TWO REMINDERS ... from Theary C. Seng

I’d like to send out a gentle reminder regarding your remembrances in a Tribute to Loved Ones Lost to the Khmer Rouge and your photo contributions to Kramanation: Wear Krama Campaign. Please send to theary.seng@gmail.com – Theary C. Seng

1. A Tribute to Loved Ones Lost to the Khmer Rouge

We want to put a face and a name to the cold figure of 1.7 Million… our loved ones are more than a number… we need your help. Thank you to those who have contributed… a gentle reminder to others who have not…

http://www.thearyseng.com/victims-association

My brother, Kerry Hamill, was a beautiful, strong, courageous and much loved man. He was the eldest of five children growing up by the sea in New Zealand. We had a blessed childhood, full of friends, fun, adventure and family. It was a childhood that fostered Kerry’s love of the sea and sailing but this love would ultimately bring about his premature death. During his version of New Zealand’s youth traditional OE (overseas experience), in August 1978 Kerry unknowingly sailed into Cambodian waters and was seized by the Khmer Rouge navy, taken to Toul Sleng prison (S21) where he was tortured and murdered. Kerry, you and our brother John are with me always. I mourn for the loss of your life, the lost experiences of joy and love that the future held for you; the uncle that my children were never to meet and the future family of your own that was taken from you. My search for your boat ‘Foxy Lady’ and your final resting place, where ever that may be and in whatever form that may take, continues so that one day I may bring you home to ‘Rest in Peace’. - Rob Hamill: Olympian; civil party in the Extraordinary Chambers (ECCC) www.brothernumberone.co.nz

In loving memory of UY Pierom as remembered by Artist/poet Chath pier Sath; pointing to his drawing of his brother UY Pierom who died at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, along with Pierom's wife and all his in-laws. Both of Chath's parents also died when he was very young, one before 1975, the other immediately after the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia. "I don't really remember my brother that much. He was the oldest. I was too young to remember, but I do remember the night the Khmer Rouge came, we were all together as a family, my brother Pierom, his wife, children and in-laws. However, during the evacuation, we got separated. It was only after the Khmer Rouge that my mother knew of his fate and the fate of his family. He was a Lon Nol soldier fighting against the Vietcong on the American side. He was with my father when my father was shot and killed in battle. This is all I can remember." - Chath pier Sath

o O o

2. Kramanation: Wear Krama Campaign

We are starting our fourth page. Thank you to all of you who have already contributed. We look forward to many more photographs, especially ones at events outside Cambodia.

http://www.thearyseng.com/advocacy/97-khmer-products-signature-kramas

Louise Allison Cort, curator at the Freer and Sackler Galleries, Washington, DC admiring high quality Khmer silk wrapped in traditional Khmer krama (Photo: VOA Pin Sisovann, 2010)

Good Krama Store in San Francisco - an amazing collection of photos and creative uses of Khmer kramas. "We have created a small business based on our favorite things in the world: KRAMA! We travel back and forth from Cambodia several times a year, importing krama back into the states and making many people happy with what we agree is the best scarf in existence. We strive to not only share krama with the world but to give back to the culture and communities which these kramas come from. When I saw your site I was happy to see more people who share our passion for krama." - Ryno Barela (Photos: Good Krama)

Theary Seng, 2008... the kramas also go well with bright yellow Gap rain boots.

The team at Cambodian Living Arts in their kramas, 2010. (Photo: Cambodian Living Arts)

Whoa! Whoa! Let's keep this PG-rated (or here, BRHSG-rated). The krama protecting the family jewels. Artist Sopheap Pich in one of his krama boxers (he has 20+ made at a time!) at his Phnom Penh studio, July 2010 (Photo: Nicolas Axelrod).

Little genius Maddox Chivan Jolie-Pitt and Brad Pitt showing us the different ways to don the kramas (photos: internet)

Cambodian-American rapper/activist/filmmaker praCh Ly performing on stage (photo: Kimsua Chay, above); with actor Rev. Jack Ong (director of Haing Ngor Foundation), Jared L. Davis (co-founder of ORPHANAGE Film Production who recently won 2 Emmys for his RESIDUE, as well as praCh's agent) at Santa Monica, 2009 looking very California-serious in their kramas: "When I perform, I usually wrap it [krama] around my hand or put it on the mic stand or put it in my back pocket and let it hang."

MORE PHOTOS at
www.thearyseng.com

Survivors' Remembrance Of Loved Ones Lost: A Slideshow of Khmer’s Collective Memory

SURVIVORS' REMEMBRANCE OF LOVED ONES LOST

a slideshow of Khmer’s collective memory

WE NEED YOUR HELP !

If you would like to honor your loved ones lost during the Khmer Rouge regime (April 1975 to Jan. 1979) via my webpage www.thearyseng.com (under "Victims Association") or that of the Association of Khmer Rouge Victims (AKRVC) www.akrvc.org (currently under construction), or both, please provide the following info:

• Photo(s) of loved ones lost

• Names (official, nicknames etc.) and as much biographical information (date of birth, place of birth, when/where "disappeared" or killed or passed away and under what circumstances)

• Your personal message of remembrance of loved one(s)

• Your name (name of sender)

• Please indicate where you would like this remembrance be posted (www.thearyseng.com/victims-association, at AKRVC, or both). Half to one-full webpage will be dedicated to your loved ones in a Survivors' Remembrance of their Loved Ones slideshow.

Write either in Khmer or English; both websites will have Khmer webpages to accommodate this journey of collective remembrance. Please help pass on the message.

_____________
Please contact us:

• if for www.thearyseng.com, then Theary at theary.seng@gmail.com

• if for www.akrvc.org, then the Center for Justice & Reconciliation (CJR), www.cjr-cambodia.org, which is providing technical assistance to the Victims’ Association at:

• Mr. IM Sophea, CJR co-director / Reconciliation Programs at sopheaim@cjr-cambodia.org
• Mr. SENG Daravuth, CJR international co-director / Justice Programs at dseng@cjr-cambodia.org
• Mr. SOK Leang, CJR Victims Outreach Coordinator at sokleang@cjr-cambodia.org

Dark side can shed light on humanity

May 6, 2009
Jen Vuk
The Age (Australia)

Don't make Pol Pot's grave an attraction, but remember his victims.

IT TOOK three decades of internal politics, and a tangle of red tape, but justice finally came to Cambodia at the end of March when 66-year-old Kaing Guek Eav faced a UN-backed court for the alleged atrocity he oversaw as chief of the Khmer Rouge's infamous S-21 torture camp.

Call it symmetry or coincidence, but on that same sweaty afternoon, newly arrived in Cambodia's seething capital, Phnom Penh, I found myself standing at the gates of S-21 (now known as Tuol Sleng Museum).

Entering what was once a suburban high school — before it fell to the Khmer Rouge and its murderous ideology — I couldn't shake off a growing unease. After all, here was the site where more than 15,000 men, women and children were detained and tortured, ending with their execution at nearby Choeung Ek (the Killing Fields) between 1975 and 1979.

What's more, unlike New York's Ground Zero, Bali's Sari Club and Port Arthur's Broad Arrow Cafe, Tuol Sleng is no spectre.

Standing tall and intact, furnished with instruments of torture, stark head shots of the dead, and dried blood still evident on the walls, the site is almost every bit as gruesome now as it was in early January 1979 when Vietnamese troops stormed in and drove out what was left of the imploding regime.

Today, Tuol Sleng, the Killing Fields and the Angkor Wat complex near Siam Reap complete Cambodia's trinity of premier "attractions", but it's the former that have become favourites on the dark tourism trail.

The term "dark tourism", coined by John Lennon and Malcolm Foley in their 2000 book, Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disaster was too catchy by halves and had me bristling.

After all, it concerned deriving ghoulish pleasure from sites associated with death or suffering. Could it be true? Was I just another trauma tourist drawn to the sideshow of the macabre?

This tension between visitor and place is the subject of a 2009 collection of essays, Remembering Places of Pain and Shame — Dealing with Difficult Heritage, edited by Melbourne academics Professor William Logan and Dr Keir Reeves.

In it, Logan and Reeves pose the difficult question: Are there places whose history is so painful they shouldn't be preserved? Logan, a UNESCO professor of heritage and urbanism, argues that "relics of the perpetrators of pain and shame", such as Anlong Veng, the site of Pol Pot's grave in Cambodia, which has been the subject of an unofficial push to turn it into a heritage destination, "should be allowed to disappear".

While there is "no useful message" in keeping Pol Pot's name alive, he adds, "keeping places where people suffered; there is a message in that".

And therein lies the rub. What was the message among the haunting ephemera at Tuol Sleng?

Certainly, stare long enough at the photos and you'll start hearing voices; a compelling contrast to those of us looking on and rendered mute.

But not altogether silent, perhaps.

If I shut my eyes, I suddenly become open, attuned, to the spaces in between. The tragic, mournful vibrations of a humanity ill-equipped to deal with or understand the detours.

As academic, author (and my friend) Maria Tumarkin writes in her 2005 book Traumascapes: "Because trauma is contained not in an event as such but in the way this event is experienced, traumascapes become much more than physical settings of tragedies; they emerge as spaces where events are experienced and re-experienced across time."

In a paper last year (Dutiful Tourism: Encountering the Cambodian Genocide), Melbourne University researcher Rachel Hughes found that in place of "greater understanding", the majority of her interviewees expressed a "hope that their 'being there' was at least significant. In other words, the experience is no longer epistemological but testimonial; not 'I now know more' but 'I visited'."

It's with some relief I realise that I, too, am overwhelmed by what's before me. Pity, guilt and, yes, understanding make way for cold, naked gratitude — for a life light years from the aberration of Tuol Sleng and for the opportunity to bear witness to it.

Tumarkin would say this is a natural response to what was, after all, a nerve centre of terror.

Far more than the sum of its parts (walls, floors and ceilings, guide book entry), Tuol Sleng is a concrete incarnation of suffering; left as it is, in the here and now, for those of us divorced from its reality to brush against.

I later read that Kaing Guek Eav begged forgiveness under the spotlight of international interest and a Cambodian-dominated public gallery.

It's a mighty step for a country shackled to a past it would sooner forget, but can't tear down — a concept this accidental tourist was only starting to get her head around.

Jen Vuk is a Melbourne writer and editor.