My contribution to the workshop will explore the keyword “aphasia” in relation to the history of the Cold War in Cambodia. “Aphasia” is a medical term that refers to language impairment that derives from a neurological condition. I will focus on a tension between the Western medical understanding of “aphasia” and a proverb that Cambodians have to describe a condition of language that took shape during the Cambodian genocide called dam-doeum-kor, which translates to “planting the kapok tree.” In Khmer, the word kor means both kapok and mute. It is said that when the wind blows in Cambodia, the leaves of doeum-kor make no sound; therefore, the kapok tree is like a person who is mute. From 1975-1979, many Cambodians refrained from speaking, even to family members, out of the knowledge that their words could be overheard by the Khmer Rouge and used as evidence of treason. At once a protective mechanism against threat, a response to it, and a metaphor of latent regeneration, dam-doeum-kor is resistant to a straightforward cause-and-effect teleology.
In my work, I mobilize dam-doeum-kor / aphasia as a critical analytic to refract and reframe the Cold War in Cambodia and its refugee afterlives. Bringing the fields of critical refugee studies and critical disability studies to bear on the study of the kapok tree, I seek to make three key interventions: to shift the Cambodian narrative beyond a homogenous account of horror and trauma; to explore the limits of biomedicine as a privileged paradigm for thinking about Cambodian refugee mental health; and to map out what I call a “Cambodian refugee aesthetics of regeneration.”
Day 3 – (May 29, Sat HK/SG time)
Panel 8: Cold War Traumas
11am-12:30pm HK/SG / 4-5:30am BST / 5-6:30am CEST / 11pm-12:30am EDT / 8pm-9:30pm PDT