Beyond the Horizon: Five Years with the Khmer Rouge

Thursday, June 28, 2007
International Herald Tribune (Paris, France)

Summer Reading
Preparing for a new home overseas - or trying to understand your current one? The IHT's team of expatriate correspondents recommends books and Web sites to put you in the right frame of mind.

By Laurence Picq
Translated from the French by Patricia Norland.
St. Martin's Press, 1989. 218 pages.

On October 10, 1975, Laurence Picq, who had already ceded much of her working-class French upbringing to the ideological attractions of Mao Zedong, took one step farther away from home and boarded a plane from Peking to Phnom Penh to meet her husband, a Cambodian named Sikouen.

It was a step from which she would never recover. Phnom Penh had fallen to communist guerilla forces led by the murderous Khmer Rouge six months before, and the city, once the pearl - the Paris, even - of Southeast Asia, had become a ghost town. By 1979, the Khmer Rouge's radical peasant revolution had claimed the lives of some 2 million people, roughly a quarter of the population.

Picq was one of the survivors. Her memoir, "Beyond the Horizon," which was first published in France by Editions Bernard Barrault, inhabits the same terrifying territory as the fiction of Paul Bowles. If Kit Moresby could have pushed her way off the pages of "The Sheltering Sky" and written a memoir of her own, it might have looked something like this.

Picq takes a new name, Comrade Phâl, and joins her husband, a high-ranking member of Ieng Sary's Ministry of Foreign Affairs, at a compound in Phnom Penh, where she spends about three years farming and translating documents for the Khmer Rouge.

Today, Sary is one of the most likely candidates for prosecution before a faltering war crimes tribunal now underway in Phnom Penh, and Picq's book is easier to read and offers more cultural insight than many of the detailed histories of those years.

The Khmer Rouge whipped Cambodia into a nationalistic fury. It was not, in other words, a good place for a French woman, whose very skin made her a symbol of colonialism. Things go from bad to worse for Picq. Her two daughters are taken from her, her friends keep getting killed, she has to march through the jungles of northwestern Cambodia in her ninth month of pregnancy, she gets malaria, her infant son dies, and everyone nearly starves to death, for a while subsisting on a diet of red ants.

This is fairly typical stuff for those years, and by the end of it, Picq is having "mediumistic" experiences. Reading the book, however, you are confronted not with your own familiar outrage, but with something far stranger: desire. Picq is one of those rare and invaluable creatures one sometimes meets while living overseas: a two-minded being capable of slipping between irreconcilable cultures. This is far more helpful for someone trying to understand the terrible, wronged pride of a weak nation like Cambodia, than is the blind western fury of a book like Asne Seierstad's bestselling "The Bookseller of Kabul."

Picq's idealism is relentless. She picks herself up again and again, renewing her love for this borrowed revolution, until at last, having buried her baby somewhere near the Thai border, her dream of a simple peasant life of equality, utility, and justice seems to die, too. Eventually she makes it back to France, having managed somehow to preserve that most basic habit of western civilization: her self.

For additional information about Suong Sikoeun, Laurence Picq's former husband, click here.