In The Shadow Of The Banyan

“Others abandoned us long ago at the first sign of trouble. And now so have the Americans. Alas, democracy is defeated. And our friends will not stay for its execution. They left while it was still possible, and who could possibly blame them?”

The United States played a controversial role during the Cambodian civil war and the lead-up to the Khmer Rouge’s takeover. Starting in 1965, the US targeted North Vietnamese troops stationed in Cambodia with bombing attacks. Yet the strategic benefits—or lack thereof—of this campaign with respect to the Vietnam War aside, the attacks destabilized much of the Cambodian countryside, causing between 50,000 and 150,000 Cambodian deaths. Scholars like Ben Kiernan argue that this destabilization was one of many factors that led to the Khmer Rouge gaining widespread support in many areas of Cambodia.

“To mourn then, I thought, is to feel your own nothingness.”

The act of mourning appears in many different ways by the characters. There is so much loss and death that at multiple points in the narrative, Raami will mention not having time to mourn. Without the opportunity for proper funereal rituals—either because the Khmer Rouge bans it or because there is no body to bury—grief and mourning do not take on the usual rhythms they would outside of wartime. Big Uncle, for instance, mourns his family by shaving his head because he simply does not know what else he can do. Thus, mourning during wartime becomes as much about missing the individual who is deceased as it is about reconciling with one’s own helplessness.

“‘Life is like that.’ Papa turned once again to the Mekong. ‘Everything is connected, and sometimes we, like little fishes, are swept up in these big and powerful currents. Carried far from home.’” 

As a symbol, the Mekong represents the inevitable flows of time and circumstance that carry the characters on toward their doom. Yet in Papa’s telling, the Mekong is so powerful that during the rainy season it can reverse the current of smaller nearby rivers. Thus, there is always reason to hold out hope that despite the characters’ helplessness to beat back against the currents, they may return home via smaller tributaries.

“Chaos. It's the foundation of all revolutions. This one is just beginning, and I'm not sure what it is. It has yet to be named.” 

“Revolution” is a loaded term in the novel. To the Khmer Rouge, the chaos they cause represents nothing less than a dramatic transformation of the country toward an agrarian paradise. Yet to Raami’s family and millions of others, this is not a revolution; it is a genocide. As Big Uncle suggests here, the names of these events often arise only after the fact, and they tend to be contingent on whether the agents of “revolution” remain in power. Thus, in the case of the Khmer Rouge who fell to the Vietnamese, their era of dominance is a genocide. By contrast, history still widely characterizes similar efforts perpetrated by Mao Zedong in China as the “Cultural Revolution,” despite the fact that up to 20 million people died as a result of the policies of that era.

“I thought how ordinary they seemed, horsing around like that. At some point they started talking with us and we learned they were village boys who’d joined the Revolution because—as one put it— ‘guns were a lot lighter to lug around than plows.’” 

Ratner accomplishes two things with this quote. First, she establishes that despite the evil committed by Khmer Rouge soldiers, most of them are as ordinary as any other young peasant boy. This is consistent with the observations of Holocaust scholar Hannah Arendt’s landmark book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Second, the quote supports what Big Uncle said about the Khmer Rouge: that its rank-and-file members have little interest in the high-minded egalitarian political philosophies which Papa shares. They are not true believers in Communist ideology; rather, they are bored, poor, and looking for a sense of belonging.

“If one glimpses heaven’s reflection on earth, then somewhere must exist the real thing.”

This is one of many instances where Papa uses folkloric and religious imagery to instill hope in his daughter. The sight of the morning fog draped over the temple grounds is angelic, and Papa’s conclusion is that as long as such beauty remains on Earth, then there is reason to hope that the family may yet escape the Khmer Rouge to a holy refuge. A large part of Raami’s character arc is her struggle to maintain the optimistic lessons instilled in her by her father.

“On this temple ground, Papa had constructed for me, as Indra’s celestial architect had for Melea, a world that was lovely and good. I had only to look past the stench and scattered heaps to see the glimpses of beauty.” 

Many of Papa’s lessons express a duality that is fundamental to his perspective. His philosophy is almost Manichean in its contention that for whatever evil exists in the world, there is a corresponding good. Raami carries these lessons late into the book, seeing pockets of beauty even when so much else around her is starving and dead. It is only when Raami arrives at the labor camp—the nadir of her journey—that all hopes of experiencing beauty dissolve.

“The problem with being seven—I remember myself at that age—is that you’re aware of so much, and yet you understand so little. So you imagine the worst.” 

In addition to physical effects of genocide, the psychological effects on children are especially tragic. For adults like Papa and Big Uncle, there is some understanding of the political dynamics surrounding the Khmer Rouge, combined with a broader understanding of humanity that comes with maturity. This makes the genocide seem less incomprehensible and therefore less nightmarish than it is for Raami. This is partly why Raami views the suffering through the lens of folklore storytelling; she is too young to understand it through any other paradigm.

“I didn’t know what troubled me more—the possibility that we might not have enough to eat, or the realization that Tata had just lied to me.”

This is an important moment for Raami in that it is the first time that she suspects she cannot simply rely on adults to keep her safe through this ordeal. As difficult as it was to abandon her home, as traumatic as it was to watch an elderly man gunned down in the street, Raami at least had some faith that her parents, uncle, and aunts would ensure her survival. After Tata’s less than enthusiastic assurance that they won’t starve, Raami’s faith remains shaken to the core.

“That’s just it—I didn’t do anything when I could have. I could have called for help. Could have kicked and scratched the guard. Could have taken the blows of his club myself. But I did none of those things. Instead, a man beat a boy because of my name. And, sooner or later, I’ll have to answer for the injustice of it all. I’ll have to pay for my crime.” 

Papa views the story of Sambath’s beating as an allegory for the Cambodian genocide. Throughout his adult life, much as he did as a child, Papa feels that he stood by while less advantaged Cambodians suffered greatly at the hands of domestic and foreign forces alike. Thus, at least a part of him feels that his present suffering is a form of karmic payback for his earlier inaction.

“I saw the words scratched on top in a child’s handwriting: Knowing comes from learning, finding from seeking. What was left to find? Everything was lost in that coffin.” 

The death of the Viraks’s infant son is an important point of escalation in Raami’s experience of the Cambodian genocide. Thus far, most of the death has been invisible and none of the victims have been direct members of her community. Moreover, if even a baby can die as a result of the Khmer Rouge’s policies then nobody is safe.

“Those days and nights following Papa’s departure, I’d often told myself that at least there was Mama: she would hold my hand, shelter me from any storm. But when that moment came she’d stood frozen amidst the surging throngs, unable to draw me to her, neither by gesture nor word, and it was painfully clear that she’d needed me as much as I’d needed her, that without Papa, she and I would always need each other when calamity hit.” 

Up until this point, Raami always looked upon Mama as an unflappable force who is utterly in control. Only here does she realize the extent to which Mama relied on Papa for strength. As Raami’s family dwindles, she grows far closer to Mama through necessity, shared hardship, and an increased sense of mutual understanding.

“Had I owned the words I would’ve told him what my heart intuited—that joy and sorrow often travel the same road and sometimes, whether by grace or misfortune, they meet and become each other’s companion.” 

Part of the beauty of Ratner’s narrative is how she pulls out these fleeting yet profound moments of joy from the characters’ horrific circumstances. To have connected with a father figure as gentle and caring as Pok despite everything else is a blessing Raami refuses to take for granted. This ability to appreciate beauty and goodness no matter the situation—an ability she learned from Papa—is a significant contributing factor in Raami’s ultimate survival. 

“But the Revolutionary leaders and soldiers knew nothing of rice-chasing-water and in their fervor to speed up and increase production had ordered the villagers to fill the paddies with precious rice seedlings, which had all drowned and died. Fragments of their blackened, rotted stems resembling those lethal needle leeches now floated everywhere, possibly carrying plant diseases that could affect other planted paddies.” 

This is one of the most infuriating examples of hypocrisy on the part of the Khmer Rouge. Under its own guiding principles, the base people like Pok and Mae are fonts of ancient wisdom pertaining to rice cultivation. Yet the Organization arrogantly ignores their time-honored agricultural ways, leading to major shortages and eventually famine. Thus, the Khmer Rouge propaganda surrounding the vaunted base people is just hollow rhetoric.

“And so, as I navigated the human terrain, as I negotiated for my survival, I began to discern what Pok had wanted me to see that day when he walked us across the rice fields and showed me what lay beneath the paddy water—that hidden in the unbroken and seemingly imperturbable monotony of rural geography, existed those, like the needle leeches, who fed on blood and destruction.” 

Much as Raami adopts the habits and mannerisms of the base people without losing touch with her true self, bad faith actors bent on annihilation hide their plans under the homespun rhetoric of the rice paddy farmers. This recalls a not-so-subtle metaphor from earlier when Pok tells Raami that the best way to avoid the needle leeches is to dress all in black so they think she is one of their own. Moreover, the quote undercuts the idea that the Khmer Rouge are anything other than bloodsuckers operating not on any ideological basis but for their own enrichment.

“Since that day at the rice fields, confronted by the wives of the Kamaphibal, she’d stopped speaking of Papa completely, never once mentioned his name again, not even to remind me not to talk about him to others. I hadn’t understood it then, but I did now, and I no longer resented her for it—this decision to bury him, to blot him out of our memories as if he’d never existed. It was clear that while food fed our bodies, gave us strength to work and breathe another day, silence kept us alive and would be the key to our survival.” 

While Papa teaches Raami to survive through storytelling, Mama teaches her to survive through silence. Rather than choose one strategy over another, Raami incorporates the two as she quickly matures into young adulthood. In private, Raami continues to view the world through Papa’s stories, both as a way to stay connected to his memory and as a way to maintain hope against near-impossible ones. Publicly, however, she must repress her storytelling urge and pretend that she’s forgotten the spiritual and familial roots of those tales. 

“I have no stories to tell you, Raami. There is only this reality—when your sister died, I wanted to die with her. But I fought to live. I live because of you—for you. I’ve chosen you over Radana.”

This is the breakthrough moment for Raami and Mama’s relationship. While Raami always believed that Mama favored Radana because of the lingering infirmities caused by Raami’s childhood polio, it only seemed that way because Mama knew Radana lacked her older sister’s strength. Moreover, this quote emphasizes how the harsh reality of Mama’s love is in some ways more powerful than the way her father expressed love through stories.

“There will remain only so many of us as rest in the shadow of a banyan.” 

Here, Big Uncle repeats Grandmother Queen’s prophecy from earlier in the book. To Raami, after everything that has happened, this framing of their present scenario through folkloric prophecies is almost insulting to her. It reflects how much the ultimate depravation of the labor camps has shifted Raami’s attitude toward using stories as a survival mechanism. 

“Again and again it appeared in different faces, young and old alike, the vectors of Revolutionary venom, spreading like a disease, expedient and merciless as that from the bite of a death-carrying mosquito. And even if it was petty, it was obvious that when propped up and given the right platform, pettiness became poison.” 

Here, Raami frames the Revolution as petty grievance writ large. This reflects the extent to which the so-called Revolution operates by manipulating existing grievances and encouraging cruelty against an arbitrary enemy, as designated by the Khmer Rouge. Once again, venomous anger directed toward the nearest target subsumes the ideological substance of the Khmer Rouge. 

“If this was our collective karma, then why was I still alive? If anything, I was as guilty as those who survived and as innocent as those who died. What name then can I give to the force that carried me on? With each life taken away, a part of it passed on to me. I didn’t know its name. All I could grasp was the call to remember. Remember. I lived by this word.” 

At this point, all of Raami’s survival mechanisms have failed her. Even her contention that she and her family are victims of karmic retribution falls flat, given the arbitrary nature of who lives and who dies. Yet for whatever reason, her survival instinct persists. With nothing else to keep her from giving up, Raami decides that her purpose in surviving is to remember what she sees, so that the memories of those lost endure in some small form.

“I couldn’t explain it, but I remembered all those times when death had brushed by me and I’d close my eyes or turn away. I couldn’t do this anymore. I couldn’t let those I loved face death alone. From now on, I told myself, I would stay put, be here for them, and when their spirits left their bodies, they would see that I’d been here all along to hear their last words, their last breath, and they would know that I had witnessed not only their deaths but, more importantly, their fight for life, their desire to live.” 

A major consequence of Raami’s loss of her fear of death is that she now feels better able to bear witness to the murder of her fellow Cambodians. Before now, fear always held her back from truly seeing the atrocities at hand. Like her vow to remember, Raami now desires to bear witness, fully and unflinchingly.

“‘Had I understood then,’ she continued, speaking as calmly as Papa would’ve spoken to me, ‘that the war, this Revolution, was an old blaze reignited, decades, possibly centuries of injustice manifesting itself like a raging inferno, I could’ve told whoever were its builders, be they gods or soldiers, they needn’t have put him through that test of character. Your papa would’ve jumped into the fire of a thousand revolutions for us. And... and because of this, because of his willing self-sacrifice, he merited a world nobler than the one he’d left behind.’” 

In the end, it is Mama not Raami who frames Papa’s self-sacrifice in terms of a folk tale about a legendary hero. It is easier, perhaps, to think of Papa’s demise as a test of his moral character, like when Indra tests Buddha to see if he will sacrifice himself for a poor starving Brahmin. It is ironic that Mama is now the one casting Papa as a mythical hero as opposed to Raami, who at this point is too shell-shocked to even speak, let alone indulge in storytelling.

“Life, I believe, is a circular path. No matter what misery and awfulness we encounter along the way, I hold out hope that one we’ll arrive at a blessed moment on the circle again.” 

This quote comes from Papa’s final letter to Raami. It reflects his contention that while the river of time and circumstance may take a person to horrific conditions, it can also reverse course—like the smaller rivers around the Mekong—to bring that person back home. It is an open question whether Raami still believes this herself, given the fact that when she flies away from Cambodia she is fairly certain she will never return to her home country.