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Student Scene April 29, 2002 Listening In on Terror Oral History Becomes Public Health Intervention Photo by Jeff Cleary In Cambodia in 1975, the leftist Khmer Rouge led by French-educated Pol Pot overran the royal government of King Sihanouk and instituted a totalitarian state. For the next four years, until Vietnamese forces liberated the country from the Khmer regime, the entire Cambodian population was forced into farm labor in accordance with an agrarian socialistic ideal espoused by the new leader. Adherence to this new way of life was enforced through torture, the execution of intellectuals and dissenters, and the inculcation of Pol Pot's philosophy. More than two million Cambodians perished during this time, making it one of the worst acts of genocide in history. Voicing Trauma In the Boston metropolitan area today there is a large Cambodian-American population, all of whom share in the terror of the late '70s. In 1997 the Harvard Program in Refugee Trauma, headed by Dr. Richard Mollica (an HMS associate professor of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital), interviewed a handful of Cambodian survivors of the Pol Pot era in the hope of constructing an oral narrative of their ordeal. I became involved in that project for one summer, transcribing the tapes of these interviews. The voices on those tapes belonged to five young Cambodian Americans. Most of them had been adolescents during the rule of the Khmer Rouge. Their names are lost to me today, but I remember their personas from the interviews: the serious activist, the one who kept laughing all the time, the shy ones.... They took turns answering questions from a moderator about innocuous subjects at first: life in Cambodia while they were growing up, its customs, its folklore, the differences between American and Khmer cultures. They were a voluble and happy group. Transcribing interviews is like being a fly on a wall. Sometimes I couldn't help laughing myself. Half the challenge of my job was deciding how closely to copy what everyone was saying. Cleaning up the dialogue would have made the transcript more pristine, but it was often in the interruptions, half sentences, and sounds the group made where their points were driven home. Getting the Words Down The purpose of this oral narrative as I understood it was to act as a public repository of memory. Much scholarship and investigation had gone into documenting the activities of the Khmer Rouge, and the movie The Killing Fields had publicized the experience of one man who had escaped. But there was considerably less material in existence describing life as told by Cambodians themselves. The oral narrative was designed to fill that need and stand as a work that Cambodians could approach and be assured that the events of the '70s had, indeed, occurred. Trust in such a repository could be built because it would be their fellow Cambodians who had used their own words to construct it. Such trust stands in contrast to what was possible under the rule of Pol Pot, where what someone could say and write were tightly controlled. Over the course of the interviews the discussions turned to the Khmer Rouge and each person's first-hand experience. Not everyone in the group shared, and the ones who did sounded like different people than earlier. Their voices barely rose above a murmur. That the questions would eventually turn to this sensitive topic had been anticipated by the group from the beginning, but the enormity of the past and the lives lost seemed to weigh heavily on each participant. I distinctly remember one man, the most outspoken of the group, commenting on how little the traumas of the Khmer Rouge period were discussed among the Cambodian population. For him it was the first time in 25 years that he had brought up such memories. Surviving on a daily basis seemed to involve a compartmentalization of those experiences, an inhibition to speak of them, even though virtually every Cambodian man and woman has friends or family who perished in the genocide. The opportunity to finally describe the terrors he encountered as a young man was a release from the legacy of Khmer Rouge oppression, not only for him but for the entire group. Therein lies the power of an oral narrative. It puts into words what had existed previously only in memory. The permanence of such a verbal record is a commitment to its subjects to oppose the revision that an ideological or political group might undertake to alter or deny it. As such, an oral narrative has a salutary effect in emotional and mental traumas. Building a history is always the first step toward healing. Medical professionals are used to having privileged access to words and transcripts and charts, but rarely are those words seen as anything but a means to an end. As I saw that summer, sometimes words are an end in themselves. --Davin Quinn, a third-year medical student at HMS who, as a George Mitchell scholar, will study next year for a master's in creative writing at Queen's University in Belfast, Ireland The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of Harvard Medical School, its affiliated institutions, or Harvard University.

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