Iterations of War and Its Literary Counterforces: Vaddey Ratner's In the Shadow of the Banyan and Kosal Khiev's Why I Write

The works of Cambodian American writers Vaddey Ratner and Kosal Khiev address two different yet continuous wartime contexts in Cambodian American experience that continue to be little understood by the public. While Ratner’s novel In the Shadow of the Banyan (2012) offers a new semi-fictional perspective on the history of the Cambodian genocide (1975-1979), Kosal Khiev’s spoken word video Why I Write (2011) responds to the contemporary Cambodian American incarceration and deportation crisis. Set alongside each other, the texts of Ratner and Khiev disrupt hegemonic narratives of the “gift of freedom” that designate Cambodia as a monolithic site of killing and the United States as the liberal granter of freedom. As narratives that call attention to human rights violations on both sides of the Pacific, the texts of Ratner and Khiev invite critical meditation on how regimes of state violence have been co-constituted across time and national space, reinscribing social, legal, and psychic barriers that perpetually threaten to limit the freedom of refugee subjects. This essay employs the term counterforce to suggest the way in which recent Cambodian American writing thematizes the ability of art, through its aesthetic, political, and therapeutic dimensions, to assist the refugee subject in transforming or escaping the temporality of war. Ratner’s In the Shadow of the Banyan and Khiev’s Why I Write articulate the despair engendered by continuous war while simultaneously asserting the role of art as affirming and enhancing life that has been targeted for disappearance.