Roanoke Rapids native Sarah Jones Dickens was the recent recipient of a Fulbright grant, which she will use to study the effects of the Cambodian genocide on the country's visual culture. (Photo: TODD WETHERINGTON | DAILY HERALD)
Daily Herald (Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, USA)ROANOKE RAPIDS - Sarah Jones Dickens seems to have an isolated case of wanderlust.
Her parents have never left the country and her older brother, Paul, hasn't strayed too far from home, either.
“I'm the crazy liberal traveler in my family,” she said, laughing.
But Dickens, who graduated in May from Duke University, caught the globetrotting bug in high school and hasn't slowed down since. On June 26, she'll leave for Cambodia for what will only be the beginning of a year-long experience.
“I'm looking at it as sort of my boot camp to Cambodia before I'm actually on my own,” she said of the fellowship she received to visit the country and learn about its culture this summer.
Dickens received a Fulbright grant to stay in the Southeast Asian country from September through next June to study the effects the genocide of the 1970s continues to have on the country's visual culture.
The 21-year-old, who double majored in art history and political science with a concentration in international relations, is excited to bring her interests together.
“Throughout my four years, I tried to combine the two interests,” she said, “and finally, it's just like this is the time that political science and art history kind of can fuse together as one big thing.”
Having already studied some artwork, such as a painting of a mother holding her six children with a dark figure in the background, Dickens is excited to see more art that is not available to the rest of the world online. Decades later, much of the country's modern art continues to depict the dehumanization of genocide, she explained.
Dickens will live in the capital city of Phnom Penh and work with Documentation Center of Cambodia, or DC-Cam, to study visual representations of a culture which still lives with the trauma of the events that took place 30 years ago.
She plans to analyze modern artwork, photography, museums and tourist sites, and even interviews of victims. She also hopes to look into the effects of trauma on subsequent generations.
“Contemporary art and what artists are doing today speaks to the fact that things that were happening 30 years ago don't go away after the genocide ends,” she said.
Last spring, Dickens was enrolled in Visual Representations of Trauma, a class taught by Duke professor Kristine Stiles, who became her adviser and mentor. The class covered subjects such as the Jewish Holocaust, but not the genocide in Cambodia, which took place from 1975 to 1979 under the Khmer Rouge.
Stiles suggested Dickens write a paper for the class on the Cambodian genocide. Though Dickens did not have adequate time to research the subject and write a paper on it, she took immediate interest in it.
“I was both embarrassed and appalled that I'd gone 20 years without knowing 1.7 million people died over 20 years ago,” Dickens said.
After reading a Wall Street Journal column written last July by Joseph Mussomeli, U.S. ambassador to Cambodia, Dickens took an even greater interest in the subject, and e-mailed Mussomeli to let him know the effect his article had on her.
“It was one of those shots in the dark. I really didn't think he would respond,” she said, adding he did respond, and she has been in touch with him ever since.
Dickens decided to apply for a Fulbright fellowship. She e-mailed Youk Chhang, director of DC-Cam and a survivor of the Khmer Rouge's “killing fields.” Chhang responded to her, as did the numerous artists and other people in Cambodia she e-mailed. Dickens has been researching, writing, e-mailing and interviewing ever since.
According to its Web site, DC-Cam was founded in 1995, after the U.S. Congress passed the Cambodian Genocide Justice Act. The mission of the center is to preserve the history of the genocide and collect potential evidence of those crimes.
The center has catalogued about 155,000 pages of primary documents from the Khmer Rouge and more than 6,000 photographs.
Dickens is confident about her stay in Cambodia, and was already very familiar with the Fulbright program before she applied. She interned in the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs last summer, where she worked on educational programs for low-income communities. The internship also exposed her to the Fulbright program.
While she has never known trauma like that of the people in Cambodia, Dickens does have some personal experience with trauma. Driving back to Duke after a weekend away, her tire blew and the car flipped three times off Interstate 95. Dickens wrote about the experience in her Fulbright proposal:
“This traumatic experience, albeit infinitesimal in comparison to Cambodians, will be crucial during my time in the country to foster empathy to a nation and its people fraught with trauma.”
Dickens began writing her 77-page honors thesis, “Witnessing Cambodia: The Visual Representations of Trauma in Cambodia Analyzed Through Lens of Witnessing,” last September, around the time she applied for the Fulbright grant. Two of her best friends also applied for Fulbrights, and one of them will be going to Nepal.
To apply, Dickens needed a personal one-page statement, a two-page grant proposal, three letters of recommendation and a letter of affiliation from DC-Cam, explaining how her project is “vital to their goals.”
The application process was lengthy - the application was sent from a committee at Duke to the Institute of International Education to the National Screening Committee Review to the supervising agencies in Cambodia to the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board. Dickens didn't find out she'd been approved until April.
“You apply in September and just put it in your drawer and forget that you even applied and kind of go on with your life hoping something will come through,” she said.
The Fulbright program received 5,868 applications and awarded 1,282 fellowships this year, Jones noted.
A U.N.-led tribunal on the genocide is expected to begin this year, and Dickens hopes she will be able to witness the country's confrontation of its past.
Expanding horizons
While this will be Dickens' longest time away from home, it will not be her first. During college, she spent summers abroad in the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy. She lived in New York for a semester, interning in the legal department of the Guggenheim Museum. She also vacationed in Barcelona and Costa Rica.
Dickens first went abroad while she was a student at Roanoke Rapids High School, and she traces her interest in travel back to those trips. She visited Mexico with Martha Waring's Spanish class, then traveled around Europe with some classmates, led by her humanities teacher, Dwight Barry.
“That two-week trip showed me how to travel and what to do and what not to do, so I really credit him for fueling that desire to make sure I leave the country at least once every year,” she explained.
Dickens said her parents, Sammy and Christine Dickens, are happy she received the Fulbright, but are nervous about her year-long journey.
“My mom cries every day, and my mom says my dad cries every night but I just can't hear him,” she said.
The family won't be apart for the whole year, though. Sammy and Christine are already planning their first trip out of the country for December, which they've affectionately named “Christmas in Cambodia.”
Now, the only things standing between Dickens and her adventure are her shots, packing and farewells. She can't wait to look around and find the emotion that's been buried in Cambodia's culture all these years.
“It's just so powerful, but I don't think people all see it in the same way that I do and I think it's so important to give the imagery that understanding.”
