Torture or be tortured

How can we move on from traumatic events individually and as a society?

In a basement bookshop in London’s West End the audience listened carefully so that they could hear the softly spoken words of Vira from Cambodia in spite of the noise of visitors to the Photographers’ Gallery upstairs. His quietness made us hear what he had to say all the better and the outside world was forgotten in the intimacy of his sharing of his family’s story.

Vira lives in Los Angeles nowadays and has only been back once to the country from where he fled as a child. When he took his mother and children back to see Cambodia they went to their home village in Battambang. A woman approached his mother and asked if she remembered her. “How could I forget you? You are the one who tortured me,” Vira’s mother replied.

Before leaving, Vira said his mum gave the woman who had tortured her some money to help her.

He told the story as part of a discussion at the launch of a book about his family by British photographer Charles Fox. Fox explained that although he was a successful photojournalist he’d become dissatisfied with what he called “parachute journalism.”

The book is called “Buried” because it is created around a set of 40 photographs meticulously curated from Vira’s family photograph collection. Before fleeing the Khmer Rouge they buried the photographs so that they wouldn’t be found and the family accused of further “crimes”, in particular they had to hide pictures of the family when they were happy. The book brings the photos out of the darkness of the nightmare of Pol Pot’s regime and the trauma that has been so painful to remember. They are damaged, soiled and worn at the edges bearing the marks of the years that have passed. Beneath each photograph is a caption handwritten by Vira or another family member remembering the moment that the image captures. The first is a photograph of Vira’s father who was killed by the Khmer Rouge for being an educated man.

I asked Vira how he would describe what had happened between his mother and her torturer. I wanted to know if this was reconciliation or impunity? Forgiveness? Healing? Acceptance? He said that his mother felt that at the village level, Khmer Rouge officials were victims too.

His family could not forget what had happened but the book and the process that led to its creation had helped them to heal and find a way to have a future that acknowledged what had happened without being held hostage to it.

The years had served also for the power between Vira’s mother and her torturer to switch hands as the moderator of the talk, Nic Dunlop another photographer and author of “The Lost Executioner”, pointed out. Vira agreed that his mother now felt sorry for her torturer having built another prosperous life for herself and her children in the US.

Vira’s torturer represents to me the people who were left behind, who made a decision not necessarily out of any moral depravity but more likely out of fear and powerlessness. She decided that her path to survival would be to align herself with the powerful and obey their orders to torture and kill her neighbours. She could go with the flow and survive, torture or be tortured.

In Cambodia, between 1975 and 1979, enough people made the same calculation to cause the deaths of as many as 2.5 million by some estimates from disease and starvation as well as violence and execution. There is a new generation that holds the majority in Cambodia, young people there came to hear the story behind Fox’s book and he said it will be translated into Khmer. They want to know what happened, even though people still cannot speak really openly about those years and history is not taught at schools.

Another extraordinary anecdote. One rainy night before they fled, Vira’s mother spoke to her seven children openly. They could only do this when it rained, otherwise Khmer Rouge spies could hear what they were saying. She put a machete on the table, announced that she could not go on with this suffering and asked that Vira’s older brother kill her with the machete. He refused. She turned to Vira and then his siblings. They all refused. She told them in that case they would all have to live on and find a way to escape and reunite.

Their story of survival is a lesson in how people can overcome the odds even when everything seems to be stacked against them. There were a series of choices they made that led to the present they have now, in spite of the past.

Vira’s mother gave her family a gift in the midst of the pain and suffering. It was the gift of empowerment. When she put the machete on the table and challenged them, she was asking them to realise that they had the power to survive without killing. It was a dramatic moment and a stark choice during a unique set of circumstances, but isn’t it true that we are faced with such choices on a daily basis, wherever we are in the world? Are we to follow the herd and survive, hiding ourselves for fear of being singled out and killed, or make the far more difficult choice to survive in a way that endangers our way of living and even life itself?

Vira said he hopes that many other people in Cambodia read the book and are inspired to begin their own healing process as individuals, families and as a community. He also said he hopes people in America read it to understand the reasons why immigrants come to the US. For me, his story speaks to the complex, nuanced and difficult dilemma of humanity itself wherever we are, Cambodian, Burmese, and yes, Filipino.