Living to Tell the Tale

The Punch: Let us begin with In The Shadow of The Banyan. While writing it was an act of honouring the dead, a redemptive act to bring to memory members of your family whom you lost during the genocide unleashed by the Khmer Rouge between 1975-1979, what also makes this novel remarkable is its tremendous empathy, its absolute lack of anger at the perpetrators of heinous crimes. In the years that you were working on the novel, as you struggled to revisit the memory of the barbarity and the horrors of those days, how was this process for you? Was there at all any anger or resentment? Did you consciously not let it creep into the narrative? 

Vaddey Ratner: Anger is akin to reflex. Empathy stems from a deeper reflection. It can require years, decades, even a lifetime of cultivation.  As a child going through that experience, there was fire in me. I wanted so much to lash out against the brutality, the insanity, the senselessness I witnessed and endured. But if I’d done that, it would have brought my own death, or worse, the death of those I loved — both the remaining family and the friends and neighbors who’d helped us.

So, as a young child, I was forced to ask, what use is anger? What purpose will it serve? By the time I’d decided I would write this story, as a teen when I’d begun to grasp the English language, or later as an adult when I began to work with the aim of transforming it into fiction, I’d embarked on a search to understand, to look deeply.  If you enter into such a process with anger, you cannot hope to understand.

Once I’d succeeded in exhuming the ghosts, I felt that to harbor anger would be wrong. As much as I suffered, I survived — and that survival is a gift. When I am among the ghosts, what right do I have to anger? They suffered the absolute consequence of brutality. My duty, among the living, is to ensure that those lost are not forgotten. And you can’t do that with anger. 

The Punch: How important was it for you to mould it all into a story of hope and perseverance? So, while there is ordeal and suffering, the characters, especially the protagonist, 7-year-old Raami, is also someone who’s looking for redemption at the end, someone who’s invested in the idea of a better future. How important was it for you to highlight that greater human values ultimately survive? So, even when the novel is replete with death and destruction, there are stuff like dreams, stories and poems as the novel’s leitmotifs. 

Vaddey Ratner: What I find curious in Western culture today, especially in contemporary fiction, is the tendency to see hope and beauty as less complex than despair and disillusion, as if the latter are necessarily more nuanced or sophisticated. In the US today, people speak of the danger of blind optimism. I suppose in certain privileged circles, people can choose to stay walled off from much of the suffering and discontent around them. That’s dangerous because it distorts your perspective. But in a place like Cambodia, where you confront suffering at every corner, where you find children living off garbage dumps, and musicians maimed and disfigured by land mines, there is no space for blind optimism.  Amidst such continual suffering, hope becomes very complex.

As a writer, my role is not simply to shine a light on tragedy. I feel it’s much more difficult — and more necessary — to portray how people who know suffering recover the ability to see goodness. Under such circumstances, hope is not blind or without tension. It’s a struggle as well. Every day, people who live in great suffering, who have every justification to give up, choose instead to persevere. For me, the only possible foundation for art is to live in awareness of such suffering while endeavoring to uncover the beauty and dignity in the desire for life. Hope, perseverance, redemption… these are more than literary tropes. For me, they are the very foundation of existence.

The Punch: In the tragedy that unfolded until 1979 (the year the Khmer Rouge’s reign ended), you were also to lose your toddler sister and many of your extended family. You and your mother were lucky to escape and arrived in the United States as refugees. Could you talk about that phase a bit? What sense could you make of what was happening around you? What were your first impressions of arriving in the US?

Vaddey Ratner: On arriving in the US, I was in awe. We had emerged from hell. At the refugee camp on the Thai border, we saw locals nearby who had their own homes, land to farm, and the freedom to move around. Their lives were at least familiar, if not within reach. But coming to America, I felt I had arrived in a place that was not of this Earth, that existed on a different plane altogether. We called it “the third realm,” and it was beyond anything I could have imagined.

Yet, with time, I’d come to learn that America is full of people like myself, people who escaped atrocities, people who carry the burden of great suffering, if not in their own lives then in the lives of their ancestors. I learned of the sustained violence against native Americans, the enduring consequences of slavery, the plight of waves of immigrants and refugees from Europe and Asia and Latin America. I came to appreciate, not just in the history books but also in the examples of people I met, the strength of those who endured and built and redefined this country. This fed my own strength, and my sense of possibility that I too could find a place, and find a voice.

The Punch: You were so traumatised by the atrocities and the tragedy that you had become mute. Do you see the novel as symbolic of you finding your voice?

Vaddey Ratner: Definitely — but the notion of recovery is more than symbolic. 

During those first few years in America, I regained my ability to speak, and soon my facility with English surpassed my mother’s. I was very conscious that she was a woman so eloquent in our native tongue, and yet, every time she stepped out of our home she became someone — a refugee, an outsider — who spoke only broken English. In such moments, our life seemed as broken as the language we adopted. I wanted so desperately to find a way for the scattered pieces of ourselves to coalesce into something whole and new — a world as beautiful as the one my mother had built for me before the war. I wanted to capture that beauty and gift it back to her.

When In the Shadow of the Banyan came out, witnessing my mother’s reaction after she’d read it, I felt that I had succeeded in that task. In the years since, I’ve heard from fellow Cambodians who describe a similar response to the novel — the feeling of seeing their beloved homeland come to life again, in the fullness of its tragedy and its beauty. There’s something restorative about that.

Recovering my voice is a personal journey, but in exercising that voice as a writer, I find that I am not alone. I write in a realm shrouded in near silence — our collective inability as Cambodians to talk about the trauma of genocide. Because of this, it’s all the more affirming as I hear other voices echoing in response to say, Yes, we were more than that tragedy. Cambodia was more than the killing fields. Once, it was home. 

The Punch: While in the US, you started talking, having found refuge in another language — English. Tell us about the various ways the US and English change you as a person, helping you forge a new identity and, most importantly, enabling you to tell your story, the story of your country and people? 

Vaddey Ratner: My encounter with the English language came a bit before my arrival in the US when, at the refugee camp, I was given a lesson book full of illustrations. There were no sentences, just intricate illustrations with various things labeled by number. There was a drawing of the various rooms of a house, with its relaxed family room and kitchen, bedrooms each filled with their own peculiar belongings. I was enthralled by the silent busyness of those illustrations, and I spent full days decoding them, tracing the numbers. 1 is father, 2 is mother…

The language was a sanctuary. It occupied a different space from Khmer, at first enclosed safely in picture books, so it wasn’t threatening my silence. By the time I arrived in America, I felt it was safe to try to pick up this language because it felt so new, and it didn’t require me to speak of what was lost. It was about practical things like I’d seen in those pages. My reading expanded of course, and by high school I was deep in the British classics — Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre — the texts I’d been assigned in class. The landscape, the food, the dresses, the setting was all wrong, I didn’t fit there, but when I entered into these novels I felt I could live the experience, invisibly.

Eventually I was introduced to literature in translation, by authors such as Isabelle Allende, Yukio Mishima, and Gabriel García Marquez, and writers working in English who’d found a way to retain a rhythm and quality of their mother tongue, like Chinua Achebe, Amitav Ghosh, Romesh Gunesekera, Ha Jin, and Vikram Seth. The multiplicity in each of their identities was astounding.

I became particularly fascinated by the way that literature could bridge different worlds, because this responded to something fundamental in my evolving identity. Cambodia is my birthplace, a land I not only love but where I’ve buried those I love. Most of my spirit family is there. America is where I’ve rebuilt a family, and home. Between these two poles, I have many selves. I cherish the two places equally, despite the deep and tragic shortcomings of each. I don’t idealize one over the other, and I don’t carry illusions about what they are. Together they embody something of the extremes of this world we live in. They stretch me. 

When I first started writing, I was very conscious of the cultural divide, as well as the linguistic one — the tension inherent in trying to convey an experience lived in Khmer and render it faithfully, honestly, in English. Then as I became immersed in the story, that tension began to fade. I no longer asked, How would this translate? I unearthed the experiences I’d lived as a child, and I asked myself how I could express these truthfully in words. I became less consciously aware of the gap between Khmer and English, focused instead on narrowing the gap between words and emotion.

What’s astounding is to have readers of Banyan, people from all walks of life in disparate geographies, tell me that they see this not simply as a Cambodian story, that they see themselves in this story. I feel that’s all we can hope for. We write from the basis of what we know and live, but the story we end up telling belongs to each who steps into it. For me, that is a vital purpose of literature, to create an opening so that those with completely different life experiences can enter and find themselves at home.

The Punch: At Cornell University, you studied Southeast Asian history and literature. How crucial was the choice of subjects to what you eventually wanted to write about?

Vaddey Ratner: My choice was very simple. By the time I reached Cornell, there were a number of testimonials published by survivors of the Khmer Rouge, but each had been written with a co-author or ghostwriter. I was very unsettled by a sense that telling our story meant relinquishing a large part of the responsibility to others. I wanted the ability to articulate my personal history in the most inviting way possible, and at the same time to ground that in a probing assessment of my own society. So I sought an education that would equip me with the tools of research and critical analysis, and an understanding of the role of literature as social critique. But the disciplines of history and political science and comparative literature were only foundations. Cornell was also one of the very few universities in the US that offered Khmer language, so I had the chance to recover and deepen my grasp of written Khmer. This allowed me to research in much more depth, something that’s especially important in portraying the Cambodia of earlier periods I did not live through, as I do in Music of the Ghosts.

The interview about Music of the Ghosts will be published in a forthcoming issue of The Punch