'Before us stood a naked mountain ridge, holding the sky on its back. Silent black figures weaved their way up and down the long, jagged slope, like ants building a giant anthill in expectation of a great downpour. It was a sick sky. A sky burning with welts. Angry and red. The colours of rotting flesh, of dying and death, the one heaving last breath...
"I couldn't see past the plumes of dust. My eyes felt gritty. When I blinked, I saw sandstorms, I felt fire. When I swallowed, I tasted the desert on my tongue... Around me the ground was broken and scarred, with holes and ditches that resembled half-dug graves... Baskets lay scattered all around us, like giant shells, a whole sea of dead clams. Hoes and shovels criss-crossed like bones in an open field. Dirt and rocks gathered in small mounds resembling termite hills..."
Such infernal evocation easily reminds us of T.S. Eliot's poems, or the myth of Sisyphus. But it has nothing to do with surrealism. It was reality once happened, in a not too distant past, and nothing can be more real.
It is but one fragment from the plentiful stunning descriptions of Vaddey Ratner's autobiographical debut In The Shadow Of The Banyan. Since its publication last month, the novel has gained a chorus of praise from literature veterans and captious media.
It appeared on The New York Times best-seller list in the first week, and was selected as a New York Times book review Editor's Choice.
The story spans from 1975 to 1979, when the Khmer Rouge seized power from the Cambodian government that had brought the monarchial reign to an end five years before. The Khmer Rouge, as we all know, then carried out their experiment of establishing a communist utopia.
The narrator is a seven-year-old girl, Raami, whose life was changed on the morning of the lunar New Year in 1975, when a young Khmer Rouge soldier stormed into her house in Phnom Penh. "The Americans will drop their bombs!" Raami and her family were forced to join a mass evacuation from the city and set on a journey that led them to torture, starvation and death.
The years of terror under the Khmer Rouge was the darkest time of Cambodian history. Endless summoning and separation under the name of "greater good", families were destroyed. People were put into work camps, systematically starved, or perished from forced labour or malaria.
With the extreme radicalism in its nature, the Khmer Rouge's party treated its perceived enemies with horrible atrocity. Intellectuals, diplomats, doctors, pilots and engineers, policemen and military officers, "those of rank and reputation", were detained and executed. Then, office clerks, technicians, palace servants, taxi drivers, people with "modern professions" were killed in vast numbers. At last came the purge of "traitors" and "spies" lurking in the party. People vanished overnight.
Raami and her family, from the aristocratic class of the old world, were "weeds", which must be "uprooted before they multiply". Shortly after the takeover, Raami lost her father, the Tiger Prince of the Sisowath family _ one of the two contending lines of Cambodia's modern royalty. On the way of evacuation, the family was scattered and family members died one after another, but Raami and her mother survived and escaped.
Vaddey Ratner
While philosophers such as Albert Camus find the experience of the "death of God" to be central to the modern condition in the West, it is also one of the curses of many modern tragedies in the Eastern world. The holocaust in Cambodia in the 1970s cost lives of estimated one third of its population _ that's more than one million people.
It is hard to believe that such an evil slaughter took place in a country in which Buddhism is deeply rooted. During the transformation to a modern society, the sudden absence of a transcendental purpose and direction became the critical challenge to modern-day people. Taking advantage of the human desire of transcendental meaning, a rationalist doctrine promising a redemptive vision easily prevailed.
However, if such a doctrine legitimises itself by oppressing others' dignity, rather than by serving the common good of all human beings, it loses its justification.
We witnessed catastrophes of this kind in the Nazi concentration camps, in the Soviet's Great Purge, China's Cultural Revolution and now with this book, Vaddey Ratner pulls us into another black scene of human history.
As the novel is fictionalised from the author's personal experience, the comprehensive logic, abundance of details and sympathetic strokes have resulted in immersive reading, comparable to a documentary work, while the absurd and brutal appear more striking.
For Princess Raami, the first blow came from seeing a Khmer Rouge soldier shoot a skinny old man in the chaos of evacuation. She couldn't understand how a young girl could aim her pistol at the old man's head and kill him for no reason.
"It occurred to me that the look on her face as she shot the old man, as she watched him fall to the ground, had no name. It was neither anger nor hate nor fear. It was absent of rage or anything recognisable."
The writer spent a fair amount of ink on the observation of the Khmer Rouge soldiers _ they wore only black from head to toe, which made them look like "a race of shadows".
Through the confused eyes of seven-year-old Raami, the author explores the questions: How did those young, innocent children become brutal killers? How could they murder monks and teachers while shouting "liberation of mankind"? How could they be so numb and calm when hanging their own comrades?
The death of Raami's Big Uncle reflects Vaddey Ratner's most intense thinking about the madness and tragic nature of the world. Her uncle, she writes, used to be "a yiak, an invincible giant who could crush you with his bare hands" and became the pillar of the whole family after Raami's father was taken away. But such a magnificent human being was finally broken, and chose to kill himself.
He died the day he found his family _ his lovely twin sons, his wife and his princess sister _ hanged by the Khmer Rouge. "Their bodies swollen. Blackened with flies." He was fatally defeated by the realisation that he could do nothing to save his beloved, even with lies.
"There are no gods. If they were the ones who gave life, created it, they'd know its value. There are no gods. Only senselessness."
With only desperation left in his life, Big Uncle hanged himself with the rope he'd woven with his own hands.
It must have needed huge courage for the author to face and represent those cruelties. As she put it in the appendix interview herself, "Every page was a struggle. I laboured and laboured, from a single word to a sentence to a paragraph. There were moments when I spiralled downward, to a depth I didn't think I could come back from. It was a painful story to write, to relive."
However, pains are not all in this novel and fortunately Vaddey Ratner has created a world for readers and herself to escape to. "What I wanted to articulate is something more universal, more indicative, I believe, of the human experience _ our struggle to hang onto life, our desire to live, even in the most awful circumstances," she writes.
She refrains from direct description of violence and keeps a distance from ideological dispute, while highlighting the "beauty and resilience of the human spirit", and has created a series of sparkling figures on whose love Raami managed to survive in the hopeless darkness.
Raami's papa, a prince and a poet, who once had illusions and sympathy in communism, gave himself to protect the family, leaving Raami with his spirit and humanity which, again and again, inspired her to continue. Raami's mother, a delicate lady, fought to live with the loss of her younger daughter, and do anything she could for her elder daughter's survival.
Suffering had made Raami seem wiser than her age. While calmly discerning the coldness of this world, she never failed to appreciate kindness, "to encounter protection and tenderness when I most needed it", even though those were indeed rarities during the period.
An old peasant couple treated Raami and her mother as their own children. An old temple sweeper showed his brave respect for Raami's father. A former monk comforted a couple who had lost a baby, families exchanged food during evacuation. Even a Khmer Rouge soldier could have a warm side: an oxen cart driver told the "tevoda and a yiak" story to Raami, so that she wouldn't be scared of lightning and thunder.
For a literature piece telling refugee stories, themes of the struggle for life and eternal love are not new. However, what makes In The Shadow Of The Banyan a masterpiece is the magic world the writer presents us in poetry, tales and religious stories.
We see a beautiful Cambodia we never knew _ from the gardens and temples to paddy fields and lotus ponds. We see sacrifice, love, humility, respect and justice in the country's exquisite tales. We see hope and salvation in people's poems and religion.
The writer has knitted her thinking and sentiments with poetry, transforming suffering into art, telling a story about an old prophecy. "A darkness would settle upon Cambodia. There would be empty houses and empty roads, the country would be governed by those with no morals or teaching, and blood would course so high as to reach the underbelly of an elephant. In the end only the deaf, the dumb, and the mute would survive.
"And the only safe place is here. Under the banyan. There, the ancestors, the tevodas, and the guardian spirits are watching over us, keeping us out of harm's way. We had nothing to fear."
