Lost in the Killing Fields
Canadian author Kim Echlin was reading a book in a Paris flea market when three hoodlums accosted her and demanded money. Echlin told them she didn't have any. The thugs then asked her what she was reading. When Echlin said it was a collection of Native American stories, they ordered her to read one. Clumsily translating from English to French, Echlin read an Inuit tale about the origins of the sun and the moon. To her surprise, the ruffians complimented the story when she finished.
The encounter, some three decades ago, left a lasting impression on Echlin about the power of literature to transcend geographical, linguistic, even cultural boundaries. Her novels explore the themes of love, identity and a shared humanity, largely from the female perspective. Her first novel, Elephant Winter, for example, is about a young woman who returns to her native Canada to care for her dying mother but falls in love with an elephant keeper instead. Her third and latest novel, The Disappeared, is an intense love story set in Cambodia against the backdrop of Pol Pot's Killing Fields.
The protagonist, Anne Greves, is a middle-aged language instructor in Montreal. At the age of 16, she falls impetuously in love with Serey, a Cambodian student and blues musician forced into exile in Canada during the Khmer Rouge's four-year reign of terror in the 1970s. Serey returns to his homeland after the collapse of Pol Pot's regime - only to disappear amid the political chaos, persecution and continuing purges.
One day, Greves catches a glimpse of her lost lover on television and travels to Phnom Penh to find him. Miraculously, she does, and together they witness Cambodia's struggle to regain its sanity. But Serey, a political dissident, goes missing again following a grenade attack on an opposition rally. Certain that the authorities have killed her lover, Greves tries to recover his remains and cremate them.
It's an impossible task. 'Our leaders say we should dig a hole and bury our past and look ahead to the new century with a clean slate,' a district police chief remarks to Greves when she tells him that Cambodians want to know about their missing relatives but are too afraid to ask what happened to them. Pointing out that she has found her lover's skull, Greves asks the official: 'Why are you willing to bury the past, but not to bury those who lived in it?'
By the end of her six-month ordeal, Greves finds herself not only imprisoned but denied food, water and sleep. Cambodian authorities eventually force her to return to Canada.
Echlin chose Cambodia for her novel's setting because, she says, she was looking for a country that had 'suffered a trauma the world had forgotten to witness'. She was inspired to write the novel during a trip to Cambodia with her husband and two daughters about eight years ago. In a Phnom Penh market one day, a Cambodian woman came up to her and said that her entire family had perished during the Khmer Rouge's brutal rule.
When Echlin asked her if there's anything she could do, the woman replied: 'I only want you to know.'
Echlin writes with a poet's sensibility about the desperate desire of ordinary Cambodians to preserve the memory of their holocaust despite efforts by successive regimes to quash it. This desire, she proposes, is inextricably tied to love, Cambodia's remedy for despair. It's a powerful emotion that compels much of the narrative, expressed refreshingly in emotional, intellectual and sensual ways. Greves and Serey witness, personally and together, what 'on a wider scale we would wish humanity could witness', Echlin says.
The Disappeared has been translated into 17 languages, including Chinese, Greek and Spanish. Echlin attributes her novel's remarkable success to its universal themes of conflict and crisis, especially in nations where governments suppress individual liberties. The recognition of social injustices, whether in today's Congo or China, are an important part of a nation's history as well as 'to all of us', the author says. 'Social justice can never exist where poverty, lack of education and health care disenfranchise citizens.'
Echlin, who teaches writing at the University of Toronto School for Continuing Studies, likes to listen to music while researching her books and delving into the minds of her characters. 'I always listen to music my characters listen to,' she says. Greves, for example, is a blues fan, and 'the blues is love and longing for Anne'.
One of Echlin's favourite songs is Cambodian. Titled Birds are Singing but My Lover Won't Return, its singer is unknown, she says. The song itself was rescued by Mark Gergis, a music aficionado who stumbled upon 150 old cassette tapes of Cambodian folk and pop music in the public library in Oakland, California, home to a sizeable population of Cambodian immigrants.
Echlin, who is working on 'some new fiction', listens to medieval chanting and Middle Eastern music these days. It's an intriguing combination but so far, she says, 'I don't know what it means'.
