Deportation, Spoken Word, and Embodied Agency

Over three decades after the world witnessed the mass refugee displacement that took place in the wake of the Cambodian Genocide, hundreds of Cambodian Americans are being “returned” to Cambodia through the machinations of the US deportation regime. Self-described as the Khmer Exiled American community, these deportees grew up in the inner-city of America, were incarcerated most often for gang-related crime, and were subsequently deported to their parents’ homeland, after they had already served their sentence. Concerned with this contemporary crisis, Kosal Khiev represents the first Cambodian American to write in a creative form about his experience of incarceration in the US and his subsequent deportation to Cambodia. In this paper, I consider how Khiev’s spoken word video Why I Write explores the complexity of this experience not only by mobilizing the spoken word and filmic form, but also by deploying signs of the body and ‘Southeast Asian gangster fashion.’ Such fashions, often characterized by tattoos, hoodies, baggy shorts, and t-shirts, have been the cause of racial profiling and discrimination for Southeast Asian men in both the United States and Cambodia. As Mimi Nguyen has argued, the hoodie, as a sign, screen, and expectation, indexes a history of “collective confrontation with [US] state violence and its agents” while ethnographic studies report that the ongoing social exclusion of Cambodian American deportees in Cambodia is compounded by their inner-city American style of dress (Leitner Report). Within this transnational context of disavowed Cambodian American gangster experience, Khiev’s embodied performance in Why I Write encodes his multiple dislocations and re-rootings: from his tattoos to the red target taped to his chest, Khiev's body bears the scars of empire, state profiling, incarceration, and deportation, while the rhythmic, fluid movements of his performance insist on his refusal to be contained. Despite the overlapping regimes of state power that have violently sought to regulate Khiev’s freedom of movement, Why I Write represents an attempt through art and aesthetics to escape from the enduring wartime temporality inhabited by the refugee.