''A child is never the author of it's own history.''
- Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being
I've been thinking a lot about chance today, about how precariously we balance between one fortune and the next, how because of genetics our futures are so dramatically affected. I read the book quoted above a good 6 months ago, but that line didn't leave me, and I remembered it sadly today whilst I was sat on a bench in the Killing Fields, Phnom Penh, next to a tree on which the heads of babies and children were smashed to death in front of their helpless, soon to be bludgeoned mothers. You understand my need to sit down I think. I'd just about managed to hold it together at the former detention centre this morning, through the preserved torture chambers and cells, the thousands of nameless photographs of terrified Cambodian faces already unknowingly condemned to pain and death, the mass graves, the piles of the dead's clothes, the memorial building with glass cabinets containing skulls upon skulls upon skulls. And then I saw the tree, the sign next to which reads 'Killing Tree - Babies and children were beaten against this tree until death'', and I suddenly and desperately needed to sit down and cry my heart out. I hope you don't think I'm being gratuitous in my description of the violence, this is the furthest thing from my intentions. I just do not want to whitewash what I have seen, it is what it is and deserves to be recorded accurately for me as much as anyone else; no matter how devastating today has been, I pray it never leaves me, I pray you are devastated too.
The actual fields are quite beautiful really, before 1975 the site was an orchard and today the area is obviously preserved immaculately by the people who work there. It looks like an enchanted forest straight out of an Enid Blyton book. A narrow path winds its way through green and mossy shallow trenches, trees hundreds of years old cover the fields making the sunlight dappled on the floor, wildflowers have sprung up everywhere, the air is full of birdsong, butterflies and dragonflies dart around amongst the leaves, huge roots snake their way through the dry earth along the paths, and save for the few hushed whispers of tour guides it is near silent. Not enchanted, but haunted indeed, because of course the shallow trenches were graves for thousands of innocent people. Everyone over the age of 30 in this country is a survivor of genocide, everyone lost a loved one, nearly a quarter of the entire population was murdered. Imagine that in Britain? Everyone over the age of 30 having witnessed and lived through mass murder by the ruling political party. You, well I, can't imagine it, this country bears incomprehensible scars.
This has been a remarkable day which I could write about for pages and pages but won't. Instead know what seemed strangely important to me... every skull was the same. Despite a few fracture lines here and there, the odd bit of wear and tear and damage by cause of death, every skull was the same. One day that will be what's left of me, and you too, and if our skulls were placed in the memorial cabinet in Phnom Penh, no one would know the difference - because we're the same. Underneath it all, you could be me and I could be you and we could have been them.
In my old job I used to have a little mantra that I would repeat to myself on particularly stressful days at the hands of the 16-21 year olds I worked with. As a way of stopping myself from telling the lot of them to F-off I'd take a deep breath, and just think 'there but for the grace of God go I.' They were all care leavers, most had been abandoned, abused or neglected by the people who had conceived them (I find it difficult to refer to them as their 'parents' - they never earned the right for this name) and others had fallen in with the wrong crowds, gone off the rails and had families who handed them over to Social Services' care rather than provide them with a support network and discipline that might have saved them. What if they'd been born to my Mum and Dad and I to theirs?
I would have been the one swearing and shouting, kicking holes in the door, smoking weed in the waiting room, waving knives around, knocking the water cooler over, up-ending the furniture and making arson attempts. They would have been sat in my chair, quietly watching carnage ensue, waiting for me to calm down before gingerly coming out from behind the desk, putting an arm around my shoulder and asking me what on earth the matter was my darling? If I'd had their parents and they'd had mine I truly believe that we would still have been looking at each other through that protective glass barrier in front of my desk, just from different sides. This notion was an invaluable tool for me to have any chance of doing my job properly. I would have forgiven those teenagers anything, and although I was never a soft touch I found it impossible to judge their behaviour too harshly - arguments, abuse and idle death threats were always quickly forgotten - because if they could have, I'd like to think they would have done the same for me. If anyone in their young lives had loved and cherished them as I have always felt loved and cherished by my friends and family, things could have been so different for them.
This afternoon I started reading First They Killed My Father, Loung Ung's memoir of her family's experience through the Cambodian genocide when she was just 5 years old. Opening the book I was immediately dumbstruck by a sentence in the prologue which resonated with me, chance and empathy and old mantras having been so on my mind all day. "If you had been living in Cambodia during this period, this would be your story too.'' Nothing is more important than this to me right now. There but for the grace of God go I.
The actual fields are quite beautiful really, before 1975 the site was an orchard and today the area is obviously preserved immaculately by the people who work there. It looks like an enchanted forest straight out of an Enid Blyton book. A narrow path winds its way through green and mossy shallow trenches, trees hundreds of years old cover the fields making the sunlight dappled on the floor, wildflowers have sprung up everywhere, the air is full of birdsong, butterflies and dragonflies dart around amongst the leaves, huge roots snake their way through the dry earth along the paths, and save for the few hushed whispers of tour guides it is near silent. Not enchanted, but haunted indeed, because of course the shallow trenches were graves for thousands of innocent people. Everyone over the age of 30 in this country is a survivor of genocide, everyone lost a loved one, nearly a quarter of the entire population was murdered. Imagine that in Britain? Everyone over the age of 30 having witnessed and lived through mass murder by the ruling political party. You, well I, can't imagine it, this country bears incomprehensible scars.
This has been a remarkable day which I could write about for pages and pages but won't. Instead know what seemed strangely important to me... every skull was the same. Despite a few fracture lines here and there, the odd bit of wear and tear and damage by cause of death, every skull was the same. One day that will be what's left of me, and you too, and if our skulls were placed in the memorial cabinet in Phnom Penh, no one would know the difference - because we're the same. Underneath it all, you could be me and I could be you and we could have been them.
In my old job I used to have a little mantra that I would repeat to myself on particularly stressful days at the hands of the 16-21 year olds I worked with. As a way of stopping myself from telling the lot of them to F-off I'd take a deep breath, and just think 'there but for the grace of God go I.' They were all care leavers, most had been abandoned, abused or neglected by the people who had conceived them (I find it difficult to refer to them as their 'parents' - they never earned the right for this name) and others had fallen in with the wrong crowds, gone off the rails and had families who handed them over to Social Services' care rather than provide them with a support network and discipline that might have saved them. What if they'd been born to my Mum and Dad and I to theirs?
I would have been the one swearing and shouting, kicking holes in the door, smoking weed in the waiting room, waving knives around, knocking the water cooler over, up-ending the furniture and making arson attempts. They would have been sat in my chair, quietly watching carnage ensue, waiting for me to calm down before gingerly coming out from behind the desk, putting an arm around my shoulder and asking me what on earth the matter was my darling? If I'd had their parents and they'd had mine I truly believe that we would still have been looking at each other through that protective glass barrier in front of my desk, just from different sides. This notion was an invaluable tool for me to have any chance of doing my job properly. I would have forgiven those teenagers anything, and although I was never a soft touch I found it impossible to judge their behaviour too harshly - arguments, abuse and idle death threats were always quickly forgotten - because if they could have, I'd like to think they would have done the same for me. If anyone in their young lives had loved and cherished them as I have always felt loved and cherished by my friends and family, things could have been so different for them.
This afternoon I started reading First They Killed My Father, Loung Ung's memoir of her family's experience through the Cambodian genocide when she was just 5 years old. Opening the book I was immediately dumbstruck by a sentence in the prologue which resonated with me, chance and empathy and old mantras having been so on my mind all day. "If you had been living in Cambodia during this period, this would be your story too.'' Nothing is more important than this to me right now. There but for the grace of God go I.
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