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Entries in genocide (15)

Sunday
Apr032022

Practice

Make it new day by day, make it new, said Leo sitting under a Camellia tree in a green garden. It blossoms 10,000 pink flowers every spring  ... light shadows bamboo leaves  ... practice calligraphy  ... Be the brush be the paper be the ink  ... Zen.

Practice allows you to wake up.

 

Mandalay

*

After the orphanage Tran discovered a dingy roadside cafe along the Perfume River in Hue. He sat at a wooden table under a torn blue plastic awning protected from searing mid-day sun. He ate animal tongue with eel extract and monkey brains while savoring thick noodles mixed with spicy red peppers, spinach and broccoli. Green tea and snake blood.

He needs the antioxidants.

He hears melodious NOM dialects filled with 25,000 characters as men pole boats loaded with bananas and onions toward floating markets on a calm velvet surface. A girl in white silk rolls dough into noodles. She drops them in boiling water fired by wood in a red brick stove. Another girl chops vegetables and fish. They stare at him laughing and talking.

Keep staring, I might do a trick, said Tran.

Trucks, tractors and herds of water buffalo crowd the dirt road. Illiterate boys bank an eight ball in dust. An angry, frustrated, underpaid, undersexed overworked female Vietnamese teacher moonlighting as a Communist party stooge admonishes her pool shark students for breaking the cue ball off green bank walls.

 

Play the angles you idiots, she shouts, elevating her Marxist CONTROL stick, stabbing them, prodding them, driving them forward, accelerating them through educational fields filled with landmines.

She pounds her stick on a bamboo podium to get their attention. She releases her repressed anger and frustration, Your fate is to put up with me, she screams. Students cower behind rote memorization grammar rules in fear.

Famine survives in green paddies below heaven’s gateless gate as emaciated farmers work steaming white oxen past orphans selling bananas, trinkets and skin to lost scared alienated caffeinated satiated rich obese white tourists.   

Lovers sleep on teak furniture abandoned by Rohingya fleeing a genocide promoted by the Burmese Army. They stream across streams into Bangladesh where they languish forever.

Across from the restaurant behind a spaceship made of mud is an iridescent dirt playing field and elementary school. Curious disheveled smiling children stare as a stranger with one good leg squats over a holy toilet.

Tran shits fertilizer 7.5 miles into the center of the Earth creating earthquakes in Christchurch and Japan. Radioactive debris floods the Mississippi Delta singing the blues.

Book of Amnesia, V1

Monday
Mar072022

Bell

Once upon a time in a green garden of light speckled green, shadows danced on silent red flagstones.

A bird in a mango tree sang about freedom, sky, friendship and dreams of peace.

A brown leaf departed the tree of life fluttering, singing, dancing down all the days ... reaching earth.

A green brown lizard sat quiet and calm.

A woman in yellow sitting on a cement bench stared through the quadrant of stone slats toward the law offices.

She has no concrete idea what goes on in there other than people paper and conversations about issues and matters she doesn't understand or comprehend because she showed up on the back of a motorcycle from an obliterated distant village and perhaps it's a member of her surviving family in there or a stranger from another galaxy - a time traveller disguised as a homo sapien wearing a tie ...

Another leaf leaves the tree of life in a wild flight of confusion and joy ...

Discussing Ukrainian war crimes, a slow genocide as 4,000,000 refugees struggle forward with babies and the elderly whispering, singing, telling stories about new futures all bright and beautiful in their lives after leaving everything behind, all the fear nourished by desperation and fate.

The woman on the bench feels a soft breeze and hears a small bell ringing as a woman pushes her ice cream cart along pavement. Both women smell the fragrance of purple yellow white orchids and they know everything will be peaceful. One day.

The bell's melancholy echo is long ago and far away.

Ukraine light, strength, courage, humanity, peace.

Wednesday
Dec042019

Fairy Tale

I am sorry are our three favorite words in Cambodia.
It’s the last thing 2,000,000 genocide victims cried out before a complete stranger slammed a
shovel against their skull. I am sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry.

One survivor said to another survivor, what a beautiful fucking mess. Help me drag this one away.

You either let go or get dragged along, said a Buddhist monk lighting incense for world peace.

Same in China said Leo, We learn life’s hard bitter lesson to accept loss forever, I am sorry. What is the most beautiful word you know Zeynep?

Freedom. And yours? Food, said Rita and Leo.

Less talk and more drawing are essential in life, Z said. Experiment with circles, dots, triangles, squares, lines and curves to reach existential levels of realization. Connect the dots forward.


The asylum is a prison and protection, said Rita.

You create art to explore your sense of self and find out how you feel you are, rather than whom you think you should or ought to be, Z said, drawing her future.

Make the right choice for the wrong reason, Leo said.

Make the wrong choice for the right reason in the right season, Rita said.

Z discovered questions were repeated. 1,001 questions ran around her Turkish restaurant looking for answers. Questions grew tired of repeating themselves. This is so fucking boring, said one question. We are abused. We are manipulated and rendered mute. Useless.

Think of it as a test, said another question. Patience is our great teacher. I’ll try, said another question. Yes, said a question, these non-listeners have a distinct tendency to say nothing and say it louder than empty silence when they’re leaving, when their faces are turned away from eye contact, potential real heart-mind communication and growth.

Echoes drifted in through around silence and ignorance. I’ve seen that too, said a question, who, until this moment was silent. My theory is that it’s because of genocide, fear and ignorance. It’s also a delicate mixture of stupidity or indifference, said another question. I suggest it’s their innate Buddhist belief. They suppress their ego. Non-self.

Why is the most dangerous question, said Lucky addressing questions. Remember Leo asking why and ended up carrying shit at the Reform Through Re-education Labor Camp near the Gobi before becoming Chief of the Cannibals wearing an alarm clock around his scrawny neck reminding everyone of Time?

Yes I remember said a timeless prescient question. Leo was one smart cookie, whatever that means. He figured out unique survival skills in a desperate situation. He knew the fundamental difference between book smarts and street smarts. Anyway before we drift off the subject, how do you explain fear, asked a question.

Rita (author of Ice Girl in Banlung) - Fear is a basic instinct. It’s in our DNA. It’s in the amygdala. Flight or fight? Is it safe, eyes say scanning a potentially dangerous environment since Day One. You see it everywhere, all day, everyday all the scared uncertain eyes asking is it safe?

They peek left, glance right, double check. The coast is clear. Let’s go. People ran away to survive. Instinct.

People had a panic attack, started running and others would ask them a question like why are you running, who’s chasing you, where are you going or what’s the matter or when did you become afraid or why are you afraid, or why don’t you stay longer and the running one would keep going trailing abstract question words behind them like memories of dead or missing families or disembodied spirits or exploding landmines or molecules of indifferent breath.

I see, said a question, that explains everything. Yes, said an open-ended question. Being correct is never the point.

Nothing is true. Everything is permitted. We are assassins.

The Language Company

Burma

Tuesday
Dec262017

Ambiguity - Ice Girl

Chapter 23.

Chugging down the street, antiquated ¼ ton trucks recycled from catastrophic invasions, wars, death, suffering, bombings, and genocide carried 1.7 million people dying from forced labor, starvation and execution illuminated by historical footnotes.

 Voices blended billowing black diesel dust with forgotten cultural memory in swirling red dust.

  Two barefoot mendicants walked past Ice Girl. One looked content. He wore simple tattered white cotton cloth. A red and white-checkered kroma scarf knotted his head. 

  He carried their possessions in three white rice bags on a bamboo pole balanced on a shoulder. A tall gaunt man followed their trail of tears.

  Man #1: These bags are heavy. I am tired of carrying them. You carry them. He dropped the bags and pole on red dirt. Crash!

  Startled birds flew. A brown river changed course. A woman stopped sweeping dust. A rich man getting out a black SUV smiled at prosperity. A young boy fondling his fantasy without objection paused. A prone passive girl suffering from eternal hunger in a plywood room waiting for fake love blinked. An infant dying of malnutrition cried in its sleep. A mother waiting for medicine holding her child shifted her hip weight. A monk in a pagoda turned a page of script. Ice girl massaged cold reality with an edge.

  The man walked over to a large water cistern. He splashed his weathered face. He drank deep. 

  His friend stooped over, adjusted bamboo through twine, hoisting the pole and bags onto his shoulder.

  Man #2: Where are we going?

  Man #1: Muttering to his feet in red dust, Down this road.

  The Wild West red dust town bigger than a village welcomed smaller. The dexterity and fortitude of millions shuffled along in a flip-flop sandal world filled with joy, opportunity, risk, chance, fate, and destiny.

  They devoured French pastries and flavored yoghurt.

 Ambiguity, contradictions and paradoxes assumed the inevitable. Assumptions and expectations wore Blue Zircon, seeing harlequins.

 A boy near Angkor Wat sawed crystals of clarity in his tropical kingdom. He saw but didn’t see while standing in a blue hyperventilated dump truck holding his rusty trusty bladed saw. Blocks of ice disguised as solidified water were longer than the Mekong feeding Son Le Tap Lake.

  He unwrapped blocks. He sawed. He tapped a musical hammer at precise points defining worlds of experience into melting scientific sections.

  His co-worker loaded condensation on thin shoulders. He carried melting weight to a bamboo shack. He dumped ice into an orange plastic box. A smiling woman frying bananas over kindling gave him Real notes. Thank you for the cold.

  Carver carved. Tap-tap-tap.

  The woman assaulted ice with a hammer, shattering fragments to refresh java, coconut and sugar cane juice. Ice blocks melted latent potential. 

  An old woman in pajamas sweeping dust heard ice weep, “Hope is the greatest evil. Her daughter whispered, “Evil doesn’t exist.”

  History, war, violence and predatory politicians have screwed Cambodians, said Ice Girl.

  Let’s Make A Deal. Do the numbers. 15% (and increasing) of Cambodia has been sold to foreign investors. 1.7 million out of 11m were massacred. Millions are illiterate. Millions are subsistence farmers. It is a rural agrarian society. They produce what they need to survive. They eat, sleep, fuck and sit around.

  Any day above ground is a joyful day in paradise, she said. Paradise is a country where genocide survivors are happy. They are free people in a free country. Ecstatic. They laugh, run, play, plant, harvest, work, breed and die. But they live in fear. They are afraid the past will become the present. Time is a scary circle.

Annual red, green, gold, yellow and white fireworks celebrating the end of the genocide regime blasted black sky. A child sang, “The wicked witch is dead!”

  Another child sang, it’s a brave new world minus four old dying relics waiting to die of old age during a $100,000,000 dollar international show trial for genocide between 1975-1979.

  They deny their role.

  Not me! I was only following orders. I don’t have to accept responsibility for my actions.

  That’s what they all say.

  No, please. Have mercy. Authority ordered me to kill them all. Yeah yeah.

  Denial will kill you, said an illiterate man cranking up electricity purchased from Vietnam. How quickly people forget, said a blind historian rewriting Khmer stories.

Media buys people, said Ice Girl. I sell frozen facts. That’s the truth. Facts and truth are not related.

  Numbed silence covered rice paddies. Traumatized and anesthetized survivors cried, Send in the clowns. Send in the politicians and bankers and thieves and Chinese manipulators.

  Same-same but different, said a hungry girl in a plywood shack waiting for Freedom to say OK.

  Freedom laughed, I’m not saving anybody.

  Paradise survivors are happy because they are alive, said Ice Girl. They started over after Year Zero. 14 million now have enough food, clean water, medicine and Socratic educational critical thinking opportunities in a NGO fabricated world to rebuild their identity, self-esteem and life.

Culture means you can forget

It will take another generation, or sixty years given the average life expectancy, to recover revive and renew our simple uncomplicated life.

  Down the road, Alice in Slumberland, a human pretending to be an economically depressed Khmer teacher making $40 a month minus gifts told her students: You should just blend in. During genocide people who asked quest-ions disappeared.

They vanished. They became extinct.

Asking quest-ions was not allowed. Asking quest-ions is seen as strange and startling and dangerous. Dangerous people ask quest-ions. People who ask WHY are a clear and present threat to growth, development, intention, incentive and robotic daily comatose poverty existence. 

  Accountability is a foreign language.

  Economic terrorism is an unpleasant fact. Personal incentive is rebellious and counter-productive to maintaining the status quo ho, ho, ho.

  An a priori communication theory without facts or truth or  thought or doubt or wonder or curiosity or hard quest-ions is a male land mine survivor without legs living on Ground Zero. He rests near a pagoda waiting for compassion from strangers. A bookseller of genocide memories smokes a cigarette w/o hands.

  Where are the female land mine survivors? Leo asked. Maybe they are dead and gone, said Ice Girl. Maybe they live somewhere safe with someone taking care of their daily needs. Removed from Fibonacci’s spiral and the golden mean.

  Ready for a trick quest-ion, she asked. Sure. What’s louder than a group of Khmer people? I don’t know. Another group of Khmer people.

  Get used to it, she said. Volume. Signal-Noise. They love distractions. They live, eat and breathe distractions and signal-noise. They love talking over each other. The one who talks the loudest without saying anything is the winner.

  Most are too poor to pay attention.

  Listening is hard work, said Leo.

  Silence kills people, she said. Fear of death is one long conversation. They’ve been traumatized by their past into the immediate present facing unknown scary futures. It’s a time machine, a time warp and a shift in consciousness.

  For example, said Leo it’s curious seeing the FIRE inside the cement stove in the local java/tea shack at 0615 along a muddy road in Battenbang. Orange and bright red flames heat water, consume kindling.

  Words crackle, spit, and dance with laughter's sensation of heat. Kindling stands stacked like 12,000 orphans in 269 safe places waiting to exonerate memories of loss and abandonment.

  It’s a male thing. They are over forty and survivors of The Dark Years. The men wear fresh pressed short-sleeved white cotton shirts and black pants. They talk about business, jobs, kids, wives, girlfriends, weather, facts, opinions, big plans, construction projects, myths and ghosts. They eat fried bread drinking brown tea and thick java. Spoons create music with glass. 

  1.7 million ghosts dance through their silent conversations. Ghosts whisper, What if I die here? Who will be my role model? All my role models are gone.

  Feed me, feed me, cried an Asian ghost to their family burning sandalwood incense.

No one talks about it. Silence is golden. Men prefer to talk about the long now. Ghosts live in the past. Living in the past is time consuming. Leave it there, said one. Half our population is under thirty said another. They have no memory of the past.

Education is the key, said another. We missed our chance. The only chance I had, said one, was to run and hide in the jungle. My education was nature. Look at my hands. I spend my days in an office rewriting our sanitized history. History is time, said another. Geography is space.

  My dream is to be a gardener, said one. He watches Leo mine an unexploded episode from a notebook. The gardener realizes a notebook, once used by Authority to write down names of the dead or soon to be, is now a potential source of liberation and memory.

  He works at Bliss, a meditation retreat.

  I love gardening, he said in Khmer. We have nature as our common teacher. Yes, said Leo, Your work here is beautiful.

  He’s a 60-year old genocide survivor. White t-shirt, blue shorts and black flip-flops. His silent black eyes contain all the secrets of his survival.

  How did you survive, asked Leo. I ran away, I hid in the jungle, then into the mountains, deep, very deep, deeper than unconscious memories of life’s transient nature.

  I was running from the shadows of Death. I became a living ghost, a stranger to myself. I survived hearing screams 24/7 from room 101 as generations slaved starved and died, murdering everyone, kids like you, fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles, grandparents all disappeared gone erased finished evaporated exterminated, dead.

  Yes, agreed Death. Everyone comes to me.   

  When I thought it was safe I emerged, crossing landmine paddies into a Brave New World. I walked over 1.7 million bodies and bones, smelling, tasting, hearing seeing Death. Death bones in my dreams rattled freedom and food. I never sleep. Death sees me. I feel it closer than skin on bones, closer than white on rice.

  It will take another generation before the Khmer adjust to breathing. Laughter is rare. My people have suffered hopelessness and passiveness for twenty years. That’s a humbling life changing experience, said Leo. Life is found in a desperate situation, the man said.

  They meet every afternoon in fading light after torrid heat. He waters red roses, flame orange bougainvillea, green ferns, purple orchids, hanging planters. He smiles as water rainbows cascade through white light coating green, sliding down stems, meeting petals. Water disappears toward roots below the surface of appearances.

  He sits curled up on a straight-backed brown chair smiling and silent watching Leo typing notes from a black book. I don’t know this tool, he said pointing to a plastic screen and floating artificial letters. I can’t read, no chance, it was all about surviving, labor, nature, planting, harvesting, scheming and deceiving, running, hiding, keeping your mouth shut. We work, breed and get slaughtered. Such is our fate.

  The gardener and Leo heard a voice from a local classroom: Quest-ions are forbidden, screamed overworked, underpaid and undersexed Asian teachers named Authority and Social Control.

  Ask at your peril. Anyone in the 2% group raising their hand to ask a quest-ion with confidence is shamed or silently beaten into silence. Fear and ignorance are great motivators, forever and a day. Conformity breeds conformity. 

  Curiosity is fatal, said Ice Girl. Curiosity kills more humans than war, disease, lack of medicine and starvation. Humor and curiosity are basic elements of intelligence.

  Two pale female French tourist conspirators plotted their narrative at Bliss.

  We colonized this place, said one, Giving them baguettes, war, illusions of freedom, top heavy dull administrative procrastination, fake NGO bureaucracies, administration tools, wide boulevards, imaginary legal systems, an eye for an eye, corruption possibilities and designs of egalitarian ideals, morals, ethics and principles, faded yellow paint and French architecture.

Yes, said her friend, this IS the old brave new world and I am lazy and passive and my stomach comes first. I am starving. Let’s eat our sorrow.

  She is a super thin model of anorexia boned with stellar constellations. Her grim hawk faced rotund lesbian lover has flabby upper arms. She scribbles her serious fiction-memory and sense of entitlement in an unlined black notebook with one hand while massaging her forehead to increase creative blood flow.

They examine a microscopic map of Angkor Wat
filled with unconscious alliterative jungles,
gold lame Apsara dancers,
232 species of black and red butterflies,
1.9 million anxious tourists in a big fat fucking hurry,

Chinese, Japanese and Korean robot tour groups,
crying elephants, super tour buses, 125cc motorcycles, tuk-tuks,
begging illiterate children speaking 10 European languages
hawking gimcracks
whining predatory adults with an 8th grade education
accompanied by miles of flaming plastic bag garbage,
narrow boned white oxen,

14 million attention deficit disordered citizens addicted to simple minded FACELOST entertainment,
cell phone adolescent sex text nonsense,
1,001 laterite cosmic Hindu Khmer temples stretching from Thailand to Laos and Vietnam in a boomerang circular dance evolving from the stillness,

letting go of outcomes

as the French ladies whisper,
Where did we go,
What did we see,
How did we feel,
Where are we,


Did we discover the magic eye of sudden insight or any wisdom in this totality of mystery, devotion, and sublime splendor?

 They’re on their grand Asian tour. One describes fragments of her short life with an animist talking stick.

  She cuts out brochure pictures and ticket stubs. She pastes them into her book. It will make a fine future visual memory of her ear and snow.

  Her attention span is shorter than a grisly tour for eternity at the Genocide Museum in Phony Baloney filled with 2,000,000 skulls.

Here we are.

Ice Girl in Banlung

Saturday
Apr152017

The Dark Years

It was curious seeing the Cambodian barber open on the last day of Khmer New Year.

The small southern river town of Kampot was dead quiet. Merchants and families slept in shuttered shops behind metal gray accordion sheets. A tropical afternoon sun beat down. White cumulus clouds billowed in the east.

The barber had a white haired customer. He’d fought against Thailand, Vietnam and Khmer Rouge. He didn’t talk about it. He survived. That was his conversation. His legacy.

He sat in a solid steel chair staring at his reflection. He saw a thin serene brown face and wavy white hair. A long mole bristling white hair resembling an inverted Buddhist pagoda hung from the left side of his chin.

The mole saved him from Khmer Rouge executioners. They were superstitious peasants and said he was the Devil, an evil spirit. They’d let him go.

They conversed in French. The gaunt barber had lived here all his life. The Devil survived four years of genocide by hiding his family in nearby mountains and jungles where the French constructed and abandoned a post office, hotel and casino. They called them The Dark Years.

No one talked about The Dark Years.

The old man closed his eyes. The barber trimmed with hand clippers. Snip, snip, snip. White hair fluttered to the floor meeting piles of black hair. Electric trimmers with frayed wires collected dust on a narrow wooden table under a fractured mirror. A holiday television program featuring Apsara dancers blared from a box on a bamboo table inside the long narrow room.

After trimming top, sides and neck hairs he adjusted the chair easing him back. The barber extracted a thin razor blade from a small piece of paper. He severed both ends into a soda can clinking metal fragments.

He opened a wooden handled straight razor and clicked the blade in. He sprayed water mist around the man’s head. Moisture refracted rainbow light prisms. Whispering the outside edge of an ear lobe angling the man’s head with his left hand he trimmed microscopic hairs.

The razor rasped temple to temple across the scalp line. He was quick, silent and efficient. Smooth hands touched head and face fast light and artistic. The blade followed the line of the nose, curled and danced across skin below closed eyes. He wiped the blade on a white towel lying on the man’s chest. He shaved lower sideburns.

He returned the man to a sitting position. The man smiled at his reflection. The barber snapped a towel across thin shoulders scattering dead cells.

The man eased out of the chair as they chatted. He removed a roll of money hidden at his waist. He handed peeled notes to the barber. Merci. Au’voir.

He shuffled into white heat. His son waited for him on a motorcycle. He tried to swing his right leg over the rear seat. Feeling off balance he hesitated. His left hand reached for a shoulder. His frail contorted useless right arm dangled in space.

The executioners had broken the Devil’s arm. They taught the Devil a lesson in compassion and forgiveness and power and control. Before giving him freedom they wanted to hear the Devil scream for mercy. They wanted to hear his pain echo through The Dark Years.