Chanthou Thoeun

Dr. Lyon

ENG 653

15 March 2009

Testimonial Acts as Aesthetic Design: Human Rights Discourse in

Chanrithy Him‟s When Broken Glass Floats

Following current debates surrounding human rights discourse, this essay examines the

problems of ethically representing the suffering of others within the frame of human rights. By

engaging the texts of human rights scholars such as Michael Ignatieff, Luc Boltanski, Elaine

Scarry, and Linda Alcoff, I examine the contemporary solutions and frames within which to

represent the other. Next, I offer an alternate solution, what I call “aesthetic design” as a

possibility for imagining the other to direct political attention and attention. Intertwining my

discussion with the dynamics of narrative theory, I offer a reading of Chanrithy Him‟s

autobiographical memoir When Broken Glass Floats to exemplify the utility of “aesthetic

design.”

The problem of ethically representing an other‟s suffering is one that continues to haunt

discussions taking place within a human rights frame. Political philosophers such as Michael

Ignatieff have complicated the assumption that human rights are universals, asserting, “We need

to stop thinking of human rights as trumps and begin thinking of them as a language that creates

a basis for deliberation” (95). Ignatieff argues against positing human rights as a discourse

entrenched in philosophical and metaphysical idealization and stakes a claim for the practical

and political application of human rights on a globalized scale. While the move Ignatieff makes

suggests the departure of human rights from a universalized western frame steeped in

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assumptions of democracy, liberty, and individualism, his emphasis on “rhetorical pragmatism”

limits the possibilities that human rights engender.

Moreover, if Ignatieff asserts that human rights deliberate, the questions remains as to

who determines the locale within which determination takes place. In many instances, the

violation of human rights occurs in places that are not immediately discernable for those who are

most familiar with human rights. Distance and location are two other variants that complicate

the question of determination. Addressing the problem of distance and the mitigation of

suffering through human rights deliberation, Luc Boltanski asks in Distant Suffering, “Why else

present a spectacle of suffering human beings to unconcerned people if not to draw their

attention to it and so direct them to action?” (20). Boltanski directs attention to representation

and deliberation as they occur as “spectacles.” Where Ignatieff espouses a purely pragmatic

approach, Boltanski necessarily entrenches the framing of suffering within an aesthetic, as his

attention to “spectacle” suggests. It is in this attention to spectacle and representation that I find

a useful point of departure for the representation of the other in human rights discourse.

Linda Alcoff and Elaine Scarry are two among many scholars who actively engage the

problem of speaking for others within the discourse of human rights. Like Boltanski, both

scholars focus on the tension that arises when speaking for others who are not folded into

dominant modes of discourse, much less the discourse of human rights. In an essay entitled “The

Problem of Speaking for Others,” Alcoff suggests that the danger in speaking for others

translates, ultimately, into a problem of representation. She holds, “In both the practice of

speaking for as well as the practice of speaking about others, I am engaging in the act of

representing the other‟s needs, goals, situation, and in fact, who they are” (9). Addressing such a

problematic, Alcoff offers and subsequently rejects two modes of mitigating the problem of

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representation while finally advocating a third option provided by Gayatri Spivak. Engaging

Spivak‟s question of “Can the subaltern speak?” Alcoff suggests the practice of “speaking to,”

which proposes alternative narratives of history that reject, revise, and reconstruct pre-existing

discourses. In such a confrontation, the other concomitantly renders his or herself intelligible to

“us” and fractures the ideologies that constitute “us.” More important to my later discussion on

aesthetic design is the concept of “speaking to,” an act that presumes an “I-you” dynamic

engendered by the autobiographical model.

If Alcoff proposes how the other can speak to us, Scarry provides conceptual tools that

allow this speech to take place. Arguments Scarry has previously articulated in The Body in

Pain transfer over in this essay in ways that are productive. Scarry makes a useful distinction

between quotidian imagining and constitutional design as conceptual frameworks to begin

imagining others. She explicitly argues for constitutional design because it structures from the

ground up and seeks to redress differences epistemologically. On the difficulty of “imagining

other people” Scarry assumes epistemologically restructuring how others can be imagined vis-à-

vis constitutional design, such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), is

teleological and productive in human rights deliberation and politics. Echoing Ignatieff, Scarry

maintains, “Human rights are universal in content, but they are particular in their base of

authorization and content” (100). It is through documents such as the UDHR that allow the

subaltern to negotiate speech. As such, though I find Scarry‟s conceptual tools useful in thinking

about imagining others, such concepts also walk a fine line between tool and temple for subaltern

subjects to make themselves intelligible for those in the majority.

Alcoff and Scarry elucidate important points with which to imagine the other. While

their respective solutions to imagining are not without fallacy, the attention Alcoff directs in

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“speaking to” and Scarry‟s notion of “constitutional design” anticipate a third solution that is

productive. I propose the notion of “aesthetic design” as a mode of design rendered specifically

through the testimonial text. The testimonial, the narration of a first-person witnessing, allows

the “I-you” dynamic produced in the act of “speaking to” advanced by Alcoff. Furthermore,

aesthetic design differs from Scarry‟s notion of “constitutional design” in the amount of agency

determined through each design. Scarry‟s design relies heavily on documents constituted by

institutions and state apparatuses to interpellate the other. Aesthetic design offers a possibility

for interpellation that is not rigidly structured around legal documents. While I don‟t mean to

suggest that “constitutional design” and “aesthetic design” are mutually exclusive and inherently

incompatible, I argue that the intersection between the two produces possibilities for imagining

in ways that are ethical for the “I” who produces and the “you” who witnesses the other‟s

production of design.

By aesthetic design I refer first to an other‟s ability to represent his or herself and their

collective identity to mass audiences. Secondly, in this representation of the self, the other is in

the position to control the relationship between his or herself and audience members. Ideally this

attention focuses attention and directs political action to alleviate human rights violations in

areas not immediately discernable to western audiences. Discussing the relationship between the

cognitive function of literature in and the status of fiction in narrative theory, Daniel Dohrn

asserts,

The task of the author is not merely an inventive one. Rather, her theoretical convictions

about the actual world and the aims of literature, her sensory imaginations, the emotive

patterns developed during her life, artistic rules and conventions, and so forth will guide

her figuring out paradigm scenarios. This is the reason why these purely fictional

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scenarios can nevertheless be relevant for understanding the real world. The reader

should allow himself to be guided by the narrative. (39)1

Of critical importance here is the manner that aesthetics govern the act of relating between the

author and the reader. While deconstructionism has rendered authorial intention irrelevant to the

text, Dohrn‟s analysis maintains the relationship between the reading function and the writing

function as inseparable, contingent upon one another, even. The structure of this relationship

becomes especially critical to the representation of “other” subjectivities that are often at the

margins of sight. Dohrn‟s discussion on the relationship between writer and reader may seem

incompatible with my discussion of Chanrithy Him‟s text When Broken Glass Floats because her

text is an autobiographical memoir testifying to the genocidal regime of the Khmer Rouge. I

maintain, however, like other scholars in the field of autobiographical studies, that

autobiographies traverse the fine line between fiction and nonfiction, between personal stories

and historical narratives.2 Autobiographies maintain an aesthetic function that designs both the

representation of its author/subject as well as the relationship between author and reader.

To illustrate how aesthetic design functions to structure and direct human rights

discourse, I now turn to Chanrithy Him‟s memoir, When Broken Glass Floats. Although there

are a multitude of other testimonial texts that engage rights discourse, I find Him‟s text mostly

clearly demonstrates “aesthetic design,” even in its autobiographical mode. Chanrithy Him‟s

1 By paradigm scenarios, Dohrn refers to scenarios actions and events that structure readers‟ interpretation. One

example Dorhn offers as a paradigm scenario is the narration of childhood, which in its invocation or direct

narration, elicit certain interpretive responses from the reader.

2 For an extended discussion on how autobiography persistently pushes against the boundaries marking fiction and

non-fiction, see Leigh Gilmore‟s text, The Limits of Autobiography: Testimony and Trauma. In five separate case

studies, Gilmore examines literary/autobiographical texts that engage in the departure from autobiography and

fiction and back.

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text engages human rights discourse because she has garnered attention for herself as well as

Khmer Rouge history by both exploiting the image of the emblematic victim to call attention to

human rights violations. Her testimonial project utilizes aesthetic design, centered on the trope

of the innocent child and female sufferer to gain currency and relevance within human rights

discourse.

When Broken Glass Floats is the memoir of Chanrithy Him, who was a young girl of

merely three years of age when she learned the word “war” in Cambodian. The text‟s narrative

trajectory describes the excesses of the Khmer Rouge, chronicling the overthrow of Lon Nol‟s

government, the terror of the Khmer Rouge regime, Cambodia‟s liberation from that regime with

the Vietnamese‟s invasion of the country, and culminates with the protagonist Chanrithy (also

referred to as “Thy” or “Athy” in the text) eventual escape to the United States.3 Amid these

political upheavals, Thy and her family are forced to evacuate their home in Takeo to the capitol

city of Phnom Penh. Along with millions of other Cambodian families, Thy‟s family is then

forcibly relocate to the rural areas of Cambodia, where they toil in the “killing fields” to fulfill

the Khmer Rouge‟s fantasy of a utopian agrarian society devoid of foreign corruption and class

disparity. During the course of the family‟s struggle through starvation and disease imposed by

the Khmer Rouge‟s refusal to sufficiently provide care to its citizens, the dissolution of the

family unit signals the breakdown of national collective identity. And while Him‟s text follows

standard models of refugee narratives, in which the United States symbolizes the locus upon

which ideologies of equality, democracy, and liberation can take place, I argue that Him‟s text

exploits the testimonial form to engage in human rights. Without disavowing the extent of her

3 Following current practices of autobiographical scholarship, I use Him when referring to the author of the text and

Chanrithy (“Thy” or “Athy” which are childhood nicknames belonging to Chanrithy) when referring to the

autobiographical persona/narrator/protagonist in the text proper.

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personal suffering under the Khmer Rouge, she negotiates within pre-established frames to

engage in human rights.

When Broken Glass Floats arrives at a critical juncture between speaking of and

testifying to one‟s own pain while speaking for other‟s pain. As Him seeks to testify to her own

personal pain under the excesses of the Khmer Rouge government, she explicitly positions

herself as human rights advocate in the opening remarks of the text. The voices of those who did

not survive the genocide who are “Determined to connect” beg the world and the narrator:

Please remember us.

Please speak for us.

Please bring us justice.

This opening poem emphatically marks the text as testimonial and emphatically signals rights

discourse in the supplication for justice. Furthermore, the author is authorized to speak of her

experiences within the space of political justice and ethical remembrance whose lives were lost

during the war. Hence, Him‟s position as narrator and author is multiply and complicatedly

positioned for she speaks not only for herself but also for those who did not survive. While Him

narrates the tale of her own survival, the unfolding of her story necessarily tells of the dead.

Him‟s text functions as her personal testimony as well as the testimony of those who did not

manage to survive. It is the deployment of the autobiographical forms that enables Him‟s foray

into rights discourse and to approximate Cambodian American subjectivity. Where Scarry

explicitly argues for “constitutional design” because it structures from the ground up and seeks to

redress differences epistemologically, Him‟s text augments constitutional design with “aesthetic

design”; it is literary form that enables Him to speak of her pain and the pain of numerous other

Cambodian refugees. In Him‟s text, it is the testimonial form that structures how the self and

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others can be imagined to redress violations of rights. Him achieves this relationship between

self, collective identity, and the audience by including the above poem as part of textual design.

Surficially a poem that moves audiencesaffectively, the poem also positions her location as the

strategic narrator.

If Him‟s testimony operates as a sort of aesthetic design that allows for the

epistemological restructuring of imagination, then critical attention needs to be devoted to the

way in which its testimonial form does more than utilize a template that has been pre-established

by empire.4 When writers such as Chanrithy Him, who are marked by the intersections of race,

class, gender, and ideology, enter into a pre-existing discourse to represent the self, much care

must be taken to ethically represent one‟s self and one‟s collective identity. Him herself

addresses the multiple functions that work within her text. While she speaks for herself in the

national arena for mainstream American audiences, her testimony is a meta-narrative that also

functions to call attention to atrocities across an international platform. Of testimony‟s practical

uses in human rights discussions, Sidonie Smith and Kay Schaffer direct our attention, in Human

Rights and Narrated Lives, to the pragmatic uses and limitations that arise in the circulation of

life writing within contemporary human rights discourse: “As meta-sites for social critique,

published narratives sometimes unsettle received conceptions of personal and national identity,

sometimes dismantle the foundational functions through which nations and imagined

communities construct and reconstruct their histories, sometimes promote new platforms for and

forms of political action, and sometimes produce a backlash of actions that forestall recognition

4 I refer here to Georges Gusdorf seminal essay “On Autobiography” in which Gusdorf strives to legitimate

autobiography as a genre of literature that is separate from the novel. While Gusdorf‟s essay has certainly been

fundamental in drawing attention to autobiography as a “special genre,” later critics have taken him to task for

upholding a white heteronormative autobiographical subject as quintessential to western autobiography.

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and redress” (32). As texts capable of producing counterhistory, life writing signifies a

particularly useful tool for victims of human rights violations to plea for human rights. In other

words, the aesthetic and politics of life writing allows counterhistory such as those produced by

survivors of Cambodia‟s Khmer Rouge, to gain currency and circulation within western and

human-rights discourse. Third World Women autobiographies such as Him‟s not only narrate

the life of a singular identity, such texts also operate politically and socially within national and

international contexts.

While Him utilizes the autobiographical form to offer her testimony, she is careful to

avoid constructing a narrative that either wholly condemns or exonerates the political forces at

play in Southeast Asia during the 1970s. For example, while she fails to explicitly incriminate

the United States‟ secret bombing of Cambodia, she intersperses the narrative with newspaper

editorials that speak to the United States‟ role. One such example occurs in chapter two in which

the narrator Athy‟s idyllic childhood in Cambodia literally becomes shattered with the bombing

of Cambodia. The chapter, entitled “B-cinquante-deux” is begins with a 1973 article from the

New York Times written by Seymour Hersh. Portions of the excerpt Him includes read:

Washington, July 17—United States B-52 bombers made at least 3,500 secret bombing

raids over Cambodia in a 14-month period beginning in March, 1969, Defense

Department sources disclosed today….Military sources did confirm, however, that

information about the Cambodian raids was directly provided to President Nixon and his

top national security advisors, including Henry A. Kissinger. (38)

The evidence Him levers here critically underscores her multiply positioned subjectivity that

traverses American, Cambodian, and Cambodian American ideology. Because her testimony

must fit the demands of American public audiences, the possibility of explicitly contesting the

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United State‟s role in those secret bombings is offset by a greater need to reap the benefits of

compassion and understanding from American readers. Including sources produced by

American writers that indict the United State‟s role allows Him to negotiate this otherwise

intransigent space of testifying and educating. Him‟s strategic negotiating avoids entering into a

“blame-game” while articulating some troubling facts about the events surrounding the Khmer

Rouge‟s rule of Cambodia. As such, Smith and Schaffer are correct to cautiously point out that

the platform of human rights necessitates a specific form of story-telling that both overrides and

overwrites difference. Testimonials must be written to fit a specific model in order to gain

currency and direct political action, if it does so at all. However, this acting of writing into a pre-

existing frame problematizes individual agency for those who have suffered. Not only do

sufferers have to present themselves as victims, they must represent themselves as a specific type

of authentic victim. When Broken Glass Floats negotiates this problematic not within the space

of the narrative-proper, but along the marginal spaces of text that consists of footnotes and

newspaper editorials. This strategic gesture avoids the wholesale reification of a simple victim

and instead produces a text that engages in a dialogue between the so called victim and savior,

between subaltern subjectivity and hegemonic discourse vis-à-vis autobiographical testimony.

While testimony initially offers a space for the constitutional design for imagining oneself and

the other, as suggested by Scarry, this design can be deployed in a manner that offers subaltern

subjectivities the possibility of engaging and contesting that design.

As such, aesthetic design allows injured persons (particularly those who come from

othered racial, gendered, and class lines) to engage in human rights discourse vis-à-vis the

vehicle of autobiographical testimony. One speculation that subtends those discussions is the

question of power and the power of speech for injured persons who are inherently excluded from

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hegemonic modes of discourse, such as human rights discourse. How does the other (and

specifically the Third World women who is often disenfranchised and disempowered along a

number of intersecting and conflicting determinations) speak of her pain so that her speech

becomes intelligible for those in the majority at the same time she maintains a sense of agency?

When Broken Glass Floats engages in human rights discourse to give voice to injuries suffered

under the Khmer Rouge utilizing the logic of aesthetic design. Him‟s text engages this debate in

the act of representing her personal pain and the collective pain of Cambodians who suffered

under the Khmer Rouge in two critical ways: Him gains compassion from readers by positioning

herself as a child and as a young girl, two prevalent frames of representing human rights

violations. And while the possibility of other models is certainly possible, these two models

function in tandem to render the suffering of Khmer Rouge refugees intelligible.

Teri Schafer Yamada‟s discussion of Cambodian American autobiography as testimonial

discourse provides a rather specific contextualization of women‟s life writing and its legitimacy

in human rights discourse. In reading Chanrithy Him‟s When Broken Glass Floats and Luong

Ung‟s First They Killed My Father, Yamada asserts that Cambodian American autobiographies

reshape the genre of American autobiography.5 Yamada discusses Cambodian American

autobiography in conjunction with American biography as well as other Asian American

autobiography while maintaining that Cambodian American autobiography exists on an

5 Luong Ung‟s text First They Killed My Father: A Daughter of Cambodia Remembers is another text that has

received wide-spread circulation to garner attention for Khmer Rouge atrocities. While the narrative trajectory of

Ung‟s text is similar to that of Him‟s, I take issue with a number of points in Ung‟s text, namely her tendency to

exceptionalize her position as victim while simultaneously speaking for millions of other Cambodians. For an

extended critique of Ung‟s text in comparison to other Cambodian American texts, see Sody Lay‟s essay “The

Cambodian Tragedy: Its Writers and Representations” in Amerasia Journal 27:2 (2001): 171-182.

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“indeterminate site.”6 By extension, Yamada further differentiates Cambodian American

autobiography with other refugee literature such as those produced by Vietnamese American

writers whose narratives often move beyond the status of refugee while the former remains

“situated on a luminal interstice of the national/international” and is limited to the duration of the

Khmer Rouge‟s rule from 1975-1979 (146).

Him is able to negotiate within this interstitial space of speaking for herself and speaking

for others in the autobiographical mode because of the manner in which she positions herself as a

child witness. Autobiography as a genre of representing the self is one that has always been

fraught and perhaps even uncomfortable with itself as a genre.7 Certainly, the trope of the child

as the quintessential innocent bystander is not one that is unique to autobiographical texts.

However, by positioning herself as a child narrator, Him is able to garner compassion for her

cause for audience at the same time that she exploits this model to complicate her position as

innocent bystander. An interesting moment occurs in the text when Chanrithy describes the

exodus of two million Cambodian families who are forced to evacuate Phnom Penh, per Khmer

Rouge orders, to rural areas in Cambodia. Observing the “mass river of humans” crowding

Cambodian streets, Chanrithy observes, “To me the scene seems like a page out of history,

though schoolbooks and lessons seem worlds away right now” (66). Chanrithy further elaborates

6 By indeterminate site, Yamada refers to the recursive nature of Cambodian autobiographies. Such autobiographies

traverse between individual and collective suffering, national and international space, fiction and history, personal

and political action. Because such texts traverse along these multiple determinations, they are indeterminate and

difficult to pin down in formalistic terms.

7 I refer here to debates in which Philippe Lejeune, Paul de Man, Paul John Eakins, and Georges Gusdorf among

others have troubled the genre of autobiography as a legitimate genre within literary studies. In establishing

autobiography‟s canonicity, traditional scholars of autobiography have privileged an autobiographical subject that is

white and male. Later scholars such as Leigh Gilmore, Sidonie Smith and Kay Schaffer, among others have

troubled this assumption to critically open up space for discussions of autobiographies that do not follow this

traditional form.

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once the family stops for lunch at a wood clearing, “Unlike my sisters and brothers, I mingle

with these adults” which allows her to overhear important information about the events (71).

While overhearing adult conversations creates moments to structure events in the narrative, Thy

navigates the structures of kinship and familial power positions by positioning herself as the

precocious child. Thy actively seeks out moments to educate herself with the political situation

in ways that refuse the label of “emblematic victim” while superficially seeming to conform to

such a model.

Thy‟s question of agency additionally becomes complicated when she and her family are

hailed to attend the first meeting with Khmer Rouge officials. Although Him fails to explicitly

discuss class conditions that serve as an impetus for the war, she does invoke the affect of anger

which mobilizes her refusal and resistance to the orders of the Khmer Rouge: “I glare at Pa.

Why must we sit on the ground and obey the Khmer Rouge? We can’t just obey them. We don’t

owe them our respect” (82). Unlike the rest of the citizens, she refuses to defer to Khmer Rouge

authority and further elaborates, “Anger boils inside me. Internally, I take it out on my father as

I squint defiantly at the makeshift stage” (83). Chanrithy is more than an innocent observer as

she is actually defiant and claims agency, troubling her role as simple hapless and innocent

victim, a model of innocence that remains ahistoric and unchanging in the face of political

exploitation. She later comments on her refusal to prostrate to Khmer Rouge soldiers, “It is a

small act, but an important one” (84). Her defiance shows through in another instance as she

reflects, “This is the delicious power of the mind—they can‟t stop me from my silent thoughts.

They can‟t interrogate my memories” (86). While no single person possesses the ability to

interrogate his or her own thoughts. While Him‟s text tackles the momentous task of

representing the collective experience of Cambodian suffering in the hands of the Khmer Rouge,

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the text also forecloses the reader from understanding Thy as merely suffering victim. Thy‟s

stubborn refusal to allow Khmer Rouge soldiers access to her memory suggests to readers that

there are some things she will disclose but some things that she will keep hidden from the reader.

This particular moment in Him‟s text marks the intransigence in faithfully textualizing the

refugee experience for American audiences. At the same time that readers regard Thy as the

innocent bystander, readers are foreclosed from gaining access to her memory, suggesting the act

of testimony necessitates the act of levering certain memories of evidence while eliding those

that are less important.

Him‟s role as child observer becomes implicated in interesting ways later on in the text

where she is able to form alliances with adults in positions of power in order to negotiate

survival for herself and her siblings. In chapter ten of the text, Him and her sister Ra befriend a

Khmer Rouge official, known as Pok or father. Thy describes, “Though I haven‟t met him, I

envy Pok. I wonder how he fits in with the ideology the Khmer Rouge have long preached to

us” (208). Though not her biological father, who is referred to as Pa, Pok provides Thy and her

sister with care in a manner reminiscent of her own father, a man who faithfully provides care for

his family and countrymen regardless of political ties. Reflecting earlier on her bouts of asthma,

Thy relates, “As always, Pa is my doctor—he‟s there for me, checking my breathing, listening to

my lungs, trying to make things better as my chest rides up and down, struggling for air” (84). It

is the death of pa and the subsequent loss of western medicine that later serves as the impetus for

Thy to learn medicine once she arrives in America. However, Him frames this childhood

promise to commemorate her father‟s death by studying medicine takes on a significant

structure, not in the text proper, but in the prefatory material of the text.

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Him utilizes the space of the preface to frame and structure her relationship with the

reader, as well as with her relationship with other Cambodian refugees. She discloses the nature

of her work on post-traumatic stress disorders with Cambodian communities in Portland,

Oregon, the place of her new home in America. Him reveals,

As a survivor, I want to be worthy of the suffering that I endured as a child. I don‟t want

to let that pain count for nothing, nor do I want others to endure it. This may be our

greatest test: to recognize the weight of war on children. If thousands upon thousands of

children will suffer and are suffering right now in the world, we must be prepared to help

them. But it is folly to look at the future without an eye to the past. (20-21)

Assuming the persona of child narrator allows for Him to attest to her personal trauma suffered

under the Khmer Rouge, the collective trauma of the Cambodian body-politic, as well as gesture

towards the ways in which her narrative resonates across national and international boundaries.

The image of the suffering child enables the proliferation of Him‟s narrative in contexts that are

not specific to the Cambodian genocide alone, though it usefully furthers Him‟s cause. In

addition, Him describes the horrendous inability to assuage the suffering of her sister Chea who

died of a prolonged fever shortly before Cambodia was “liberated” by the Vietnamese: “At

thirteen, unable to save her, I was angry at myself for not having Pa’s medical knowledge, for

not having learned from him…If I die, I will learn medicine in my next life” (24). At the end of

the preface Him invokes the childhood memories suppressed in her, “There were times when

I‟ve denied my own memories, when I‟ve neglected the little girl in me” (25). At the same time

that she positions the child victim‟s memories as pure and authentic she navigates this trope of

child victim in ways that critically undermine the passivity of such a model. Him alludes to the

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suppression of memories and invokes those suppressed memories to call for justice and direct

attention to human rights violations inflicted by the Khmer Rouge regime.

While positioning herself as a child productively allows Him to testify to Khmer Rouge

atrocities along national and transnational fronts, Him‟s position as a gendered subject also plays

a critical role in the aesthetic design of her narrative. As the work of Anne Cubilie demonstrates,

the testimonies of Third World women persist along the peripheries of dominant discourse.

Cubilie contends in her preface that victims who survive to tell their stories in the form of life

narratives survive who testify to scenes of terror, “come to be figured by us in the form of

„ghosts‟ who haunt our collective imagination. Configured as the uncanny, visible only from the

corner of one‟s eye” (Cubilie xii). Him‟s position as a gendered subject certainly does not

operate in a manner that is immediately intelligible for readers. While we are focused on the

pain and suffering that she and her family undergo, Him‟s gendered status only becomes

intelligible at key moments that are “visible from the corner of one‟s eye.” Those moments

become transcribed within the margins of the text or are narrated implicitly when Athy‟s

witnesses the deaths of her female relatives. For example, in the preface Him imparts, “Being

raised by educated and open-minded parents, I had advantages. I was never forced to live up to

the sexist expectations of traditional Cambodian culture—a fact that would become important to

my survival” (23). Here, Him explicitly counters assumptions that women from Third World

countries are systematically disenfranchised and rendered ahistorical, monolithic, and

unchanging in opposition to the global feminist. Moreover, Athy‟s refusal to conform to the

gender expectations ascribed to her allows her to witness certain events that subsequently allow

her to testify. Following the fall of Lon Nol‟s government and Khmer Rouge‟s ascendency to

power, Chanrithy‟s father sets out to ensure neighboring villagers have put up white flags to

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signal their surrender to the Khmer Rouge. As Chanrithy demands to accompany her father, he

admonishes “Athy, stay home with your mother!” only to give in to her persistent demands (59).

Also, when she discovers the rotting body of her school site, she says, “Once home, I try to be as

normal as I can, acting like I‟ve just come back from a typical visit at a friend‟s house. No one

suspects my spying, nor the horror that has visited our playgrounds. I keep it to myself and it

seems to eat me up, devouring me from the inside out” (61). While it is easy to read her memoir

as a child‟s remembrance of traumatic events, the quote referenced above point to the ways that

Chanrithy actively sought out scenes to witness and instead of merely allowing them to happen

to her. Resisting the gender expectations imposed upon her enable Him to negotiate survival in

the face of Khmer Rouge terror.

A particularly compelling scene in which the mark of gender becomes a site for

negotiating survival occurs in 1978 when Thy, her sister Chea, and her brother Map are left to

take care of themselves with the deaths of both parents. To negotiate survival, Thy‟s sister Chea

dons the mask of what other comrades call “crazy old man.” Chea has altered her gender marked

body so that she can fluidly slip between male and female. In addition to her emaciated and

starved body, Chea shaves her head so that her female body is rendered unintelligible by Khmer

Rouge leaders.8 At the same time, this mode of survival simultaneously functions as a site of

abjection for Chea, who writes a poem to articulate the plight of her position:

I pity myself. Though I am a virgin, I am called an old man.

In the previous society, how furious would I‟ve been. But now it‟s normal for a woman.

8 Chea and Thy have kept books in secret places only to have those books later discovered by a Khmer Rouge spy.

Since books were prohibited by the Khmer Rouge government as a method of regulating citizens from questioning

their illusion of authority, the discovery of hidden books become a life-threatening event for Chea and Thy.

However, Chea circumnavigates punishment by asking Srouch, the leader of Khmer Rouge informants, “Does

comrade want these books? You may have them. I just keep them for wiping myself after I poop” (230).

Thoeun 18

I pity myself as a woman. Twenty-three years old, yet they think I‟m sixty.

My teeth still intact, my hair shiny black, they think I‟m sixty, for I‟ve shaved my head.

I pity myself so much, living without parents.

There‟s no hope of caring for them, of living near my beloved mother and father. (232)

While gender fluidity and performance allows for survival, Chea also bemoans the loss of gender

norms ascribed in the former society. In her doctoral dissertation, Susan Moynihan has

described the ways that Chea‟s gender transformation signals to Thy the threat of her own future.

Moynihan argues, “In Chea, Thy sees her own possible fate, where her sexuality and sense of

femininity are so distorted, she feels she has no chance of fulfilling life, at least in traditional

ways” (114). It is this sense of not having to and being unable to fulfill traditional gender roles

that allows Him to testify to her traumatic experience as she seeks refuge in the United States.

However, Him is careful to locate her refusal of gender roles in the seemingly traditional and

primitive homeland. In other words, she carries with her the seed of survival as engendered by

the markings of her gender. While the design of a gendered subject elicits certain interpretive

reactions, Him‟s tenuous representation of feminism in Cambodia prior to the war structures the

reader‟s interpretation of her gendered position. Him allows readers to sympathize with her

gendered position, but she forecloses from readers the presumption that Cambodia is inherently

patriarchal. As such, the fact that Him‟s testimony is enabled by her move to the United States

is questionable. While seeking refuge in the United States‟ has allowed her to live life safely, it

has not guaranteed her the affective closure engendered by her testimonial project. Though

constitutional design offers a possibility for projecting her suffering in the imagination of

western audiences, this imagining only becomes materialized in the aesthetic design of her

testimony.

Thoeun 19

The aesthetic design of Him‟s text generates material consequences that resonate

politically across national and international platforms. February 17th

of 2009 signified to many

Cambodians and Cambodian Americans the inauguration of a process of recognizing Khmer

Rouge human rights violations within a national and international scale.9 Approximately ten

years after appealing for United Nation‟s assistance in proceeding with an independent trial to

bring Khmer Rouge leaders to trial, the United Nations and the Cambodian government have

finally begun the process of retribution and reparation for those who suffered under Pol Pot‟s

Khmer Rouge regime. Interestingly enough, the beginning stages of UN backed trial

proceedings has resulted in the call for victim testimonies as forms of evidence to implicate

Khmer Rouge leaders.10

According to an article printed in BBC news, the first victim to present

a personal testimony within space of the United Nation Tribunal is a thirty-two year old

Cambodian American woman whose parents died under the Khmer Rouge government. It is

telling that the call for personal testimonies occurs after the literary testimonial projects of

Cambodian American writers such as Chanrithy Him. Luong Ung, author of First They Killed My

Father, who narrates her survival of the Khmer Rouge regime, recently made an appearance on national

television in segment a segment of Public Broadcasting Service‟s (PBS).11

Originally aired on March 31st

after the initial trial of Kaing Guek Eav (otherwise known as Duch), this section of NewsHour engaged

9 “Landmark Khmer Rouge trial starts.” BBC. 17 February 2009.

10 “In Khmer Rouge Trials, Victims Will Not Stand Idly By.” New York Times. 17 June 2008.

11 Ung‟s text was published in the same year as Him‟s. While I recognize that Ung and Him‟s text differ from one

another in critical ways, both authors‟ autobiographical texts ultimately approximate a similar task in testifying to

the Khmer Rouge‟s atrocities. I choose not to engage Ung‟s because I take issue with a number of points in her text,

namely her tendency to exceptionalize her “Chinese-Cambodian” status to reify ethnic hierarchies in Cambodia. At

the same time the she exceptionalizes her ethnic status, Ung strives to collectively speak for other Cambodian

Americans.

Thoeun 20

Gregory Stanton, the director of the Cambodian Genocide Project, as well as Ung whose role was that of

an authorized testimonial subject. Literary testimony, a form of aesthetic design, directs the manner

of procession for these trials proceed and how the interpretations they generate.

Thoeun 21

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