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Songs at the Edge of Democratic Kampuchea

At a first glance, it might seem difficult to see the threads connecting David Chandler’s essay “Songs at the Edge of the Forest” to his more recent works on Democratic Kampuchea (DK), such as Voices from S-21: Terror and History in Pol Pot’s Secret Prison. How, for example, does one move from an ancient story (“How the Kaun Lok Bird Got Its Name”) about a mother who abandons her three daughters in the forest to the depths of twentieth-century torture at a place like Tuol Sleng? Chandler provides us with a model and a clue, as he frames the stories in the “Songs” essay in terms of moral order, arguing that they manifest a tension between a vision of what should be and the reality of what is. During the tumultuous period in Cambodian history that preceded French colonialism, Chandler argues, such stories wove a meaningful narrative between an idealized conception of a properly ordered society and a world frequently characterized by violence, chaos, and fragmentation (see also Hansen, this volume). In this essay, I argue that this tension between order and disorder—which encompasses the fluctuation between states of meaning and meaninglessness, purity and contamination, and clarity and blindness—has direct relevance to understanding Democratic Kampuchea and the dynamics of violence in places like Tuol Sleng. In the multidimensional spirit of Chandler’s work, I move toward the DK sociomoral order and Tuol Sleng through another Cambodian legend concerned with moral order, Tum Teav, which concludes with King Reamea’s obliteration of Governor Archoun’s (Ârchoun) family line seven generations removed.