An Answerability of Memory “Saving” Khmer Classical Dance Judith Hamera [T]he Khmer Rouge surrounded Phnom Penh, and on April 17, 1975, after five years of civil war, they took control, waving their flag in the streets. Until January 1979 they forced all Cambodians to live in labor camps and work fourteen- to eighteen-hour days. They fed us one daily bowl of watery rice; they separated families; they destroyed all Cambodian institutions and culture; they systematically tortured and killed innocent people. It is estimated that during this time nearly a third of the Cambodian population was killed due to disease, starvation, or execution. —Dith Pran (1997:x) [F]or those who undergo trauma, it is not only the moment of the event, but of the passing out of it that is traumatic; [...] survival itself, in other words, can be a crisis. —Cathy Caruth (1995:9) Technique makes dance go. It is both the animating principle and the core ambivalence housed in every studio and manipulated by every performer: both task master and mastered, both warden and liberator. Dance technique offers more than protocols for reading the body; it is also a technology of subjectivity, a template organizing sociality, and an archive that links subjectivities and soci- alities to history. As archive, technique contains and organizes the traces and residues dance leaves behind, and out of which it forms again: injuries, vocabulary, relationships. It is what Paul Connerton calls an “inscribing practice.” It “traps and holds information long after the human organism has stopped informing” its individual enactments (1989:73). But this archive, and its residues and traces, its inscribing practices, are not only cognitive and corporeal, as Connerton might lead us to believe. It is not just physical labor that constructs specific archives of technique, not simply cognitive labor that fills them, but also the unrelenting dailiness of emotional and relational The Drama Review 46, 4 (T176), Winter 2002. Copyright ᭧ 2002 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology 65 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320907029 by guest on 25 September 2021 66 Judith Hamera Photographs or any other artwork were not an option for this article. The Sem family, after the years of suppression, still feel they are living under a threat. They wanted no images or even tape recordings made of their work and their interactions with me. This reticence is understandable given the genocide practiced by the Khmer Rouge. It is also problematic, in light of the representational politics of the Khmer Rouge autohomeogenocide, to substitute photographs of other Khmer dancers for those of the Sem family. labor. And further, like many of the emotional and relational labors that constitute them, these archives are haunted affairs. “Haunted places are the only ones people can live in,” writes Michel de Cer- teau (1984:108). He might have observed as well, that they are often, for good and ill, the only places that people can perform in. What follows is an account of one very small archival hauntopia. Certainly it is not representative in any simple way. Yet it has persisted in my mind and heart long after (perhaps because) my contact with the individuals involved had ended. The taxing, relentless, affective labors of technique often lend themselves to hagiography, to hero stories of what performance overcomes. This account is not one of these. Rather, I suggest here that while performance often overcomes, it is just as likely to succumb to exhaustion, to deep personal anguish and profound social dislocation, and to the memories it has deployed as both blessing and goad. Answerable Bodies/“Unclaimed” Experience I would like to begin by acknowledging, explicitly, the fraught relations be- tween history, trauma, and truth that undergird the following discussion. While these relations are the living and breathing of the psychoanalytic enterprise, they are much less readily acknowledged in an ethnographic one, and particularly one so intimately linked to genocide, to its imperative to witness, to speak the truth back to power, as in recent memoirs by the survivors of the Khmer Rouge (see Criddle 1987; Him 2000; Nath 1998; Ngor 1987; Pran 1997; Szymusiak 1999; Ung 2000). Perhaps scholars of performance are ideally positioned to engage such fraught relations, to “constellate [...] various approaches to the nexus of perfor- mance [as well as trauma, truth, and] history” (Pollock 1998:1), while mindful of the promises of, and lacunae within representation in its inexorable trajectory toward disappearance. But the relations I refer to challenge even the capacitating frame of performance. To paraphrase both Emerson and Geoffrey Hartman, I suspect my instruments (Hartman 1993:243), both theoretical and interpersonal. Simply put, the crises of truth so central to the relationship between trauma and representation undermine, at almost every turn, my attempts to narrate a coherent account of one family of Khmer survivors, of how they told themselves that dance was the reason for their survival, and of the ways they tried and failed to find solace therein to performatively shore up survivorship and continuity.These crises of truth in trauma remind me that cultural gaps, as well as representational and methodological ones, are fundamentally human—that is to say, affective, psy- chic—gaps, and they divide husband from wife, parents from children, and family from community, as well as researcher from the ease and stability of scholarly claims. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320907029 by guest on 25 September 2021 “Saving” Khmer Dance 67 Thresholds of Secrecy I met the Sem family through their son at a performance of the Classical Dance Company of Cambodia in Los Angeles in 1990. The children were fairly gre- garious and suggested that, as I was interested in classical dance, I should meet their parents who, in their words, “danced real Cambodian dance in Cambodia and in [refugee] camp.”1 “Sem” is a pseudonym and my decision to use it requires both an explicit acknowledgment of, and my complicity in, the “thresholds of secrecy” (Feldman 1991:11) which characterized my relationship with this family. I use the pseu- donym in part because, as I will explain later, I am not able to ask the family directly for permission to represent them and their stories, something I generally do with dancers I write about and, again for reasons that will become apparent, is especially crucial here. Beyond this, I have been unable to account for and confirm key details about the family, which has led me to suspect that the name they lived under in Long Beach, California, was itself an enabling fiction, its utility ensured by the inability of Western ears to recognize the subtlety of Khmer inflection, and by wide variations in nonacademic transcriptions of Khmer into English.2 BEN SEM: You had to forget yourself, understand? Forget you were student, forget you have family, tell them [Khmer Rouge] you are farmer, you are builder. Then more forget. Forget hun- gry, forget tired, forget scared. I have other reasons to suspect that the name under which I knew the family was what Allen Feldman might call a tactical “spacing between discourse[s], be- tween words and acts,” or past and present, one of many signs of the recognition that psychological and historical parity between myself and my interlocutors was an impossibility (1991:12). Mail, including bills, some of which I was asked to decipher, came to the family’s apartment addressed to different names. A search of licensing records and city permits for the donut shop in which, I was told, the Sems were partners turned up no one by their name, though it is perfectly possible that their use of “partnership” was not a technical, legal one. Father Ben Sem and his wife May were vague about the date of their arrival in Long Beach (1981 or 1982) and would not reveal who had sponsored them, though they regularly received generic mailings from a Protestant denomination active in refugee re- settlement. Searches of relevant archives and records did not clarify matters. Ul- timately, for reasons which, I hope, will become clear, I abandoned what I had always rather shamefully considered a “detective operation” to ferret out some simple “truth.” Ben and May had met, they said, in “Camp 2,” which I presumed at the time and still believe, was Site 2, the largest of the camps along the Thai border. The name used by the family while in Long Beach is a common one; it is represented in the Cambodian Genocide Archives and databases among both victims of the Khmer Rouge and the Khmer Rouge themselves. This is true of the pseudonym I have chosen as well. I have used the girls’ “American names,” Sandy and Jennie, which, at the time I knew them, they much preferred, to the pain of their mother who was given the names of all three children, in strict order, by a seer in the camp. This choice also reflects the distance between parents and children, a dis- Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/105420402320907029 by guest on 25 September 2021 68 Judith Hamera tance that figures prominently in Ben and May’s deployment of dance to theorize their own survival and legacy. I have used a shortened version of a Khmer name, “Rith,” similar to that of the Sems’s son, their oldest child, in keeping with what was, at the time, his preference. As Feldman reminds us, it is a mistake to view thresholds of silence, like the Sems’s tactical ambiguities, as purely individual matters, though they are that. Like virtually every other “first wave” Cambodian refugee family, the Sems did not escape the Khmer Rouge autohomeogenocide intact or unscathed, physically or psychically.