Southeast Asia Politics, Meaning and Memory. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2020. xiv, 168 pp. (B&W photos, coloured photos, illustrations.) US$59.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-5606-9.
Boreth Ly’s Traces of Trauma is an important volume that presents a culturally specific conception of trauma and positions the paradoxical role of visual art in the projection of a Cambodian national identity. The book centres on the question of “how a morally shattered culture and nation found ways to go on living after the civil war, the US bombing, and the Khmer Rouge genocide” (7). In response, Ly engages with photography, film, dance, and poetry, among other artistic forms, produced by Cambodian artists in country and in the diaspora. The artists span across the memory and post-memory generations, including survivors of US bombing, the Khmer Rouge genocide, and the civil war.
Critically, the book pushes back against the Western psychoanalytic concept of trauma and instead presents a nuanced understanding of trauma that is based in the Cambodian culture and context. This new conceptualization, centred on the concepts baksbat (broken body) and snarm (scar), is an important contribution not only to the study of Cambodia but to those interested in the societal legacies of atrocity more broadly.
Chapter 1 uses four contemporary pieces from Cambodian artists to present a genealogy of representations of trauma. Building on the work of Chhim Sotheara, who articulates trauma as baksbat—a condition not only of broken body, but also of broken courage—the chapter establishes a Cambodian vernacularization of trauma that bridges physical and psychological domains. This type of break, Ly explains, fundamentally cannot be mended (17). This discussion also reflects on the fractures in Cambodia specifically, where much of the violence was committed by Cambodians and not a foreign entity, thereby making the (societal) scars distinct from those in other post-atrocity contexts.
Chapter 2 elaborates on the concept of scars, or snarm, across the landscape of Cambodia and in the memories of survivors of the US bombings. While in the previous chapter the works discussed demonstrated the irreparability of harms, here the works suggest an ability to endure. This is what Ly terms “scarred resilience,” or resilience after trauma (39). Ly’s engagement with the Samput Mien Domguon (heavy skirt) series highlights the gendered ways in which the harms of trauma were and are felt, depicting the artist’s mother both enduring the violence and trauma herself, but also mending and moving forward to protect her children. The gendered nature of resilience here is built on in later chapters through a discussion of a reinterpretation of traditional symbols of national identity.
Visual culture held a dual status during the Khmer Rouge period. Ly explores this dynamic in chapter 3, demonstrating the centrality of visual culture for communicating the ideology of the regime, but also the regime’s emphasis on the destruction of art from previous eras, which it viewed as threatening to the new state. Despite the disavowal of arts and culture, the use of art in this period promoted the picture of the revolution that the regime wanted to broadcast. It was deliberately styled to show the regime’s ideals and not the grim reality. To this point, Ly notes that the Khmer Rouge’s emphasis on photorealism and portraiture encouraged a “corrective ideology” that vested power and authority in one leader (61)—a dramatic shift from the unspecified nature of Angkar to a clear focus on photorealistic paintings of Pol Pot as an embodiment of the collective ideals, a transition fitting of the aesthetics under communism.
Chapter 4 transitions to the present by rethinking visual markers of Khmer identity in the aftermath of the US bombings and Khmer Rouge genocide. This chapter focuses on two traditional, but reinterpreted and reclaimed, symbols: the krama and the sugar palm. Ly argues that their recognizability as emblems of Cambodian identity has also allowed minority groups, artists, and activists alike to use them to signal a political message of belonging to a broader cultural identity. The krama, specifically, serves as a symbol of political solidarity and pride against an oppressive state. However, the chapter leaves unaddressed whether the adaptability of these symbols is a double-edged sword: namely, if the state could instead use these symbols to co-opt or repress.
Chapter 5 addresses the final symbol of Khmer identity, the mythic serpent princess Neang Neak, bringing the ancient and the contemporary and the art forms formerly of the court to the public. Ly’s presentation of Neang Neak highlights the ability of a snake to shed its skin and grow a new one: to literally rid itself of a past experience in order to trigger regrowth and repair. Further, this myth and the associated matrilineal practices are another means of gendering resilience and regeneration. The resurgence of Neang Neak thus reinforces the gendered nature of this symbol of national resilience.
Ly responds to the question set out by Theodor Adorno of how one can create art after the devastation and horrors of genocide: the process of creation and the production of visual works not only articulates the trauma experienced by survivors or inherited by the next generations, but it serves to remediate that trauma. Art, for Ly, is “both a poison and a cure” for Cambodians (128), helping to express the experiences that they have faced during decades of violence and offering the tools needed to reclaim and reinterpret national identity.
This book intervenes in our understandings of trauma, signs of national identity, and the role art plays in processing trauma at individual and societal levels. While it makes several important contributions, they function independently, making the volume seem disjointed at times. Nonetheless, it is an important volume not only for readers interested in the study of visual culture, art history, or contemporary Cambodia, but also for those interested in memory, trauma, and the legacies of violence more broadly.
Rachel Jacobs
Dickinson College, Carlisle