The Main Point in My Encounters With the Khmer Language

In Francois Bizot's auto-biographical work, "The Gate", he writes:

"I hated the idea of talking to the Khmers in French; the sentences seemed flat and meaningless, for it is not only words that differ from one language to another, but also the ideas they translate, different ways of thinking and speaking."

We encounter this aside as Bixot relates his jungle confrontations with Duoch, the murderer, the torturer, his prison-keeper, and eventually a kind of friend

It is perhaps no large or novel insight these days.

The fact that there are significant problems in translation across languages is now accepted even in common culture, if only to acknowledge that some words are "difficult to translate" or "untranslateable". What gives so much weight to Bizot's observation is that it was no idle comment. He was fluent in Khmer. Duoch was fluent in French. They could have easily spoken in either language as they confronted each other daily in the jungle clearing that served as a Khmer Rouge jail and where Bizot was staked to the ground. Bizot  says: "it occurred to me that we had only ever spoken in Khmer".

Bizot's life depended on his ability to convince Duoch that he was not a CIA operator as he had been accused when captured, his only means of defense were his own words, offered and repeated, the answers he could give to the questions that Duoch asked. Bizot was a French researcher, a long-time resident of Cambodia, whose focus of study was the practice of Buddhism and the Ancient Khmer civilization -- and nothing more. Somehow he had to prove this to Duoch, in the middle of the jungle, to prove this without witnesses and without documents, with only the consistency between what he said at one time, and at another, as his salvation.

His life is literally on the line and depends on the result of three months of interrogations that occur in the midst of the Cardoman Mountain jungle in the early 1970's. "I could not explain in my own tongue what I had to say to my torturer. The bonds gradually forming between us depended entirely on our capacity to understand each other on common ground, and thus could be done only in his language."

Today, in late 2009, Duch is on trial for the thousands of murders he oversaw as the head of the infamous Toul Sleng prison in Phnom Penh during the Khmer Rouge period in Cambodia. Bizot is the only westerner to have survived imprisonment by the Khmer Rouge; he was the first witness in Duoch's trial.

This idea, this hypothesis, is what brought me to Cambodia in 1992. I aimed to discover how difficult the UNTAC organized transition to democratic rule might be, given traditional Khmer forms of social solidarity and competition. I assumed that these would be reflected in their language, a language created, sustained and altered by its users to facilitate that solidarity and to underwrite their own forms of cooperation and competition. I wanted mostly to see if I could find places in the Khmer language where words reflected concepts that made possible ways of behaving that might not be accessible to the English language and vice-versa.

I wanted to learn how the Cambodians sustained their solidarity and how it broke down from the point of view of its own conceptual structure, reflected in its language. I thought, perhaps naively, that points of access into these mysteries might be achieved by seeing how and to what extent the western conventional language of democracy might or might not find purchase in Cambodia, within the Cambodian culture as reflected in its language (and the patterns of solidarity, competition and behavior it made possible).

(Democratization requires institution building. Institutions suited to that form of governance, aimed to ameliorate and make less possible the autocratic rule and deadly factional cleavage that were typical of the exercise of political power in Cambodia, needed to introduce a new language, I assumed, a language that would not find an easy match to the words, and concepts behind them, then available in the Khmer language. New modes of political competition would require embedding new ways of thinking, need to promote new forms of solidarity and competition, new political behaviours to supplant outdated ones. At least this is how I thought about it.)

This blog cannot point in any way to even partial answers to the questions that brought me to Cambodia, but I do hope to record some of my more interesting encounters (and inferences from those encounters) with the Khmer language on my long road to try to get some idea what the answers to the these questions might be, or to finally accept that the questions were flawed from the beginning.

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