Iterations of War and Its Literary Counterforces: Vaddey Ratner's In the Shadow of the Banyan and Kosal Khiev's Why I Write

Troeung, Y-Dang

doi:10.1093/melus/mlv011

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Vaddey Ratner: the Art Of Healing1

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2023

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Cited by 2 publications

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“…Ratner's redemptive witnessing thus moves beyond the brute particularities of the historical genocide and Cambodian mythopoeic registers to construct a utopian, borderless realm where the human is marked by its transcendence, remaining 'responsible to history while importantly unconstrained by it'. 48 In Music of the Ghosts, Ratner focuses on the transformative power of music, an intangible and ephemeral mode of remembrance, to index healing. 49 Music in Cambodia marks memorialisation as healing, the rhythmic chants of monks and mourning songs (smot) by lay people 'placate both the minds of the living and the spirits of the dead'.…”

Section: Vaddey Ratner: the Art Of Healingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Shattered selves and border witnessing: globalising trauma studies in Cambodian survivor narratives

Salgado

2020

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Section: Vaddey Ratner: the Art Of Healingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Shattered selves and border witnessing: globalising trauma studies in Cambodian survivor narratives

Salgado

2020

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Novels of Vaddey Ratner and Viet Thanh Nguyen—unpacking trauma language, facing ghosts, and killing shadows

Thi

Klinbubpa-Neff

Phuong³

2023

Humanit Soc Sci Commun

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This article focuses on why exiled writers turn to literature to untangle their complicated pasts and reconstruct their identities. Ratner and Nguyen’s memories and reconstruction of Cambodia and Vietnam are fragmented, secondary, and indeterminately accurate. Growing up with transnational identities and relearning about their motherlands in the US altered their perceptions of SEA. Both writers turned to literature to untangle their complicated pasts and reconstruct their identities. During these journeys, ghosts, enemies, and guilt surfaced and stalked them until confronted and resolved. Nevertheless, their reconciliation plunged them deeper into crisis as it became clear that their memories were in fact nostalgia. Ratner and Nguyen are among the ultraminor world writers who witnessed chaos, yet still successfully articulated their failures and displacement in literature. The results of this research affirm that their works can help us understand Southeast Asian political and cultural dynamics then and now.

show abstract

Iterations of War and Its Literary Counterforces: Vaddey Ratner's In the Shadow of the Banyan and Kosal Khiev's Why I Write

Cited by 2 publications

References 17 publications

Shattered selves and border witnessing: globalising trauma studies in Cambodian survivor narratives

Shattered selves and border witnessing: globalising trauma studies in Cambodian survivor narratives

Novels of Vaddey Ratner and Viet Thanh Nguyen—unpacking trauma language, facing ghosts, and killing shadows

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