Kampuchéa by Patrick Deville
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
After three decades of covering civil wars and coups across the globe, Deville's voice is full of nostalgia, retained emotion and sadness. The mass murderers swarm in our world and Deville sees no sign of it changing:
"La planète défile sous la carlingue et j'essaie de surprendre les progrès de la raison dans l'Histoire et sous mon train d'atterrissage[...] Khieu Samphân, ancien chef d'état du Kampuchéa démocratique, bientôt octogénaire, [...] demande sa remise en liberté pour se consacrer au jardinage. L'ombre de mes ailes glisse sur l'Océan Pacifique. A Ciudad Juarez, dans le nord du Mexique, le chef de cartel Vincente Leyva se fait serrer pendant son jogging. A Lima, le procès de l'ancien président Fujimori suit son cours. L'ombre de mes ailes glisse sur l'Océan Atlantique. A Arusha, le procès des Rwandais suit son cours. A La Haye, le procès des généraux croates Gotovina et Markac suit son cours [...]
On pourrait cesser de lire les journaux."
(Kampuchéa, p.13)
The anger still shows now and then: "Ce cinglé de Daniel Ortéga", "Nous sommes une dizaine de naufragés assis sur des bancs, quelque part sur cette planète comme une grenade dégoupillée dans la main d'un dieu idiot et distrait". But most of it has drowned in resignation.
Through this tone seeps a deep compassion for a certain type of human beings : those who pursue a dream, which they reach or not and which, when reached, turns sour, bitter, nightmarish, their beautiful romantic vision ending up in death: it is Mohout dying of fever in the enchanted Angkor he discovered for Europe; it is Pavie who sacrifices his whole life to the Mekong and the people who live off it ; it is this young Chinese woman he meets by the Red River, who is leaving her village and farm to go to the big City in the hope of a better life. It is, strangely, the three friends from rue Saint-André-des-Arts who dreamt of a Cambodia as seen by Rousseau and who, carried away by their romantic vision, turned it into a bloodbath. Deville has harsh words for the Pol Pot regime. When he talks about the men, his tone becomes more intimate, full of melancholy:
"Cet homme maigrelet, qui estime avoir assumé la lourde tâche de faire torturer puis assassiner plus de douze mille de ses compatriotes, s'est éclairci la voix, a bu un peu d'eau, puis, au désarroi des responsables de l'interprétation simultanée vers le khmer et l'anglais [...] a récité la fin de La Mort du loup d'Alfred de Vigny :
Gémir, pleurer, prier est également lâche
Fais énergiquement ta longue et lourde tâche
Dans la voie où le sort a voulu t'appeler
Puis, après, comme moi, souffre et meurs sans parler."
(Kampuchéa, p.18)
These are the melancholic colours that Deville finds to paint the figures of the Khmer leaders. Lost between their childhood in French Asia and their young age in post World War II Paris where sexual revolution was simmering, they dreamt of a Cambodian revolution modeled on the French one -the dream of purity, of absolute, of Rousseau's Nouvelle Héloïse.
He has much harsher words for those who used Asia as a playground for their own personal ambitions. This is for Garnier, who played at being a general throughout south-east Asia and sent thousands of people to death to stage his little wars. This is for Hun Sen, the current leader of Cambodia, put in place by the leaving Vietnamese in 1985 and still in place today. This is for Mayrena, founder and only ruler of the very short lived Royaume de Sedang ("Le Règne du Malin" is the title he chooses to tell the story of the man who became the inspiration for Malraux's Perken in La Voie Royale and Coppola's Kurtz in Apocalypse Now).
Deville spares the poor devils who killed thousands for a dream. He does not forgive those who tricked and manipulated for the sake of their own personal wealth.
This view of South East Asia, through the people who built it, the dreamers who explored it, the madmen who bled it, gives to what should have been a travel book the emotional resonance of a novel. Intentionally, Deville had the word put on the book cover : "roman", indicating that he was not so much interested in presenting historical and geographical facts as in narrating a destiny.
