Ruminatrix
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Saturday, May 03, 2003
The letters of the alphabet give birth to man and woman
Francois Bizot's memoir The Gate tells of the author's life as a prisoner of the Khmer Rouge during 1971. Fluent in Khmer and married to a local woman, Bizot was doing ethnographic research on Cambodian Buddhism when he was captured in an ambush and held under suspicion of being a spy. Striking details -- the beauty of the peasant girls who come to spit on the freakishly tall farang, the feeling of the stocks being shut on his ankles in the evening, personal hygiene, his emotional breakdowns -- are interspersed (intertwingled?) with wry observations on the all parties to the conflict. He's arrogant but very lucid:
I could not bear to be taken for an American... Not because of the events in Vietnam; for many of the local peasantry, attached to their traditions and resistant to the new ideologies, the Communist revolution was a disruption of their age-old way of life.But that's nothing compared to his observation of the KR themselves. When a group of prisoners from the Lon Nol army arrive in the camp, one tries to give Bizot a prayer-cloth covered with magical letters and diagrams -- an amulet for his protection. A KR guard takes it away, telling him that such counter-revolutionary materials are being confiscated and remade into underwear "before the material could get bloodstained." Bizot drily notes:
Rather it was the Americans' uncouth methods, their crass ignorance of the milieu in which they had intervened, their clumsy demagogy, their misplaced clear conscience, and that easy-going childlike sincerity that bordered on foolishness. They were total strangers in the area, driven by cliches about Asia worthy of the flimsiest tourist guides, and they behaved accordingly.
[This] shows just how far the KR revolution was willing to go to debase a traditional system of values.To place letters of Buddhist doctrine in contact with regions of the body considered "impure" was an absolute sacrilege, one no peasant would risk commiting. Only town dwellers would be capable of such iconoclastic radicalism.Then Bizot's chief KR interrogator engages him in a series of long conversations...It's a stunning, deeply humane work and beautifully written.
The majority [of the KR] were poorly integrated Sino-Khmer, the sons of shopkeepers or frustrated employees. Having replaced the traditional village structure with the fraternal solidarity of the resistance, motivated by sincere idealism, and appalled by the gap between rich and poor, they had shared an existence outside of the rural world, which they knew nothing about. None of them had ever tended rice fields. The way they roamed through the countryside proved they had no respect for crops, gardens, trees or pathways....
Paradoxically, these city folk, who loathed the plow, the soil, the palm groves and domestic animals, who disliked the open, rustic life of the villagers, idealized the Khmer peasants as a stereotype of perpetual revolution: a model of simplicity, endurance, and patriotism, the standard against which the new man would be measured, liberated from religious taboos. In this contradictory scenario, Buddhism was to be replaced by objectives dear to the Angkar [i.e. the Organization] in order to ensure the triumph of equality and justice. The Khmer theorists had substitiued the Angkar for Dhamma, the personification of Teaching, the Primordial Being at the beginning of the world, whose body, composed of the letters of the alphabet, gave birth to the first man and woman.