I met Phillay, driving his tuk tuk, last time I was in Cambodia, and he told me his story of survival from the Khmer Rouge. (I'm assuming you all know something about the terrible times that the Khmer Rouge brought to Cambodia.)
I promised to tell his story when I came home - this is an extraordinary tale of terror and courage that we need to hear it, however uncomfortable that might be. But when I came to write it, as a story, I found it simply too painful. I couldn't hold it together in the boundaries of a story - somehow the horrors fell out of the edges and contaminated everything.
But I could write it as a poem. By attending to rhythms, and line lengths, and the general sound of the piece I could, at last, give his story a shape. This is not everything that happened to him, but it gives you a flavour of how his life has been. (You need to know that Pol Pot was the President of the Khmer Rouge, and that Phnom Penh is the capital of Cambodia.)
THE UNBEARABLE RIGHTNESS OF BEING
His father was a military man; with house and
car
and uniform and no defence when Pol Pot
knocked.
Phillay, then seventeen, was driven from Phnom
Penh
to dig canals from daybreak, with the promise
of
just one small bowl of rice at nightfall and
anything else that might float by:
fish; crabs; snails; leeches.
His body soon cadaverous.
Malaria bit him.
A friend carried him to hospital, protection
from the last indignity of dying in the fields
and heaped,
like compost, in stinking ditches.
He found a brother and a sister there,
shared their bed, kept breathing
while they died beside him and he ate their
rice
until the smell betrayed their non-existence.
It saved his life. He tottered from his bed to glimpse,
across a compound wall,
the Director’s daughter.
With his eyes he loved her; and in his head:
he rested on her breast and slept.
Yet dare not touch her, knowing babies
would be ripped from her, swung by the ankles
against a tree, their brains in offal
fragments
lest they tell the tales of loving
They moved him on, the men in black,
to jute mills, to the rice paddies.
But love hung, like a window, above the fields
of bones.
