Our guide was three years old when the Khmer Rouge fell. He lost a brother and a sister, and his parents lost everything because they were urban intellectuals. He looked at me. “You wear glasses,” he said, “that means you are an intellectual. You are not going to the fields, you are going to die.”
I don’t know how other people manage, but when we walked into the monument at the Killing Fields, I just kind of fell apart. It didn’t help any that some guy was taking photos of his girlfriend in front of a pile of battered skulls with a sign that read “Females, Aged 18-29″or some such thing. I had to head back out the the entry way, it was all too much for me.
I thought it was important that I try again, so when we went to Toul Sleng, the prison where the Khmer Rouge held and tortured their victims, I did actually walk inside, but as soon as we were in the first room, I fell apart all over again.
Maybe it’s because I come from a tribe that’s historically been victims of genocide, or maybe I just have really thin skin. Maybe it’s because I was tired from the heat or maybe it’s because I experience the world through the visual. Maybe, maybe, maybe. I have to wonder what’s different about me than about the dozens of other people who strolled about the place, snapping photos of the remains of the dead and then, heading off to the souvenir stand. Tourism is a bizarre thing at the best of times, at the worst, it’s what it was today, brutal and full of cognitive dissonance.
I don’t understand the tiniest thing about Camodian history, but the people here are smiling and so attractive and friendly and mellow. When you give the barest glance to their past, there is not a moment that your heart is not breaking. If you pay attention, just a little bit, you realize that the guy behind the counter who hands you the hotel key was born in the time of the Khmer Rouge, or that the beautiful girl in the shop has parents who lived through impossible horrors.
Maybe, maybe it’s because you’re a compassionate and empathetic person. Maybe you are more sensitive than most to the horrors that one person can inflict on another. Good on you for being able to hold onto both qualities in our world where violence is so commonplace and glorified.
Maybe it is also because such evil, torture and destruction intrinsically changes the environment in which it took place. Some people believe you can feel the ghosts of the dead if you go to battlegrounds or even aboriginal burial grounds. If this is possible, that could be what you are sensing.
I don’t know why some people seem relatively unaffected when faced with evidence of the horrors of history, but I know I’d react like you did too. I can hardly maintain my composure when I visit places like the Vietnam War Memorial or the Holocaust museum, so I can imagine how it would impact me even more to see some of the actual locations. I don’t think it’s bad to be this way at all, the world needs more deeply feeling people.
I absolutely would not be able to go near that place. It’s the same reason I turn away when I see images on TV of places like that in Rwanda. And why I can only blog about Darfur if I keep my mind focused on possibility.
(Your previous posts leave me speechless in their descriptive beauty…can hardly wait to see the photos…)