Walking with the Ghost: Occupying the Present in the Afterlife of War in Southeast Asia

• In Event: Colonial Interruptions: (Re)mergences, Remains, and Redress in Southeast Asian American Diasporic Politics

Abstract

"I have grown up intimately aware of the specter of genocide. And although we were never privy to long, oral histories regarding the Cambodian Holocaust growing up, my siblings and I walked with the ghosts of the genocide in our day-to-day interactions with our mother and her reoccurring psychosomatic trauma…"

"I often think about what it means to inhabit one's own body, to occupy time.
I feel… most human… in those moments when I'm most in my body, when perhaps paradoxically, my body both stops and moves through time.

I wonder if trauma will always feel as it does. As if someone is stealing the present from me. That loss of control when my body is transplanted back there, back to how it felt before… when my body did not feel like my own."

Centering an analysis of the multiple meanings of crossing, this paper explores the relational affects and effects of historical violence and trauma as they travel across time and space. Drawing upon lifelong engagements with the psychosomatic and Jacqui Alexander's landmark text Pedagogies of Crossing, I ask: what can the recursive instance of psychic-corporeal pain teach us about experiences of racialized, gendered violence? How might the psychosomatic as a crossing "never undertaken all at once, and never once and for all" (290) instruct us on what remains and what emerges in the aftermath of militarism, war, genocide and occupation in Southeast Asia? And-meditating on the lessons regarding illness and wellness the psychosomatic gestures to-what role might the body play in understanding the processes of injury and harm, and conversely, redress and reparation in the afterlife?

Author

• Lina Chhun, Stanford University