Faces Fleshed in Green

While visiting the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, a former Khmer Rouge prison camp in Cambodia’s capital city of Phnom Penh, Binh Danh studied closely the mug shots of former prisoners. Danh, a Vietnamese-born artist whose family fled to a refugee camp in Malaysia in 1979 and eventually emigrated to the US, was haunted by the faces of the dead. “Each has a different story,” he remembers now, “but all ask the same question: How could this happen?”

During the years of Pol Pot’s rule, one of the most lethal of the twentieth century, an estimated 1.7 million people died as a result of mass execution, torture, overwork in labor camps, and starvation. Those suspected of being “national enemies”—foreigners, professionals, artists, teachers, Christians, Muslims, Buddhist monks, homosexuals—were rounded up and systematically put to death by the Cambodian government in prisons such as Tuol Sleng.

Danh knew the numbers, but it was seeing those faces that pushed him to seek out a medium to visually record human memory, to emphasize the fleeting nature of mortal existence. He eventually devised his “chlorophyll prints,” in which Danh places photographic negatives of portraits from the Tuol Sleng archives onto living leaves, creating ghostly images of the victims from the shadows their faces cast. According to Danh:

I have tried to show how like plants humans are; we participate in the kinetics of events and the process of creating memories by absorbing the history around us—and, like leaves, we wither and eventually die. The residue of our existence nourishes the memories of the living like a decaying leaf nourishes the soil.

The eloquence of this union of forms—material and ephemeral—moved poet Robert Schultz, when he saw Danh’s work at the Art Museum of Western Virginia. He was struck by “the uncanny connection between Danh’s art and Walt Whitman’s central trope—the leaves of common grass seen as hieroglyphic,” and he became “determined to render Danh’s pictures back into words.”

One night, Schultz awoke with the solution he had been seeking—the formal structures and urgent refrains of repeating poetic forms: pantoums, villanelles, triolets. “It was not until I understood that my leaves were the poetic forms, with their own cyclings and repetitions that I could finally write these poems,” Schultz reflects. “The subject matter demanded restraint, the slight distancing of given forms. But the forms themselves had to enact the organic cycles that Binh Danh’s chlorophyll prints insisted upon.”

In “Khmer Rouge,” for example, Schultz uses the strictures of the pantoum—repeating the second and fourth lines of each quatrain as the first and third lines of the following quatrain; repeating the first and third lines of the poem as the third to last and last lines—to introduce and interrogate the regime’s empty sloganeering. Schultz underscores not only the over-simplifying of the Khmer Rouge’s bureaucratic logic but also the relentless repetition of the executions themselves.

Taken together, Danh’s images and Schultz’s poems form a narrative of the dark hells of the Cambodian genocide, and—like Orpheus returned from Hades—they carry with them the dead reborn. “As the stories tell, / To rise we go down,” Schultz writes in “Found Portrait #18”; these stories for Danh and Schultz “begin in the underground,” where the thousands upon thousands of Cambodian bodies lie. Yet, in the common dirt, their stories take root. Through Binh Danh’s art, they evolve into natural and historical reincarnations of past tragedy, physical reimaginings of lost memory. As Schultz writes in “Ancestral Altar #7”: “The dirt took them / into its dark / and sent them back / in caladium leaves / … and here they are— / the bitten faces / fleshed in green.”