by Sandip Roy
http://highbrowmagazine.com
Posted Thursday, February 07, 2013
Posted Thursday, February 07, 2013
PHNOM PEHN, Cambodia--The manager at the hotel in Phnom Penh was deeply
apologetic. Norodom Sihanouk, the former king had died about a week ago
and the royal palace was closed to ordinary visitors. But the Killing
Fields were open, he said reassuringly, as was S-21 -- the school the
Khmer Rouge turned into a grisly detention camp in 1975.
In Cambodia, death can sometimes get in the way of tourism and sometimes tourism is all about death.
The 15-Storey Crematorium
On February 5, after lying in state for almost four months, Norodom
Sihanouk -- the king who abdicated twice, led his country into the
horror of the Khmer Rouge and then out of that darkness -- was cremated
on an ornate funeral pyre inside a 15-storey-high crematorium, while 100
guns fired a salute and 90 Buddhist monks, one for each year of his
long life, chanted shlokas around his flower-bedecked coffin.
I was not a complete stranger to the spectacle of public mourning. I
had seen photographs of the makeshift memorials of flowers and teddy
bears outside Buckingham Palace for Lady Diana. There’s still an
apartment building in south Kolkata with a painting of Indira Gandhi on
its wall, dating back to an artistic tribute right after her
assassination.
But in Cambodia, a country that’s lived through both monarchy and
communism, mass mourning happens on a different scale altogether -- both
grand and state-sponsored, as well as simultaneously intimate and
personal.
In just 10 days in the country, we would stumble upon mourning
everywhere -- a gathering of monks in front of the market, on the lapels
of ordinary Cambodians going to work, in giant portraits garlanded with
white chrysanthemums outside official buildings. Movie theatres were
shut and the dance bars were closed. Bars, thankfully, were not.
One night we stumbled on a great public mass outside the royal palace.
It was like a movie set bathed in a smoky halogen glow of thousands of
candles. The palace was lit up as brightly as India’s Diwali festival.
Mourning becomes electric here.
The place was awash in greenish lotus buds, the stems drooping like the
necks of swans. Nuns and monks sat on the ground, their chants a steady
hum rising into the night sky along with the smoke from thousands and
thousands of incense sticks and candles that made our eyes water.
Mourning on the Plaza
Yet there was also something unsentimentally clear-eyed about it all as
well. Small children jockeyed with each other fiercely to sell black
and white mourning ribbons. “You already have one,” asked one persistent
little girl? “Buy another one for your friend. Only 50 rial. You want
black, white or black-and-white?”
Families in T-shirts emblazoned with portraits of Sihanouk picnicked on
boiled eggs. Mourning is brisk business. That’s only to be expected in a
country where death has long become a tourist attraction.
At the boutique hotel in Siam Reap, the welcome note from the
proprietor said he lost all but two of his family members to the Khmer
Rouge. His mother was bludgeoned to death. Now many of those same Khmer
Rouge killers have shed their old uniforms and quietly joined the
government. You don’t know if the person sitting next to you on the bus
could be your mother’s killer, our host wrote.
Then in almost the next sentence he invited his guests to take a drink
from the bar up to the roof during sunset. It’s quite lovely up there,
he wrote. A young woman at a museum exhorted me to buy a book detailing
the horrors of the Khmer Rouge. It’s a terrible story she assured me,
but her eyes were opaque, all emotion sanded out of them by the
never-ending recitation of her spiel.
When I demurred, she moved seamlessly into trying to sell me silver jewelry.
This is Wife Number 2
Given Cambodia’s heart-rending history of genocide, making death part
of commerce seems to be one way to pick up the pieces and move on. It’s
only foreign tourists like me who pick gingerly through the shards of
memory, posing uneasily against a backdrop of skulls and rusty
bloodstains, squirming as if we are eavesdropping on death. The
Cambodians are happy to chat on their cell phones inside the torture
chambers.
Bou Meng survived the notorious school-turned-prison because he could
paint portraits of Pol Pot. He and his group cheerfully interrupted his
grilled-fish and rice lunch to talk to tourists and sign his memoir.
“This is wife number 2,” he said with a toothless grin, pointing to a
middle-aged woman next to him, while posing ramrod straight for
photographs. Wife number 1, he told me, died in the S-21 prison camp.
“Cambodia is a very poor country,” said Brigitte Sion, who edited the book Death Tourism: Disaster Sites as Recreational Landscape,
to be published in the United States in July. “The mentality there says
I have to survive. I survived the genocide, and I have to survive the
dire economic circumstances.”
Selling the Killing Fields
Even if that means handing over the hallowed Killing Fields where
17,000 Cambodians were killed, mostly with rifle butts and machetes and
the sharp leaves of sugar-palm trees to save on precious bullets.
A Japanese company now leases the Killing Fields. It pays the Cambodian
government $15,000 a year, maintains the grounds and the museum and
pockets the revenues. “Some people say we sold the Killing Fields,” a
guide told her tour group ruefully.
Sion said S-21 and the Killing Fields were never intended for
Cambodians to heal their wounds. The real memorials, she said, are far
away from the tourist track, in modest stupas and little shrines tucked
away in remote villages.
“[S-21 and Killing Fields] were sites meant to attract tourists,
attract foreign officials and show how Cambodia is in the process of
acknowledging its past history. So it’s a façade,” she stressed.
That is why, instead of cremating the skulls found there, as Buddhist
tradition dictated, they are now piled in a pyramid. It might break the
karmic cycle but it makes for a good photograph. “It speaks to the very
primal instance of visitors to see death up close,” said Sion. “And the
survivor has a new role -- that of the tour guide.”
That was abundantly clear in the little tourist shops facing the
Sisowath Quay, a stone’s throw from the plaza where Cambodians mourned
their ex-king. The tour company offered up the attractions of Phnom Penh
for $6. There was a picture of a pile of skulls from the Killing Fields
and a painting from S-21 of a small baby being wrenched from the arms
of wailing mother.
But this tour of heartbreak country came with one more attraction, one
final stop -- a visit to a shooting range where you could try your hand
at an assault weapon. On the poster a blonde woman posed with a rifle,
grinning in front of a sign that said, “Don’t touch the gun.”
Point-and-shoot tourism trumps everything here. It is the real king. Le Roi est mort. Vive le Roi!
Photo: Image from the public mass for the late
ex-king Sihanouk in Phnom Penh. (Photograph courtesy Bishan Samaddar
from his album “Mourning Sihanouk.”)
Additional photo: Heng Reeksmey (Wikipedia Commons).
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