Healing Through Art and Beauty in Cambodia
My first few days in Cambodia were some of my most overwhelming. With chaotic streets, a language barrier and pollution that made my head pound, I welcomed the peace of disappearing into my hotel room at the end of the day. However, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was distant from the place and the people all around me. So I turned my attention to Cambodia’s past and culture as my way of making connections.
On my third day in the Cambodian capital of Phnom Penh, I paid a visit to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum (commonly known as S21). Before the Khmer Rouge, S21 was an ordinary school on the outskirts of the city. Buildings are clustered around a serene courtyard that is now home to carefree chickens, tall palms and decade-old mango trees. In 1975, the school was converted into Security Prison 21 and tens of thousands of people were tortured here before their deaths in the nearby killing fields. At S21, I began to conceptualize the workings of a regime so brutal that 1 in 4 Cambodians were murdered in only 44 months. Even to this day, blood stains are visible on the floors. Time stands still here. Brutally tortured bodies don’t feel as distant when some part of what made these people human still remains.
The unspeakably cruelty is most poignantly conveyed in rooms filled with images of the victims. Their photographs were taken as they were first arrived and “processed” at S21. As with other genocidal regime, the Khmer Rouge were obsessed with documenting their destruction. Hundreds, possibly thousands of faces stare back at you as you make your way through these buildings. Some look eager to please their captors, but all look confused and of course terrified. Every face is gaunt and starved, they had already endured months as forced laborers before they arrived at S21. Most shocking of all are the young faces. You even see babies here.
I was overwhelmed as I grappled with the human face of the easy-to-abstact atrocities of the Khmer Rouge. At the Killing Fields, I visited a stupa that houses 9,000 skulls, along with thousands of thigh bones and dislocated jaw bones. A scientific key is visible in-front of each case. Blue stickers indicate a victim’s skull was broken with an iron rod, purple a bamboo stick etc. While the Killing Fields were horrifying, at S21 the thousands of faces haunt a visitor in a different, and incredibly human way. Here, their humanity is intact as eyes follow you through rooms, and onwards after you leave.
Back in my hotel room, I called the one person I so desperately wanted to talk to. Half way across the world, at 5:30 am his time, my dad picked up the phone. I tried to explain the scale of the Cambodia genocide to him. “Dad, soft hands or glasses were a death sentence — artists, intellectuals, the educated were the first killed as the Khmer Rouge tried to not only destroy people but their culture.” After a few moments of silence my dad quietly said, “how can this country heal? How do people heal when culture is destroyed?”
A week or so later, in the sleepy town of Siem Reap, my phone buzzed into life. I’d been woken up by a WhatsApp message giving me directions to a small, Buddhist temples on the other side of the river. Like clockwork, I jumped in a TukTuk. A few minutes later and I was sitting on a bamboo mat, in an open air temple. Monks sauntered by and the smell of incense lingered the air as smoke curled towards the temple’s wooden roof. In front of me were the Medha, an all-female drum group. In Khmer culture, it’s considered bad luck for women to play the drum. But here, on holy ground were six women and their teacher smiling and laughing as they learned and perfected new songs.
The Medha are supported by a non-profit called Cambodia Living Arts (CLA). CLA was founded by the Cambodian-American refugee Arn Chorn-Pond. He survived the Khmer Rouge by playing Communist propaganda music for the regime. CLA’s mission is to facilitate the transformation of Cambodia through the arts. Originally, it’s focus was to revive the largely destroyed cultural memory of Cambodian traditional dance, theatre and opera. Today, it seeks to teach and empower younger generations about the arts.
Art is (of course) many, many things. Art can convey the common linkages between people that give rise to distinct “culture.” Art can be deeply political or simply aesthetic. But before visiting Cambodia, I’d never thought of art as an act of healing. I hadn't turned its focus inwards and thought about the power and freedom art can give to its creators. I had never understood art as a way to stand tall, take up space and heal in a dynamic, active way.
The Cambodian people are often presented as “victims.” Victims of communism, authoritarianism, genocide, brutality by their own people, America, and more. But on a bamboo mat in this small, Buddhist temple in Siem Reap, I saw people learning, growing and sharing. Here, I listened in awe and admiration to these young women. Not only were they the champions of their traditions, heritage and culture, but they were actively giving it new meaning. The Medha are anything but passive or victims. These are artists.
Please consider donating to Cambodia Living Arts or visiting a show if you are in Cambodia. Here is the link to support them.
Also please read up on the SFS Centennial class to Cambodia that originally inspired my interest in Khmer art.