Written during the author’s visit to Cambodia in 2017, this piece references the Khmer Rouge Genocide which took place during the 1970s throughout the country, and may contain difficult imagery.
The tree itself is thick, too thick to hug properly, and stretches up in a slow arch, favouring the right from my vantage point. Under this arch runs a pathway, beside a small depression in the earth which is marked with a sign and a fence. The sign says simply "The Killing Tree". The bark of the tree is rough; dozens of jagged lines running from root to twig, with shallow crevices between each. Hundreds of colourful bracelets of cloth, yarn and twisted wire hang on every extruding knot, sometimes overlapping and wedging each other into cracks in the bark. Some knots have no room for more bracelets, so new additions are looped or tied to old bands, forming long chains that sway in the breeze and caress passerby. Some bracelets have fallen to the ground, and have begun to rot and turn brown. I find myself wondering whether these have been left to lie out of neglect or reverence.
The audio guide begins to explain the tree, and sitting under the shade of the crooked branches, staring at the empty patch of fenced earth, I can imagine more than I'd like to: crying mothers, dying in the now shallow pit while their infants are swung against the ragged trunk; bone and blood embedded in the bark, to be discovered by survivors; Khmer Rouge soldiers, mere teenagers, using this very tree as a weapon to save bullets. Scanning the branches, I wonder about every pale patch of fungus or moss, looking for whitened skull fragments. Other visitors stand or sit near me, along the raised wooden boardwalk, staring at the pit, or at the tree, or at nothing. I wonder if they're wondering the same things as I am.
The headphones are making my ears itch. A fly tickles my leg again. Amazing, that under this tree of horror and death, a single insect can seem like such a trial. Even though it’s Cambodia’s cooler fall season, the heat of the day is beginning to get to me. As a tiny gesture of solidarity, I resist wiping away the sweat above my eyebrows, as if the discomfort could open some minuscule door and connect me to the suffering of the past. I see other pits, other bracelets, even bones still half-buried in the ground, revealed by recent rains: the Killing Tree overshadows all these. Its shape follows me throughout the rest of the day, full of questions and confusion: it wants hate, it wants revenge, it wants anger or despair or both. What can I do with such haunting voices? How has this country lived with, grown through, this darkness? How do you get rid of a Killing Tree shadow?
***
Like the rest of the Choeung Ek memorial site, the Killing Tree and its adjacent grave have an untouched, unpolished feel. Also called The Killing Fields, this site is one of over 20,000 like it, where over 1.3 million Cambodians were killed by the Khmer Rouge. In these memorial sites, the past is not packaged cleanly in the marble monuments so common to us in Canada: Clothing, bits of bone and other remnants of the past are part of the seasonal cycle of earth and water, churning, decaying, resurfacing. While some areas hold preserved relics of the Khmer Rouge atrocities, Choeung Ek as a whole reflects a difficult truth about tragedy: that grass grows over bones, trees of death keep living, and ants continue to gather food in the trenches. This memorial park has allowed the past to live, even when that means allowing it to change.
Letting the past live in this way is messy, literally and metaphorically. A marble monument on a clean lawn can sometimes entomb the time it represents, severing all but a thread between ‘that’ past and ‘this’ present. At Choeung Ek, however, the past and present are an unbroken weave, an ongoing tapestry where the Killing Tree is not merely represented, but met in person; where the bracelets hung on its bloodstained bark represent the participation of visitors in the ongoing narrative; where the past is not safely detached from the present. But where the Killing Tree lives, does not its shadow?
Maybe marble monuments are an attempt to eliminate struggles like this: That was then, they say. Don’t forget, but don’t worry: the past is dead now. Except, it’s not. Severing tragic or violent moments from the story of a people or a place doesn’t kill those moments: it immortalizes them. They become an unchangeable, static, and potentially looming reality, instead of an interwoven narrative. But why would anyone want something like the Khmer Rouge genocide to remain part of the story? Why would anyone let the Killing Tree continue to stand?
Maybe, because of the bracelets.
Maybe, because of the ants.
Maybe, because under the shade of the Killing Tree, thousands of people have been able to become part of the cycle of decay and new growth, contributing to a transformation only possible in an ongoing story.
Leaving the park, I’m still not sure how the Khmer people have or will continue to survive a narrative where the Killing Tree continues to grow. The question rises again in my mind: How do you get rid of a Killing Tree shadow?
Maybe you don’t. Maybe, you change it.
Maybe, with bracelets and ants.
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