what i’m thinking
I didn’t mention it last weekend because I wasn’t ready to talk about it at all yet, but I had just gone to the Killing Fields genocide memorial on the outskirts of Phnom Penh – a little over a week ago now. I’ve been thinking about it a lot ever since. And yes, it’s partly why I picked the time I did to read First They Killed My Father.
→ [Note: trigger warning for genocide-related imagery if you keep reading below. I’ll do an end-ish for it in case you need to skip!]
Normally when you visit the Killing Fields of Cheung Ek memorial, an audio recording tour in English is available to guide you through what you’re seeing and give you lots of information. Unfortunately, we aren’t yet back to “normal,” so while the Killing Fields were finally open to scheduled visits, the audio guide was not available and neither were any in-person English-speaking guides. I just had to walk around and see and feel it all and read the occasional English sign indicating something- things like “Killing tree against which executioners beat children,” or “this tree was used as a tool to hang a loudspeaker to avoid the moan of victims while they were being executed,” or “mass grave of more than 100 victims, children and women whose majority were mostly naked”—and 100 was the smallest number for any of the mass graves with numbers of the buried provided.
You walk on a sort of boardwalk around the premises, which are so small and so unnervingly beautiful. Gorgeous trees providing shade and rustling gently in the almost cool breeze; the light chatter of a hundred or so smartly uniformed schoolchildren on a class trip. You think to yourself, what a beautiful tree; and then you read about the hangings on it, or the beatings against that other one over there. You start to feel the energy of the trees, sad, like the blood of thousands of people who died were absorbed into the roots, seeped into cracks in the tree trunk and gashes in the wood from the machetes and scythes that tore straight through flesh and bone and, finally, bark. The almost cool breeze feels ghostly, feels chilled, and your skin pricks at a sense of whispering in your ear, you catch echoes from those years that are both long gone and still so present. Your feet fall so loudly on the boards that wind their way across the pocketed earth, each depression of ground around you an excavated mass grave, yawning down like the earth itself has buckled under the weight of the bones, the bodies; of what transpired here, though they are simply the grass-covered, unfilled remnants of excavated shallow graves. And in the middle, a tall white memorial rising to the sky like a cry, the floor-to-ceiling windows lined with thousands of skulls and the center filled high with other fractured bones, shards of so many shattered lives. Outside on the steps leading up, you take off your shoes, place a yellow carnation in a vase, set a stick of burning incense into an ash and earth-filled urn, and take a moment of silence or perhaps of prayer. Each of us visiting went barefooted through this ritual of memory; some orange-clothed monks chanting, some school children snapping a selfie or other photo on their phones, and some just standing quiet or kneeling, hands clasped, heads bent.
→ [End imagery trigger warning for the most part, I think, but topic does continue as a theme below!]
The Killing Fields are, most unfortunately, not the only genocide memorial I have ever seen. It’s my third continent of bearing witness in this way. I studied peacebuilding, genocide, and reconciliation in Rwanda years ago in my undergrad, sitting in on the Gacaca courts system its last year of operating, traveling all over the country to hear from university student peace unions and visit sites and memorials of mass murders and burials, and working for a local peacebuilding NGO to record and edit a collection of first-hand audio stories from the genocide.
Growing up as I did in Eastern Europe, too, I quickly learned all about ethnic cleansing and massacres as well as the holocaust – often as much from firsthand stories from neighbors and strangers and friends across the continent as from memorial sites or visiting the concentration camps. It was hardly history; it was all still so alive in memory and time and place.
And all of this is to say nothing about other atrocities perpetrated against entire people groups (keyword: PEOPLE) in the name of “civilisation,” “progress,” or “religion” —as in the Americas and across the world and through the ages, including through colonialism or “expansion…”
I used to be haunted by the “never again” and “do not forget” slogans and marquees that are often to be found around the genocide memorial sites I’ve been to, because I hopelessly thought, “but it always happens again.” Is it for lack of remembering that history repeats itself? Is it for broken or mistaken or partial memories? Is it that we hold the practice of remembrance poorly and destructively, causing new harm and damage? Is it the fault of governments or international bodies of governance or peace? Single actors with power or reaching for it with greed? How is it that all of history – all of history – is painted with blood from genocides and massacres over and again and again, yet we cannot even acknowledge all that has been and is being perpetuated, and we can practically guarantee more of the like to come?
Someone asked me recently when we were discussing genocide how it could be possible for one day people to be neighbors and living side by side amicably enough and the next day one rises up in arms against the other and brutalizes and murders them?
I’ve been turning the question over in my head many times since our conversation and again after visiting the Killing Fields so recently. I find myself thinking that, while propaganda plays a massive role in enabling that sort of arming and uprising and amping of rage or hatred, the propaganda itself isn’t what causes people to do this to their neighbors or fellow human beings – it simply helps launch or propel it forward. And whatever the intent of the people who start the genocide or massacre, etc, it seems to me to be possible for the individual actors swept up to murder, to pillage, rape, and brutalize because they have dehumanized their neighbor. There is no more an inclusive “we” or “shared humankind,” but an “us vs. the other” and the values attributed are no longer shared or equal.
It alarms me how much this “othering” is happening in societies today. In my social media feeds from all over the world, I see so much of this “us vs. that [negative descriptor] other,” on all sides of things – whether along political party lines, religious lines, migration and immigration lines, identities, vaccination or choice or guns or so many, many other things. And not only are we “othering” one another, but it seems to me that we have grown intensely reactive and emotional about or around it all.
When I first started blogging (nearly 2 decades ago, what!), it was this beautiful thought-sharing, conversational platform where we were all so curious to share, to gain insights into other people’s thoughts and lives, to glean and learn new things; expand ourselves. Now blogging has perhaps devolved into either a marketing platform, a brand platform, or simply a content generator even at the personal/individual level, with little room left for exploring thoughts or engaging in real conversations, and far too many trolls or people reacting instead of responding. (I know, not all blogs…) (And also, who really wants to read the comments anymore on blogs except for painful entertainment or social science purposes?) One of the reasons I’m now newslettering instead of blogging is actually because of this.
But that people reacting bit – when did we stop responding thoughtfully and start reacting so much? When did we go from “liking” posts being about simply showing up and saying “I’m here and I saw this” to a marketing-type metric of reach or popularity and comments largely disintegrating into reaction and trolldom?
Do you ever notice how often people use the word “feels” instead of “seems” or “is,” or “I feel” instead of “I think?” Or think about how the evolution of internet usage and the many corresponding platforms and aps and tech have us using emojis, bitmojis, and memojis all the time? (If you get my chats and emails, you know I’m a heavy user of them…) I wonder about how we have arrived at a place where we are constantly acting out on our emotions and how we feel about things – often in the first second – rather than first taking the time to think through what we see or read or are experiencing and to then respond thoughtfully (noting that you can also respond emotionally thoughtful, of course) instead of react emotionally. We meme, gif, and emote our way through life (I do it, too), and at least one social media platform now even throws friends’ stories at you in notifications with a message “so and so has posted a story. What’s your reaction? [eyeball emoji]” We are almost socially trained to react now instead of respond. Trained to react immediately instead of pause, breathe, reset if needed, and then respond.
We are so many of us so very frail right now; strung out across the world together-ish in a pandemic that we are all so ready to be over. Exhausted, isolated, and frustrated. Lockdowns, curfews, quarantines, masks, the question(s) of vaccinations, shortages, cancellations galore, no plans at all anymore, work from home, educational chaos, blurred boundaries, family chaos, feeling trapped, loss of loved ones, getting sick or still sick or recovering achingly slow, burnout, supply-chain breakages, job losses, high-risk jobs, debt, rent, crushed hopes, lost dreams, COVID dating scene, COVID partnered-up and stuck together incessantly scene, exploitation and abuse and inequalities increasing, polarizing politics, weird weather and natural phenomena- and the list goes on! It’s so much. It’s all so much. And so much is awful. But just about if not every single one of us is experiencing some variation of this terrible melody on a physical, mental, emotional, and/or spiritual level. It’s not just you hanging there at the end of your tether.
I think, in the midst of it all and hanging on for dear life in so many ways, we especially cannot forget one another’s same, shared, and equally precious humanity and we must carry our own humanity with care, too.
Circling back to my earlier comments, I think perhaps the only way of ever truly ensuring any kind of “never again” for the horrors of genocide or massacres or “cleansings” is when each one of us holds the humanity of all other people with the same kind of love and respect as for ourselves. Even though individually we might not be able to technically ensure “never again” at a global level, we can still take that step, do the work of reframing, pause to breathe and then respond instead of react within our own personal worlds. If we all come to do this, starting with modeling it ourselves, then have we not ensured it at a global level ultimately? And although we are so many of us strung out and weary, remembering this and living it still, anyways, I think will make it less hopeless, less wearisome, and certainly less scary and lonely.
So. I realise this has been a rather massive glimpse into just some of what I’m thinking about lately. If you are still with me and have read through all the way til now, thank you for your time, attention, and reflection with me. I’m still mulling through these thoughts and my visit to the Killing Fields, and still connecting dots and switching ideas in and out, so know this is just a lot of wondering and thinking about rather than me solidly marking out an opinion and staking a flag in it. It’s a lot to process through and reprocess and those who know me well also know I generally prefer asking questions over having “answers.”
That being said, my personal takeaway from it all for the moment is to actively, constantly challenge myself to consider:
- in what ways am I othering people from whom I think or act, etc, differently or hold opposite opinions – whether online, in person, amongst friends and family, in my workspaces, etc, and how can I change my immediate behaviour and the pattern of it, and
- how can I recultivate more thought-responses and less emotional-reactions in my encounters with people, ideas, and/or experiences both in-person and online
I know that I want to be better at these things and to be better as a person. I know that people in my circles and worlds do, too, even as we all grapple with our variations on a theme of life right now. Perhaps you reading this now do, too. And it gives me hope – hope that amid the struggles right now, we still reach out and respond to additional disasters that aren’t necessarily even impacting ourselves; hope that we are breaking down barriers of isolation and finding ways of being honest and vulnerable and kind in what we find and around our limitations (shout-out to Adele!); and hope that we do want to never have atrocities happen again, even though the going is hard and even if it feels so abstract and unrelated to our actions. And hope that we keep trying to be and do better—even when that action or that beingness comes about unexpectedly or is not what we had anticipated.
