Our disappeared were everywhere, irresistible, in waking, in sleeping, a reason for violence, a reason for forgiveness, destroying the peace we tried to possess, creeping between us as we dreamed, leaving us haunted by the knowledge that history is not redeemed by either peace or war but only fingered to shreds and left to our children.The Disappeared is my very favourite type of book: it introduced me to a new time and place (I learned something) using language that I found to be spare and beautiful (and consequently, I felt something). In addition, I love books that go from what is familiar to me (St. Joseph's Oratory in Montreal) to what is foreign (a marketplace in Phnom Pehn). Throw in big themes of love and death and memory, and what's not to like?
As the book opens, we learn that the narrator is recording the events of thirty years earlier, when as a girl of sixteen, she met Serey – the great love of her life – who was a Cambodian exile; sent abroad to study and now unable to return home during the murderous reign of Pol Pot. The narrative takes the form of a love letter (always referring to Serey as “you”) as Anne Greves remembers their early days together and the strain that it placed upon her relationship with her father; a distant man, an immigrant himself, who was forced to raise Anne alone when his wife died young.
A girl understands with her first lover that there is no daughter who does not betray the father, there are only great crashing waves of the woman to come, gathering and building and breaking and thrashing the shore. I watched my body's swelling and aching and flowing and shrinking as a sailor watches the changing surface of the waves. I let you do anything. I did anything I wanted and the dirty sheets of Bleury Street became my world.Set against Anne's naive and urgent love is Serey's concern for his family. As a musician, he plays for her a two-stringed chapei, singing traditional folk songs and lullabies that recall the smokey blues they enjoy at Montreal clubs. Where Anne is open and effusive, Serey is reserved and respectful; his family never far from his thoughts; he having had no news of them for the four years of Pol Pot's Killing Fields.
I tried to telephone and the operator said there were no more lines to Cambodia. I went to the post office to send a wire. No lines. I gave the clerk a letter to mail and she said, I'm sorry. There is no more service. I dropped the letter in a mailbox outside anyway and four days later it came back to me with a stamp: undeliverable. Do you know what it means to send a letter to your family and read that it is undeliverable?When Serey learns that the Vietnamese have invaded Cambodia and reopened its borders, he rushes back home to find news of his family, insisting that Anne wait for word from him. And word never comes. Eleven years later, Anne thinks she sees Serey at the edge of a crowd on TV, and finally, she goes in search of him. (This is not really a spoiler, as the opening paragraph sees Anne arriving in Phnom Pehn.)
Once she's on the ground, Anne finally faces the reality of a country that has lost a quarter of its population to genocide. As in Montreal, Anne discovers that love and death in Cambodia are never far apart from each other, and by introducing a fellow Montrealer whose job it is to exhume mass graves and count the victims, author Kim Echlin is able to organically pepper her story with the appalling facts of this atrocity.
Why do some people live a comfortable life and others live one that is horror-filled? What part of ourselves do we shave off so we can keep on eating while others starve? If women, children, and old people were being murdered a hundred miles from here, would we not run to help? Why do we stop this decision of the heart when the distance is three thousand miles instead of a hundred?That's all the plot I'll record because much of the pleasure in reading this small book is derived from the discoveries along the way. There is also much pleasure to be found in the writing itself: consistently poetic and controlled. Her eyes held my grief, and her body gathered in my pain and knit it into herself as if she were an old marsh creature weaving baskets from rushes. I recognise that a sentence like that won't be to everyone's taste, but it satisfies mine. Reading a book like The Disappeared feels like a bit of a rebuke: Pol Pot was in power just forty years ago, and even today, Cambodia is ruled by a “superficial democracy” (Hun Sen has been Prime Minister since 1985); but who remembers the Killing Fields? Who gives a thought for Cambodia today – despite its dismal rankings on all international rankings – when the newscasts are filled with other, noisier tragedies? Not me. For many reasons I am pleased to have found this book and I enjoyed it thoroughly.
