by Alice Pung
We visited Greg Guirard, a Cajun fisherman, poet, writer and photographer who has lived his whole life in the Atchafalaya Basin. ‘For a standard American,’ Greg told us, ‘if you’re not making money, you’re wasting time. For a real Cajun, if you’re not having fun, you’re wasting your life.’ His homeland in the Atchafalaya Basin had been logged to death, all the ancient cypress trees rooted out of existence a generation before his birth.
The Atchafalaya Basin is very different from the rest of the United States. The Cajun people seem to be from a different era and place, when time moved more slowly and stoicism was a virtue. In 1604, their ancestors left France for Acadia, now known as Eastern Canada. After the British conquest of Acadia, they were deported in 1755, and first arrived in Louisiana a year later. Roy Blanchard, Greg’s friend, told us that ‘a Cajun is a guy that’s going to make it no matter what’. Greg writes that, ‘We Cajuns are being Americanized, and some of us don’t like it at all. The Cajun Dream and the American Dream are not the same.’
Greg and Roy took us out on a boat to the swamps of the Bayou. Greg’s boat hauled up a catfish from a net. The catfish was enormous. At the bottom of the boat its gills opened and closed like someone flicking through the pages of a waterlogged book.
Roy invited us to his house and showed us a turtle that he had caught, a beautiful slow creature that he was going to eat. These men had lived their whole lives out here, and their happiness seemed to derive from a hard-won acceptance of the vicissitudes of life as subsistence fishermen and hunters, yet a way of life that is in danger of being eroded, like the land of the Atchafalaya Basin.
Most people have this deep-seated idea that a home is a place of warm comfort and simple safety, and so the notion of losing a home seems like losing all we have built in life, but it is more than that. Your home is a place where your suffering can take shelter. Homeless people in the street disturb us so because their misery is naked. There is nothing between them and the world, and the layers of grime and dirt and mental disquiet is often a result of being exposed alone in your suffering, whimpering in a place crowded with hurrying inhumanity. We hurry by because we are afraid, afraid there is nothing between us and them but very flimsy walls, nothing at all between the slave and the master but a layer of correctly coloured epidermis, nothing between the right side of the war and the wrong side except whose trigger finger works faster under pressure, nothing between the living and the dead but for the next breath.
Unless, of course, you have faith. Perhaps the Church is a place where one’s suffering can truly find sanctuary. We visited two churches in the South. The first was an Evangelical church, with no altar and no cross. Instead, this sleek new place of worship consisted of just a modern hall equipped with all sorts of audio-visual equipment, and a rock band on stage. It was more a cross between a concert and a Tony Robbins seminar than a religious sacrament, and the pastor drilled into his predominantly white audience the lesson that they were God’s Chosen People. They were there to make a difference – raising money for hurricane victims and evangelising. ‘You are the aroma of Christ, so spread that aroma far and wide!’ bellowed the pastor. Then they sang a hymn: ‘God is Good, All the Time’.
The women of the church told us how they selected New Orleans flood victims to shelter: only families were chosen, and these families had to undergo background and criminal checks from the sheriff’s department. They were given nine months to pull themselves together. These were people who had never before left their homes in New Orleans or set foot on a plane. Nine months to find jobs and restart their lives, or go back home. ‘It is sad,’ one lady of the church remarked to us. ‘Some of them couldn’t do it. They just fell apart.’
Of course, this is also what happens to ‘Chosen People’ when disaster strikes – it is an enormous and sometimes unbearable blow to one’s self-belief. John Biguenet told us about the New Orleans doctors who took scalpels home while their surgeries were filling with floodwater; and how by the end of the weekend, they were dead. ‘Imagine this,’ John told us. ‘You’re fifty-five years old. Your life has followed a certain successful and predictable path so far. You felt powerful and smart. But you have a mortgage on over a million dollars worth of surgical equipment in your clinic which you now can’t repay because there are no more patients in New Orleans. You have a mortgage on a middle-class house. You have lost everything.’ Imagine being bogged down by your attachments. I have heard stories of wealthy families who piled themselves and their children into their Mercedes-Benz when the city of Phnom Penh was being emptied of people. They drove their cars into creeks and rivers, choosing to die rather than confront the possibility of subjugation and hardship. Yet the Buddha said simply and unequivocally, life is suffering.
But take a look at us. We think we can control everything – our natural environment, other people, even our own bodies – and then when things seem beyond our control, when hurricanes hit, when levees break, when people die of dehydration on their rooftops, when we see masses of starving, huddled people, we recoil with horror. We don’t think this sort of thing should happen. We insulate ourselves against the elements. Brad Pitt comes and builds a couple of beautiful, state-of-the-art, architecturally designed houses in New Orleans (even one shaped like a boat that will float away when the next flood comes), and that is the climax of the three-hour tourist ‘Hurricane Katrina Bus Tour’. Ta-da! Recovery! We look through the bus windows, protected by a veneer of glass and moving vehicle, knowing that we are tourists who will go back to comfortable hotels, knowing we are writers who will go home to think about this long and deep and muster up the appropriate feelings of sympathy, moral outrage and guilt.
‘After all that’s happened to them, they smile so much.’ People offer such polite charges of bravery to the people of Birmingham, Alabama; the people of New Orleans; the people of Burma; the people of Cambodia. We visit developing counties and remark about how happy the locals all look and how greedy we are back home, we toss the local children a few hundred riels and vow to change our own lives. Then we return to our quiet cul-de-sacs and forget. Maybe it is easier to take action to assuage our immediate feelings of guilt and feel good than it is to remember and reflect.
The second church we visited was the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. This was the first all-black Baptist church of Birmingham, where many meetings during the Civil Rights Movement were held. Martin Luther King, Jr, visited this church, and so did the Ku Klux Klan. On 15 September 1963, they planted explosives in the basement that killed four black girls – Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair – and injured more than twenty others. Twenty-six children at that time were walking into the basement assembly room to prepare for the sermon entitled ‘The Love That Forgives’ when that bomb exploded, and what was left of the face of Christ on the stained-glass window was a shattered hole.
Susan Sontag writes in Regarding the Pain of Others:
Someone who is permanently surprised that depravity exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached moral or psychological adulthood. No one after a certain age has the right to this degree of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance or amnesia.
Jesus said blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the earth, while poor Job sits there scraping his terrible skin with broken pieces of pottery. Perhaps both can coexist without the need to find evil in Job or excoriate the meek. Without immediately rushing to make sense of suffering. This brings to the forefront a more fundamental question: is there a need to make sense of suffering at all?
What if all my genocide-surviving father wants to do with his new life is to start an electronics store in Melbourne, because in Democratic Kampuchea all forms of technology had been wiped out except the landmine, the AK-47 and the electric fence around Tuol Sleng? What if all my dad desires is to inves
t in a string of properties and confine himself to a leafy suburb, happily believing that the worst thing that could happen to me as a writer is a papercut? What obligation then do I have, as a writer, when I go back to dig up the past?
Last year when I visited Cambodia with my father, he was also going to go with me to Tuol Sleng, the death and torture prison that used to be an old primary school. In Tuol Sleng, faces stare at you from the walls, photographs of prisoners before execution. Not just men, but women with babies, children. Some of the faces have bloody noses, others have eyeballs beaten out of sockets; all are still alive but know they are going to die.
We never went in, never even came close to seeing the prison. Halfway there and entirely unrelated to our visit, I vomited in my uncle’s car. I was just dehydrated, unaccustomed to the climate. The chauffeur drove us straight back to the air-conditioned comfort of my uncle’s house, where my auntie sighed and said, ‘See, you shouldn’t visit such evil places. The bad spirits have gotten to you.’ They took me instead to the Royal Palace, with its floor of silver tiles; to Angkor Wat, with its apsaras flying all over the columns; and to their private beach at Sihanouk Hotel. My family wanted me to see recovery, not annihilation. Yet how do I know about what is in Tuol Sleng prison? How can I describe the photographs, the bloodstains on the floor, the hairs stuck to the iron railings of the torture beds? These images are readily available to anyone – even a seven-year-old – if you enter in the right google terms. What makes the eyeballs of writers more legitimate? What makes historical suffering more ‘real’ than historical ‘joy’?
And what does it mean to write about all this? Words are impermanent. Even books, which are physical objects, will get stuck in floods and become, as the playwright John Biguent said, ‘the heaviest objects imaginable’. Professor Kent Gramm remarked to us during our meeting in Gettysburg, ‘There is the belief that history is nothing except language piling on top of language.’ What makes our transient thoughts real? If we stop thinking about trauma, does it exist? My cousins in Cambodia who survived Pol Pot can’t remember a single thing about their childhoods during that era. Maybe the human body has a way of blocking off pain.
Blunt trauma needs to be alleviated by good health; love; success; and, dare I say, happiness. In America, in Louisiana, in Alabama, in Baltimore, in the Atchafalaya Basin, we did not see fulfilment of the American Dream. Sometimes we did not even see recovery. We met people like Greg Guirard who lamented the loss of their culture, Charlie Duff from Baltimore who mourned the disappearance of his stately city, and John Biguenet, who reminded us that ‘the people of New Orleans have lived shoulder to shoulder with death since the founding of the city’. We listened to people like Mr Thomas Richard German, the 76-year-old gentleman who led us through the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church where the four black girls were killed. Mr German spoke about the changes he had seen in his lifetime and in his parents’. He told us how his father had worked for a white man and his children: ‘When that lil’ boy or girl turned eight, my father had to call them by their title, Master Alexander or Miss Emily.’ He told us about how during the 1950s, sheriffs would pick up black men from the streets and castrate and kill them. How during the Civil Rights Movement, children were being arrested hundreds at a time and how the children actually enjoyed being taken in the police vans to the fairground to be processed. And how today, the most segregated day of the week in the United States is Sunday, when different groups go to their respective churches to hear about what makes a virtuous life, how to deal with loss and how to make sense of uncertainty.
We must not forget that the United States of America was built through an era of uncertainty. Perhaps the man who came closest to understanding this uncertainty was Abraham Lincoln. It is unlikely that a man like that would ever be elected in today’s current political environment. Lincoln lacked the charisma that is so necessary for television politics today, but more significantly he suffered from severe bouts of depression. ‘A tendency to melancholy,’ Lincoln wrote, ‘let it be observed, is a misfortune, not a fault.’ Yet that this mournful leader should deliver words that would rouse a nation at war defies all modern perceptions that depressed people are lackadaisical, are passive and should be heavily medicated. It also makes me wonder whether American culture now puts too much emphasis on the emotions, as if they were the sole barometer of one’s existence. In order to be a respected independent and adult human being, we are taught to be affirmative and preface our sentences with ‘I feel’, ‘I think’, ‘I know’. What if there was just feeling, thought and knowledge that did not belong to ‘me’ or ‘I’? Then perhaps we would be more forgiving of self-doubt, sadness, reticence. We would not have to talk all the time to justify ourselves. And perhaps then, melancholia would not be a personal fault but a misfortune.
In his 1863 Gettysburg address, Lincoln said: ‘The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.’ This address, less than three hundred words long, endured throughout history as one of the most powerful speeches of all time. These words move because Lincoln does not try to ‘own’ these men or their deaths. Lincoln does not cloak their cadavers in posthumous finery.
Standing on the battlefields of Gettysburg was an emotional experience for me. For a year, I couldn’t write about the field in Cambodia and its dust of people without feeling like I was making them up, because I did not know them. All the buried cousins and all the starved uncles, all the small babies. All those meaningless deaths leaving behind nothing. I think perhaps this is what Lincoln means by our ‘poor power to add or detract’. Lincoln understood what it was like to rise above emotion without superimposing optimism. Involuntarily blinkered by depression all his life, Abraham Lincoln never voluntarily willed away his peripheral vision.
I felt very lucky to take part in this tour. What amazed me most was that the US Department of State would take a group of writers from around the world to show them not the best parts of the country – the thriving industries, the lively culture and art, and the booming cities – but the side of the country in the shadows. Perhaps no other country in the world would open itself up so liberally to literary ambassadors from other nations. Through the University of Iowa’s Writers in Motion program, freedom of speech in America is real, and it thrives.
On my flight returning to Australia, my thoughts about my two-week journey were interrupted by my neighbour. I was seated next to a middle-aged gentleman who had teeth as white as a picket fence. He was everything an accomplished American man should be. Son of strict Eastern-European immigrants, he defied his parents’ expectations and married a girl with hair the colour of cornfields. At one point in his life, he was sleeping in his car because his father had kicked him out of home. So he started his own business. Both his sons became professional sportsmen, which was why he was heading down to Australia, to see one of them perform in a world championship. He told me that anything was possible if you only worked hard enough for it, and believed in it enough, and were a decent person. He asked me what I had been doing in the States for two weeks, and I told him that I had been looking at disaster and resilience. A few hours before our plane landed, he asked me extensive questions on how he would go about writing his life story. But I had a creeping suspicion that he already knew how.
We had started our journey on a battleground in Gettysburg, and ended it in a burial ground at Arlington General Cemetery in Washington, where the past was set in stone monuments, to be travelled across through well-paved pathways. Between these hushed places, we visited cities and heard the voices of people in these cities. We saw the parts of America where people were trying to eke out a life, trying their best to retain their separate cultures, people mourning loss, people being honest and resilient in quiet and unassuming ways. People forgotten by the narrative of quick success that is pivotal to the popular culture of the States today. The melancholy president, the common soldier, the Cajun fisherman, the middle-class church mot
her, the son of the Civil Rights Movement and the optimistic father – all these people formed part of a common history. Before we left New Orleans, John Biguenet told us that ‘art is not about opinion. It is about human beings living.’
THE FIELD MARKER
Our father would never let me travel to South-East Asia when I was a student, so the first time I visited Cambodia was when I was twenty-nine, with him and my sister Alison. In the plane, he warned us about the smallness of the airport, the dirtiness of the streets and the poverty of the people. He described the landmines and the lepers. It was as if he had raised us the way Siddhartha was raised – safely ensconced from all the possible perils of the world – so that the first time we saw sickness, ageing and death, we would feel like our insides were sucked dry. He wanted us to be prepared.
Our father was twenty-three when Pol Pot’s army marched into Phnom Penh, on 17 April 1975. They were an army of children. Their skin was brown. Their hair shone orange. Their eyes were oysters in two moons. They looked around, moving slowly, as if they were lost. Theirs was the breath of small animals in the night. It was as if they had not been taught how to walk, eat or laugh, but had learnt these things by doing them. Every sense woke up when they reached the city. Many of these boys had never been inside a city before, so every stimulus could only be predatory. Their uniforms were pyjamas dyed black as night, and some carried their AK-47s upright, as though they were going to set off fireworks.
They were children who had never tasted candy, to know that this was the stuff you were meant to steal from the shops. Instead, they smashed things up. Children with guns, children with bang-bang-shoot-them-dead-I-kill-you-long-time-Mister minds. Kill was a long time; dead was even longer. This was the only truth they knew. When they looked up at the sky they did not see the fingers of God; they saw the direct cause of death of their parents, the American bombs.