Abstract
In the clinical literature on trauma, the atrocity survivor’s attempt to engage others around the experience of chronic, intractable pain is often viewed as an instance of “help-seeking,” logotherapeutic “coherence-making,” or—more darkly—“patient malingering.” In this article, I challenge the utility of these rubrics through a close examination of the pain and engagement narratives of two survivors of the Cambodian Killing Fields. I demonstrate that survivor narratives can obtain a strategic multivocality, oscillating between phenomenological account and political critique, between clinical description and moral exhortation. This discursive oscillation, speaking “on and to several different levels of experience at the same time” [Levin DM (1998) Int J Philos Stud 6(3):345–392], radically disturbs the audience’s conventional sensibilities and distancing-making moves (for example, crafting totalizing accounts of the meaning of suffering or counterfactually speculating about the survivor’s experiences of pain). This disturbance allows the survivor’s narrative to function hermeneutically, enabling the audience to glimpse the moral significance of strategic multivocality for the survivor’s efforts to engage others while tracing its performative responsibilities and possibilities for ourselves. Reading pain and engagement narratives this way forces us into a place of equivocation and ambiguity that makes possible new configurations of sense, meaning, and response. It is, thus, as disturbing phenomenology that the women’s narratives derive their greatest practical power and urgency.
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Notes
All names are pseudonyms. Details about the women’s families, locations, and backgrounds have been altered. Interview transcript citations are presented in brackets, with interview session number listed first, followed by transcript page number(s). Thus, “[2,4]” refers to a citation from page 4 of the transcript from the second interview session with the interviewee referenced in the text. I use dots […] to indicate an ellipse (material deleted) and dashes [- - -] to indicate a pause on the part of the speaker.
As Csordas (1994) suggests, narratives such as these give the audience partial access “to a world of experience in so far as experience comes to, or is brought to, language” (p. 11).
So unpalatable were the results of this “analysis” that I never tried to publish them, despite the fact that the stated purpose of the study was to shed light on “support mobilization” and “help-seeking patterns” of Cambodian survivors.
That the women’s narratives were produced within the genre of the mental health research interview is important to their practical relevance—a point assumed in the current analysis.
In 1979, upon learning of the impending Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge leadership ordered workers to large trenches. The plan was to bury people in these mass graves. As a Khmer Rouge soldier told a survivor, “If we can’t have you, nobody will.”
Nightfall offered no relief from vigilance and self-monitoring, since informants were “everywhere.” In weekly “work group meetings,” the message of total subjugation was constantly reinforced: “They said that our minds were not to stray elsewhere, to stay with the same frame of mind as theirs, be one with them” [I, 4].
In other writings, Bourdieu emphasizes the acquisition of habitus via structured social contexts whose pattern, purpose, and underlying principles human agents incorporate as both inclination and modus operandi. Their acquisition, Bourdieu suggests, amounts to the incorporation of social structures and practices (Bourdieu 1992; Crossley 2001; cf. Willis 2000. Bourdieu characterizes habitus as both “structured structures”—since these incorporated habits dispose the agent to continue with particular forms of practice—and “structuring structures”—since they are equally responsible for the generation of practice. Insofar as the “messiness” of de facto social life includes analytically important, structurally indeterminate moments where “patterned” social contexts and fields collide and/or co-agents differentially define the field of practice in which they engage, habitus are also “structurable structures”—that is, plastic sociosomatic media capable of being continuously reformed (and deformed). This means that agentic practice also alters habitus.
In the pain and engagement narratives that follow, Sokha and Phala graphically describe how the emergence of chronic pain inflicts suffering, monopolizes energy and attention, and intrudes into everyday life. What is perhaps less evident from these narratives, extracted as they are from the women’s extensive discourses of atrocity and lived experience, are the ways in which these losses suffuse their experience of pain and constrict their conditions of engagement.
Extraordinary events compound the difficulties of everyday life. During the region’s last earthquake, in the mid-1990s, Phala suffered dramatic weight loss: “I had such a weight decrease that I had to go to the doctor’s, where they gave me medicine to help me eat…. I lost so much weight that there was only bones left, during that earthquake” [2, 6].
She says, “Working like that (in work camps) was OK for us, you know, very hard work. But now, I couldn’t do anything like that. I couldn’t do anything. When I’m around too many people, I have headaches often. Everyday, I need to be quiet somewhere by myself and relax for a couple of hours or something. If I go to school, I come back early one hour or half an hour early, and come back and lie down and relax. When I go to school, I can never get out at the same time as everybody else. If I set a long time, it feels like my head is going to break apart and my brain is going to explode. I can never stay long. But the doctor says, ‘Oh, you’re OK.’ They look at me, ‘Oh, you’re OK.’ You know, ‘A normal person, you can go out and work.’ I cannot do that. They don’t know how I feel inside. They know when I talk, they say, ‘Oh, you talk OK.’ You know, ‘And you can move around OK,’ like that. But it’s not. It’s not like what they say” [1, 3].
Phala adds: “My uterus, I had the doctors check it, my uterus is not that good, either. I did some heavy work and it didn’t stay in the right place, it started to come, too. Since then, I’ve been afraid to do any heavy work.”
Transcript also cited by Uehara et al. (2001b:255).
Transcript also cited by Uehara et al. (2001b:256).
“The doctors,” Phala says, “… always say that … it’s because I think a lot and worry a lot. But I think it’s because of my legs.”
That is, “representations” in the positivist sense.
By implication, this rhetoric stands as critique of the illogic of current trauma work. As Bracken (1998) observes, contemporary wars increasingly involve destruction of communities, cultures, and ways of life, while the ways in which individuals and communities experience and cope with war’s suffering depends on these social, cultural, and political aspects of local worlds that have been destroyed. Yet current trauma practice promotes a strongly idiographic focus, presenting trauma strictly as “something that happens inside individual minds” (38).
As both exhortation to action and evocation of the utter singularity of the experience of suffering, the women’s narratives evoke the hiatus or chasm between ethics and politics (see Critchley 2004). I reflect on the productive nature of this chasm in another paper.
The challenge is to avoid current tendencies in disciplinary treatments of suffering and trauma to view the treatment of the “suffering individual” as a substitute to redress of the massive material and political inequality that engenders and preserves chronic violence, poverty, and suffering across much of the globe (see, e.g., Bracken and Petty 1998; French 2004; Nguyen and Peschard 2003) or, conversely, to see in the pursuit of global equality “a refusal to occupy the subject experience” (Ortner 1995:13) offered by the survivors of atrocities. A sustained response also requires attending to the question of how to listen to atrocity narratives. This remains an unaddressed issue, as Chun asserts, largely because, “we assume we know how to listen” (Chun 1999:113).
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Uehara, E.S. “Disturbing Phenomenology” in the Pain and Engagement Narratives of Cambodian American Survivors of the Killing Fields. Cult Med Psychiatry 31, 329–358 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-007-9056-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-007-9056-0