Quite Random

Cambodia and death

A comment that gets made here occasionally is about how you could write a book on the Khmer psyche, maybe a bunch of books. I’ve heard it a few times and said it a few times. Ray Zepp compares Cambodia to a Russian doll (open one up, think you have it sussed and then there’s another one inside, and then another…). Too often the only response to the sheer weirdness of this place is to say ‘welcome to Cambodia’, with a smile of resignation.

Even setting aside the Khmer Rouge atrocities and the subsequent famine and civil war, people still die needlessly here every day. Few Cambodians wear crash helmets, many ride small motorbikes, and cars and trucks give no quarter, so fatalities are a daily occurrence on the roads. It’s a sad fact that, riding to work on highway number 6, somewhere along the way you’re likely to see either the immediate aftermath of a collision, or nothing more than broken glass, a pool of blood, and scattered shopping. In an English class a short while ago I gave the students the beginning of a story along the lines of ‘today I was walking to school when…’, expecting them to use their imagination and write whatever came to mind, no matter how strange. One did - the rest of them all wrote about witnessing a crash between a truck and a bike, one even talking about the motorcycle driver’s brains being scattered on the road. It’s just a fact of life here. People will refer to this person or that person having died as easily as if they’d described them having gone to the shops. You can’t judge people for having that attitude to death given what has gone before, and I don’t pretend to know nearly enough about this place to understand how grieving works here.

We just ran a session with the young adults as part of their personal, social and health education course, talking about reactions to change and loss, and they used lots of words like ’sad’, ‘tearful’ and ‘heartbroken’. They’re aware of the words, so I have no reason to believe the kids are any more emotionless automatons than any other Khmer, but I was aware of a fine line between helping them talk about their emotions and programming them to react to loss in what some people might see as a more appropriate way. It would be, apart from anything else, incredibly patronising to tell these people to react in a certain way when they have already dealt with loss and deprivation I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Nevertheless, if people can articulate their feelings they’re less likely to bottle them up, and bottling up is something many Khmers do very well, until they release the pressure by beating their wives, children and dogs.

You often pass funeral processions if you’re in the vicinity of a pagoda. A column of people walk slowly with the deceased maybe carried upon a large float. Funerals, like weddings, appear to vary widely in their opulence or size depending upon the income of the family. Some richer people may be buried for a few years before being exhumed and cremated. If a richer person commits suicide, their house (assuming they killed themselves there) will be destroyed. A suicide by hanging I heard about recently happened to a family that weren’t well enough to knock down the whole house, so they knocked down one wall of the room where it had happened. Friends who taught at the school where this person had worked were a little shocked when they arrived for class and asked what game the students would like to play, and one of them, with a glint in their eye, suggested hangman.

In a way, reactions to death here are quite refreshing. People may grieve in private but you don’t often see Cambodians crying about anything much - there seems to be a bigger reserve of cool, or maybe a desire to maintain dignity. Compare that to the histrionics in the West when Diana Princess of Wales died or people’s preoccupation with ignoring death unless it’s in CSI and happening to someone else, and you’ve got to ask who’s acting more strangely. Maybe here there’s just a recognition that with death and difficulty a part of everyday life, there simply isn’t enough time in the day to be wringing your hands and wailing.