center of the room and hold a discussion on the reading -- practicing text-based discussions that extend to other experiences and readings.

In order to assess what students found relevant in their reading, we spent one class period doing a few different strategies: Brainstorm A-Z, 4-6-8, and F.R.E.D. Brainstorm A-Z is just a place for students to attach any words or images related to their reading in a alphabetical format. 4-6-8 is similar in that it asks for four characters, six settings, and eight events that the student found most relevant to their reading. And finally, the F.R.E.D. strategy asks for facts, reflections,evaluations, and decisions. After working on these individually, we collected ideas and did a gallery walk to notice how sharing what we found relevant with others can help us expand our capacity for relevance while noting how reading is both intrapersonal and interpersonal. Here are a few pictures:

Assessment:

Name: ____________________________

Date: __________________

First They Killed My Father , test. There are four parts to this test.

Part 1-20. : For this part, you will need one or two pieces of paper. You will choose one subject to write about and respond in two or more pages of writing.

Themes: We know from the video clip that we watched at the beginning of this unit that Loung Ung decided to write her childhood memoir the moment she heard Pol Pot died in 1998.  She told us that she wanted the world to know what this man had done, so she witnessed her life from age five to age ten. In her memoir, she has messages about many subjects in life. In literature, we call these “themes.” A theme is s judgment or an opinion about a topic based on experience and observation.  Below are three (3) topics that the book explores.

·         Choose one (1)

·         answer questions

·         then say what Loung message to readers is on that subject ; in other words, write the theme she is trying to communicate.

a.       Subject: Family – Respond to  these questions in the form of  an essay – paragraphs.

·         Loung, Kim, and Chou find a “new family” (page 228), or do they?

·         What is a foster family?

·         Loung uses the expression (page 229) “a family of convenience.” What does she mean by this ? Use QUOTES from the text to support your answer.

·         Very quickly Loung’s attitude changes toward her new family. On page 240, she says that she hates them. Why? Use QUOTES from the text to explain your answer.

·         The children leave this family and (page 247) join a new family. Do these people treat them better? Is it really a new family for them? Discuss.

·         Finally, Loung unites with some family members only to separate again when they go to Vietnam, Thailand, and America. Thinking about the entire memoir, how did the meaning of family change for Loung over the five years, and what, in the end, is Loung’s message to her readers/listeners/secondary witnesses about family? 

b.      Subject: Revenge – Respond to these questions in the form of an essay—paragraphs.

·         The subject of revenge occurs throughout the book. Examples will be found on pages 142, 156, 168, 251, and 277.  In some of these Loung states that hatred is keeping her alive. How? Against whom does she wish to take revenge? Use QUOTES from the text to answer and explain this.

·         Is the Angkar afraid of children? See page 159. Why? Use QUOTES to support your response.

·         A brutal execution is described in the chapter called “the execution” which begins on page 264.  Does Loung experience any emotion?  How is this the same or different that the way she is telling the entire story as a child narrator? Is this revenge? Is this justice? What is the difference?

·         Why did Loung write this book? Is it her revenge? In the end, what is Loung’s message to her readers/listeners/secondary witnesses about revenge?

c.       Subject: Hunger – Food and hunger are constant subjects  throughout the book.

·          Explain the role that food, or lack thereof, plays in the tactics or strategies of the Khmer Rouge to control the people.

·         How did  Loung’s family try to survive starvation?  Include specific examples from the text.

·         In several instances Loung steals food. See pages 118 and 203. How are these two instances the same or different? Discuss her attitude to each incident. Use examples from the text to support your answer.

Part 2,  The Writing of the Book:  For this part, you will respond in the space provided.

21-25. Loung has chosen a very simple way to tell her story. What is it? Is a chronological plan the only way her story could have been told? How does the simplicity of the storytelling add power to the story? Throughout the book we are aware that we are seeing the events through the eyes of a child. What impact does this have on you as a secondary witness to the events?

26-30. First They Killed My Father  is a work of non-fiction, but in several places some text in italics have been added.  Scan the text for these places and discuss what is similar about when she chooses to use this form of text.  Are these additions to the text successful or does it bring up issues with truth-telling? Would you classify these additions as fiction or non-fiction?

31-35. Another author, Patricia McCormick, used personal experiences of survivors to write a novel – fiction. Survivors told her their stories, and then she rendered or told them in a fictional story called Never Fall Down. Not all survivors were as good at writing as Loung Ung, so they relied on a professional writer like Patricia McCormick to tell their story. In this case, McCormick was the secondary witness, and the reader/listener is like a tertiary or third witness – more distance from the truth.  Think about Tree Girl. This was an example of a Maya girl who told her story to a famous author, who then turned it into fiction.  Here is the question: In drawing attention to a particular event, is fiction or nonfiction the most powerful? Discuss your answer with reference to other books you have read yourself or studied in school.

Part 3, Politics: Use the article from Choices Curriculum and any notes you have to respond to these questions.

36-40. Who was Pol Pot, and how did he gain political power? Use examples from the text to support your response.

41-45. Looking at the article about the Cambodian genocide. How much did the American presence (or lack thereof) influence key events in this book? What was the United States’ response? Why?

46-50. Part 4, Bearing Witness and Being a Secondary Witness: Look at the article about this subject, thinking about Loung Ung’s story, and thinking about your own memoir/personal narrative writing, discuss this question:  What does it mean to witness and to be a secondary witness? Talk about your experiences witnessing your own life and being a secondary witness to Loung Ung’s (as well to the lives of your classmates’ – the ones whose stories you’ve heard)?

1.       As a secondary witness, someone who did not actually see the events but must rely on someone else’s account, we do have to consider what parts might be “less true.” For example, members of a Cambodia cultural group called the Khmer Institute read the book and say this, among other things:  

To further impress her readers, Ung actually goes so far as to claim to have shot an AK-47 (142).  To be only seven years old and malnourished and still capable of firing an AK-47, a weapon that is even difficult for a full grown adult inexperienced in its use to manage, Ung had to have had superhuman strength.[23]  The Khmer Rouge were extremists, but it is hardly believable that they would give such an important and valuable piece of weaponry to a little girl at a time when they were killing people with axes and machetes in order to save bullets.  Finally, keeping in mind Ung's constant refrain about how the Khmer Rouge did not trust and hated light-skinned people, why would they then give such a weapon to a light-skinned girl?  She explains, "They think I am one of them, one of the pure base children"; but how could they if she is so different in appearance that, as the reader is often reminded, she is constantly discriminated against?

Other passages equally throw into question whether the story is being truly presented from a child's perspective or from the perspective of someone writing it twenty years later.  In one passage the author recounts: "Twelve months since I said good-bye to Kim, seventeen months since the soldiers took Pa away, twenty-one months since Keav...  in my world where there are so many things I don't understand, counting dates is the only sane thing I know to do" (152).  With all the suffering and hunger she has to endure, it seems very odd that a little child would be able to remember dates so accurately. For a person who is pre-occupied with survival and for whom every day is the same miserable existence – without time out for weekends or holidays and without a calendar – remembering dates would be incredibly difficult even for an adult.  It is remarkable that such a small child in Cambodia had done so or would even care to do so.[37]

Knowing what you know about writing personal stories, about looking back, witnessing the event again from a more grown-up point of view and sharing your story, do you think the problems the Khmer institute has with Ung’s book take away from its truth or not?