These two poems are from Tuol Sleng Still, a series of poems relating to the death camp, Tuol Sleng, run by the Khmer Rouge in Phnomh Penh during the seventies. Still is for the photographs taken of inmates before and after their deaths (infants and youngsters included) and it's for 'now',our tacit acceptance of torture and death that seems undimmed no matter how civilised we imagine ourselves to be.
And my child? He sleeps with barely more
than birth’s darkness in his head.
I watch his famine coming as
surely as a train; but make no mistake, if you
see fear, it is fear of the void at the centre of my child’s
screams for food. All else is contempt for men
who cultivate dreams where his will never
grow.
********** Looking away from the
camera, I see two soldiers hacking a
prisoner’s legs till he’s on his knees; the
next is waiting for his shins to explode into
pain. Ten-year olds screaming
instructions, angel-faces with AK-47’s; childhoods manured in
hatred leaning against
our horizon. In twelve hours I've seen so much I'm staring
through it. A lifetime scratches down that glass; my mind is overrun with
atrocities.
Two poems from “Turn
Your Head”. They refer to individuals’ defiance in the face of torture and
death. The looks on two faces among the photographs from Khmer Rouge’s death
camp Tuol Sleng inspired the following two poems.
(I doubt this sort of bravery is on my own list of attributes.)
In 1999 I wrote a series of poems called Tuol Sleng Still. They were inspired by the gut-wrenching photographs of the inmates of Tuol Sleng, S-21, a Khmer Rouge death-camp in Phnom Penh. Between 1975 and 1979, 14,000 were tortured and died there. 7 survived. Inmates were photographed with numbered tags, and they were photographed again after their deaths.
Anyone who has experienced such horrors would probably consider my poems from the comfort of 1999 Ireland wryly. I was horrified by my ignorance: during those years I was enjoying a carefree college life. But to see the fear in faces that are little different to those that fill my everyday; I immediately felt immense sadness and felt I should, at least, inform myself. And by researching, writing and publishing the poems I could at least make the experience more real to me and contribute in a minute way to the calls against the wars and barbarism that seem to me to exemplify the pitiful limitations of us humans.
I chose Tuol Sleng because the photographs that inspired me were from there. There is a danger that I will suggest that people from far-off lands with different features to ours are barbaric, however I consider the vacuum-pack cleanliness of American mass-murder by air-strike at least as obscene, if not more so. I consider the war in the Middle East carried out and supported by governments in our name to be abhorrent. That era in the seventies is and isn’t history: unfortunately, for too many around the world it is Tuol Sleng still.
I looked at him, Cambodian like myself, similar in height and age. He was handing out the tags; I was bare to the waist.
I held the tag in my hand, holding it up to be seen; feeling awkward, conspicuous. “Pin it onto your chest” he said and waited.
I pinned it into my skin; the humiliation delighted him. Before the camera I stood erect like I was proud to wear it, like it was made of gold.
