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Article Excerpt
Abstract
While ties between Cambodian diasporas and Cambodia have been significant and enduring over the decades of conflict, the political changes engendered by the internationally endorsed elections of 1993 have transformed the scope and characteristics of the transnational traffic. Shaped by complex ideological, class, gender, and generational dynamics, Cambodian diasporas' re-engagement with the ancestral homeland has since acquired a multidimensionality that extends beyond mere monetary remittance. Spanning both private and public spheres, from national to household levels, these transnational encounters necessarily dislodge the narrow analytic focus and assumptions that accompany much of the discourse of transnationalism, and interrogate critical issues of nationalism, citizenship, and belonging.
Resume
Malgre l'importance et la solidite des liens entre la diaspora cambodgienne et le Cambodge au cours de decennies de conflit, les changements politiques engendres par les elections avalisees de 1993 ont modifie la portee et les particularites de la circulation transnationale. Le reengagement de la diaspora a l'egard de la patrie, influence par une dynamique complexe quant aux ideologies, aux classes, aux sexes et aux generations, a depuis acquis une dimension multiforme qui depasse la simple allocation monetaire. Ces rencontres transnationales, englobant les spheres privees et publiques, du foyer a la nation, ecartent les hypotheses et les points de vue analytiques fermes qui accompagnent souvent le discours sur le transnationalisme. Elles remettent egalement en question les notions critiques de nationalisme, de citoyennete et d'appartenance.
Introduction
Despite the challenges posed by protracted conflict, compounding dislocations, and distance, Cambodians dispersed throughout various refugee camps, in third-country settlement, and in Cambodia have maintained strong ties that extend not only across time and geography but also across multiple dimensions of economic, social, and political engagement. From the late 1970s to the early 1990s, when contact was constrained by political impediments, difficult access to the border camps and the economic hardships that confront new refugees in their countries of resettlement, these translocal relationships were sustained essentially through letters and financial remittances. In some instances, these exchanges were conducted between the many nodes in diaspora; in others, they made their way by circuitous routes from asylum in the West to needy families languishing in liminal refugee camps. Until the repatriation of refugees from the Thai-Cambodia border in 1991, remittances from overseas Cambodian communities provided a critical economic buffer, especially for families in camps not recognized by the UN. They continued, through the late 1980s and early 1990s, albeit in an imperceptible trickle, largely through the community of international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that emerged following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the termination of Soviet subsidies. Following the repatriation of refugees from the Thai border camps back to Cambodia in 1991, support from overseas Cambodian communities was especially important for returnee families with little or no access to land and other productive means.
While transnational relations have been enduring and significant during the two decades of virtual regime isolation in Cambodia, the political changes brought about by the internationally endorsed elections of 1993 transformed the scope and nuance of transnational traffic. Liberalization of state control over movement of people, capital, goods, and information both into and out of Cambodia fortified and diversified transnational connections. Shaped by differing political tendencies and by complex class, gender, and generational dynamics, Cambodian diasporas' re-engagement of the ancestral homeland has since acquired a multi-dimensionality that, heretofore, has not been possible. Many overseas Cambodians embarked on the political routes initially through transnational activism during the conflict period and subsequently through participation in the post-war coalition government. Many more solidify their transnational ties through family remittances and sponsorship of development projects and cultural activities in Cambodia. Some opt for long-distance involvement, others for actual return. The greater number go back and forth in the attempt to reconcile the fissures of dislocated lives, families, and communities.
The lived experiences of Cambodian diasporas, as they reflect historical, temporal, and spatial multiplexity, (1) challenge the bounded concept of the community and the linear approach towards migration. Rather than the presumed directional finality in the exit from one context and assimilation into another, Cambodian transnational experiences underscore the circularity of movement and the multidimensionality of connections. They dislodge the analytic centrality placed on monetary remittances that pervades transnational studies, and bring into focus the diverse forms, nuances, and textures of transnational connections that are equally compelling. They also interrogate the uncritical idealism that accompanies much of the discourse of transnationalism. The process of reconnecting and return for Cambodian diasporas, as it is for many transnationals, has not been without tremendous challenges. Their irrefutable agency notwithstanding, diasporas are constrained in their ability to effectively intervene and participate in homeland developments by the larger political, social, and economic contexts in which they have to operate both in their originary place and in their new places of resettlement. In the nexus of local, national, and global exigencies, agency and subjectivity exist in constant dialectical juxtaposition.
Homeland and Exilic Longing
In a context where rupture and entanglement, loss and remembrance, coexist in accustomed tension, the notion of time and space must be spoken of in terms of memory and imagination, in what Edward Said referred to as that "endless temporal notion in which past, present, and future intertwine without any fixed centers." (2) Being a refugee, as Hans Wicker points out, "means being engaged in a kind of lifelong psychological balancing act." (3) For forcibly displaced individuals, the "discontinuous state of being" (4) reflects the inability to free themselves from the past. Thus, as Homi Bhabha points out, rather than speaking of locality in "some utopian sense of liberation or return", "the place to speak from was through those incommensurable contradictions within which people survive, are politically active and change." (5) In fundamental aspects, it is in the context of this liminality that attachment to the "homeland" becomes most registered. The poignancy of longing is rooted fundamentally in the denied possibility of return for in the reconstruction of myth and memory; it is, as Said puts it, "fragmentation (that) makes it even more real." (6)
Cambodian diasporic longing for the homeland, as such, must be understood in light of the historical trauma of war, revolution, exile, and rupture. In essence, the nature and extent of the disconnection accounts for the reconnection that is sought. For many Cambodians, the rupture created by the losses and sufferings under the Khmer Rouge, and in the case of refugee survivors by physical dislocation from the homeland, was compounded by the nature of the atrocities. Disappearances and mass graves are especially significant in a Buddhist country because they deprive surviving relatives of the ability to perform the necessary rituals to ensure the successful transmigration of the soul, hence of the essential closure to these tragic life experiences. In many instances, this engenders a psychical sense of "being stuck" not only for the soul of the departed but for the survivors as well. Moreover, the virtual autarky that shrouded the country from 1975 to 1979 kept fractured families imprisoned in the liminality of not knowing. For many refugees, this "unresolved business" is made even more acute by the circumstances of flight--abrupt, often secretive and always perilous, resulting in further separation and deaths. These experiences combined account for the inability of the survivors to move forth towards building a new life and a new history. Memories of the past and of all that had been left behind essentially deny them the luxury of focusing on what they do have in the present and what they could envision for the future. Above and beyond the politics, the economics, and all the other "loftier" motivations, return for many Cambodian diasporas is compelled by that simple, yet insistent, need just "to light an incense" in remembrance.
The collective guilt of survivor-refugees is exacerbated by the conditions of post-war Cambodia. The decimation of the educated class and the enormity of Cambodia's needs exert additional pressure on the surviving and newly emerging professional and middle classes overseas. As reflected by Dr. Pen Dareth, who traded his lucrative position in Holland for a return home, "the country has helped me a lot by sending me abroad on a scholarship, now it's payback time. My conscience would not allow me to remain in Europe because I must help rebuild my country." (7) Among the 1.5 generation (8) of Cambodian-Americans, in particular, one of the frequently proffered reasons for wanting to engage in the process of national...
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