Genocide and Literature

I had mentioned Catherine Filloux’s play Eyes of the Heart in my last blog. I was citing it as an example of the problems faced in translating native colloquialisms into a foreign language. In the meantime I have read four more of her plays and have been deeply impressed by her commitment to socially relevant issues. It has been a great learning experience as well since I started researching on the net for finer details and related topics and unearthed very shocking and disturbing instances of human rights abuse.

Eyes of the Heart deals with how the genocide in Cambodia during the Pol Pot regime continues to affect and change lives forever. The protagonist Thida San has become blind after seeing her teenaged daughter being beheaded and burnt in front of her. Her brother has arranged for her to take refuge in the US where she is undergoing treatment for the blindness. In reality there are at least 150 Cambodian women living in the US who have experienced ‘functional blindness’ related to what they saw during the Khmer Rouge rule. I tried to imagine seeing something so terrible that I would become blind. I failed. Two of her other plays also revolve around genocide: Lemkin’s House and Silence of God. Lemkin’s House is based on Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish lawyer, who fled from the Holocaust and spent his entire life trying to get a law against genocide ratified by the UN and US. We all know the meaning of the word ‘genocide’ but I didn’t know that the word had been coined by Lemkin: ‘genos’ from the Greek meaning race or tribe and ‘cide’ from the Latin meaning to kill. That long after he died the UN still hesitated to use the ‘g’ word for the Rwandan and Bosnian genocide of the 1990s. Filloux’s play begins at a point when Lemkin dies of a cardiac arrest while continuing with his efforts to enforce a treaty against genocide. After dying Lemkin wakes up to find himself in a house where he meets a number of people such as Congress Senators, UN officials, victims of rape, human rights abuse victims as well as his mother. Lemkin realizes that though his efforts may have led to the passing of a law, that law is nothing but a joke as human rights violation is rampant all around. Lemkin died in 1959. By bringing a dead Lemkin back on stage, Filloux is raising a very pertinent point. She is looking at the Cambodian genocide of the 1970s, the Bosnian and Rwandan genocide– but from Lemkin’s perspective. The perspective of a man who selflessly devoted his entire life to at least recognize genocide as a crime, to ensure that if it is repeated in future its perpetrators will be booked and punished. The play made me think. As did the other play Silence of God. This is about Cambodia and Pol Pot. The protagonist, Sarah, is a journalist who is dedicated to the cause of finding out ‘why evil flourishes, why it can’t be stopped’? She is in love with Heng, a poet, who is a victim of the Pol Pot regime, when he lost his wife and children in the infamous ‘killing fields’. The focal point of the play is a build up to an interview of Pol Pot by Sarah which turns out to be a total let-down. The play ends on a pessimistic note when Heng commits suicide. He was trying to overcome his trauma and start life afresh with Sarah but when he returned to an apparently liberated Cambodia he saw that that his brother is working for a man who in turn works for someone who was once Pol Pot’s right-hand-man. The realization that not only have the guilty not been punished but that they are flourishing (the former right-hand-man is now a business tycoon who plans to set up the largest hotel in Cambodia on the most beautiful part of the river-side), hits him hard. The point that Filloux is trying to drive home–sometimes subtly and sometimes forcefully is that injustice is continuing. No matter how many laws are passed. We cannot undo the wrongs of the past. But surely such works are a reminder, a warning to act judiciously when such atrocities happen again. And they are happening all around us. Just because they are happening in another country and we do not want to get involved in a wrangle over international politics, we cannot look away.

What I liked about these plays is that they are not propagandist literature. Filloux has very beautifully woven human elements into the causes she is dealing with. So that at the primary level one is touched by the story. And then one is moved to think of the larger issues she is giving voice to.

Two other plays remain to be discussed. I will take them up in my next blog.