Peauladd Huy was born in Phnom Penh. She was eight when the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia in 1975. Peauladd lives on the eastern coast of the U.S. with her family.---------
Peauladd Huy Interview, with Kaite Hillenbrand
Peauladd, it is so good to have you back in Connotation Press: An Online Artifact. Publishing your work a few years ago was one of my defining moments as an editor. Your poems are powerful and scream inside my chest. You seem compelled to inform other people about what happened in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge – and, more importantly, how it felt (and feels) to survive it. What is the value of educating and informing people?
Thank you so much for everything. Without the bigheartedness of Connotation Press, this story would not be where it is today.
Airing on optimism, I want to say invaluable; of course, it’d require one to be blind or assumed complete ignorance of current horrors (due to war, suppression of basic freedoms, and other inhumane things) being experienced by people around the world today. Basing on these horrors, one has to say that the value is yet to be learned or yet to be heard of. And I believe this is what drives me to keep trying, to keep hoping that the story will be read, then hopefully the lesson will be learned. In a way, the value is in my hope and faith that what happened in Cambodia should be a lesson to prevention. It may not be a lesson for other countries at the moment, but it should at least be in Cambodia, that the very next Khmer generation should never permit this terror, this robbing of the essence of humanity to rule again. In some odd way, I am hoping to reach the next leaders (the children of, may they be of the current government or previous Khmer Rouge) to not mimic the cruel behaviors of their fathers and mothers. I believe the probability is there, that one or two will pull through the hunger of power and greed and will put the welfare of the people first. Really, I want to do as much as I can to reach out, but how it is received is all hope.
Why did you choose poetry as your medium for helping people understand what happened in Cambodia and its effects on you and others? Have you done other things to educate people, too?
Words are hard to come by when one is sad or in the midst of grief or anger. At least for me. One feels so much, but the crowding won’t let loose. It’s only after everything is expelled that words and feelings are sorted, and then one is able to express oneself properly. For me, poetry is this way somehow: it is built on a few words then digresses in limitless ways. There are so ways to feel a poem.
I did a short story and a few short essays. For one of the essays, I participated in a panel discussion at AWP (Boston) for the anthology, That Mad Game: Growing up in War-Zone. I gave the books to my children’s teachers.
You’ve written a manuscript arising out of your experience in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge, which Connotation Press is gratefully planning to publish. Would you tell us a bit about that manuscript and what you had in mind when you put it together? What is it, for you?
Thank you again. It reflects what a generous heart everyone is at Connotation Press.
In the manuscript I had hope to reveal what a nightmare the Khmer Rouge was, and that that nightmare is still exerting its force of destruction amongst each survivor today. For me, it is just in recent time, almost forty years later that my nightmares seem to subside somewhat. Then again, sometimes, in the evening when the sun is setting with those certain colors, I feel my heart drops suddenly, as if someone were being taken away from me again. (My mother was taken in the evening, just before the sun was setting.)
The manuscript has always been intended as a gift to be given later.
What does it mean (or take) to survive?
This story is not my story. Really. It is the story of each of us, here or long perished. It has to be put together because my survival, my life itself is owed to too many people. And most are not here today. And the few who survived cannot speak up or have since refused. To say that I am not weighed down by having survived is a lie. And to say that I know my ultimate purpose for this life is a complete lie. I don’t most of the time—I don’t know why I live. I shouldn’t have. I was always sick and frail. But for those little spans of time I know, I’ve always wanted my effort for the writing to reciprocate everyone’s effort, the ones who are gone, the ones still here, and the ones who have made it possible or not easily for me to shy away (when I’d tried to weasel my way out – thank you, Kaite, Ken, Meg, and everyone who was in Chicago that evening).
This story cannot be another story a hundred years from now. It should be history. I hope.
What brings you joy?
An elderly couple holding hands. A smile on a child’s face. A genuine worry on my six-year old’s face, about Brown Dog’s sleeping arrangement last night, who was acquired earlier on a trip to a farm. She, in her PJs running from the bed to dresser, where her jewelry boxes were (contents in the jewelry boxes: acorns, rocks, cherry pits, rambutan seed, and other jewelry things), stopped and then faced up to me, asking with her poor sad eyes if poor Brown Dog could sleep in the bed tonight, given it’s his first night with us. (She sleeps with me. Still.) I quickly replied “no.”
Brown Dog is a miniature pumpkin. Orange.
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Tribunus Onus
Days: stillness of true
midday’s light.
Steady like fireflies
alive at dusk.
One by one came forth
has gotten away
leaving us
holding our faces
asking when
it will get better
and wouldn’t the whole thing
just disappear:
already,
the blood grass is green again
and the head-wound’s healed
or trying to
scab what’d been tender
what’d been repeated
on trees to split the bark
are now doctored over by
new layers.
One by one, the years
concentric
a fine net in
cross-section: cut it,
trim it, bevel & mortise
any which way—I dare you
scale all the lengths
wrapping in circles
and still each tree won’t repeat
what’d cried
cried then cried no more.
One by one
cries lifted into
the leaves fall
and each fall another silent
echo leans deep in the wind
returning to the quiet
sky & afterwards healing
keeps spilling off between our fingers,
as if the hand-cup could not take up
all that’s ready
& what’s left already in split light
reach up between clouds
for the hand already taken back.
So we wait in spillage
between dense clouds as particulate
fall in another’s untrue light.
One by one,
they will never be the same
however far they lean
to wood up their wounds.
They are just faces
grafted and treed—
trunk epitaph,
you won’t see blood now—
how red’s stayed
red until the last rain
pool vanishes and earth cracks
the desiccated bones
revealing when rain comes again.
Bones never lie
to last undiscovered.
The years maybe forgotten
age & history every small feature
to remember how
dirt first worked itself
to stain each fragment, each crude line
or each rude hole at the weight of harm
each had sustained
to his moving frame.
Whatever harm
names to these bones
they will never be the same,
will never be more than
what’s giving them height
what’s raised
and let fall
to suffer the ground.
One by one
bundles of leaves. Pockets
of wind letting go
you would have never known
only as they’re leaving
as if final breaths
the spirits lifted
musk off the night blooms
before their journey.
One by one
if trees were marked
for passage
then let them travel on
and remember
this path they’d taken
under green crape of light
suspended like little airplanes
dragged up by something bigger—
something the world had sudden
swirls of bright sky
and whorls of green
earth, red petals, and sepals torn
open receptacles
for fallen blooms—
upside down then piling
over the ones before.
Who’s to know what
we’d known and still know
in dreams waking up
to walk the day beside us
then returning us between blood fields?
What has historied this
to busy the burial,
to quiet like miscellaneous
shame and regret,
hard to admit here
stacked up like column bones
standing a rotting bloom
is eating
into this ancient soil
and what fruit
comes bearing what’s gone
into the soil and seeds
can distance no farther
than wind’s seeded
them there?
So we return
to the tree, to what’s accreted
in the saplings below,
where each green’s repeating
its genetic
and each frantic another late cry
someone should have heard.
One by one
after the trees,
will anyone remember?
Will anyone hear
what’re forced to sound
will sound no more?
Baby breaths.
Locks of hair snagged
on bark like little tufts
greeting wind
no one left to see,
to slick down
like broad day’s brightness
to blind less
like night of moon.
Like night of wind
no one sees—invisible as a moan
tearing down the leaves
everyone sees coming
apart in shadows
swallowed by early stars—
wrestling as evidence-less as hands
clasping over
the last firefly. And what follows
is just a hush in the leaves
settling back
now crickets and frogs talk over
amongst the grown fields.
I know those nights.
I was there. I could see
clearly after voices barked
Stop. Stop.
Sometimes it worked and sometimes
they didn’t bother with the warnings.
And sometimes you stayed and watched
because you didn’t want to get caught
leaving.
Then you’d wait. Then you’d see
things you would have not seen
as voices trapped then collapsed
on his knees, stomach
then flipped on his back; so soon
again, you turned away and closed your eyes
and you’d brave
the last timid god to leg up
silence,
before you’d shock-dance yourself out
because you’d tried so hard not
to sway with the switchgrass
as the few lasts let go of something,
something finite and dead still—how could it?—
pivoting the distance between you
and night and nothing else
to interpolate here and there.
And there. And there—
another cry lit the dark field scattered
the massacred—
how to understand harm
bigger than what’s fielded
into two little hands,
two little eyes, and two little ears
still bear each night rumble, each siren
call falling apart then throating up—
bitterns, nightjars,
munias and weavers’ nests in wet grasses—
feathers up then suddenly gone
as if unhanded by wind
coming from nowhere,
as if once had never existed, never made
to navigate cries
farther than hand’s reach disappeared
deep within the throat of night,
and night where wind and every grass
coalesced on the dark canvas,
and night that drew up like crows
shuddered with claws
tearing into prey, into quiet, long
stroking the final draft,
and where on the dark canvas another pale
shadow of light’s another birth of something
leaving,
something unable to stay time
to steady the last calls.
One by one, as far back
as the doctor had done:
picked up by the ankles
to coax cries against gravity.
Against force of
physical light then against night
propelled by fields
of creeping mimosa,
thorns and briers then sudden
colics ceased.
Later a garden of soft spots
would never harden,
not before day’s dusk
heavy with musk
in falling blooms.
One by one has gone
silent
holding our faces
sneaking through cracks
indexing
dominant
manifesting
monstrosity:
already,
the years gone has not gone long
and each Khmer Rouge
reappearing in the house of judges
knows he is amongst friends
and culprits,
cohorting a crime.
Judge for yourself:
the tribunus has more
than a comedy
coloring each tragedy
is a sigh then a tap of
the gavel spills
open the ceramic pigs—how much
is bought lets go? How much’s let go
can never return.
Nothing.
Not a thing—
all have agreed—
can drastic a fixed law:
this experiment has yet
to bear fruit
for judgment
up to standards
equivalent to what
life, what breath
has yet to record memories,
what story has yet to share with loved ones
will never be shared, will never come
ever again.
One by one
the blood creeks
still clot with piece barks and bones
crowding their mouths
the water must run against.
Against what’s trying
to keep it. Against what pulls.
What’s cut and spilled
to small triggers then
gather in—
How long have we waited
staring at the water’s
gauzy shore trying to still
& heal or to lay still what’s wanted
to wash loose after all dark
cruel riverbirds returned
to their blood trees.
One by one
we’ve worked the coping
rope, one knot at a time,
extrapolating
to the nightmares:
branch-reach
to pick through
bone pits and scars—
lignified and woodsy
long devastated a forest
is still not enough to seed
this crime onto these human hearts.
What more does it take
for one to reach up & stop
the others and the others
to turn on acceptance:
one and another
they are getting away with it
and they all know it.
For now
what’s gone is gone
we all must wait.
Why—you’ve said
waiting for what
what could have happened—
the world is watching
on constant intervals
in so little time
segmenting
one to another wrong.
Like fathers to sons
to sons of monsters.
We are what we are:
a few survived & others memory
to react however
told to be forgotten
to move on—
I wished I could have
not seen the world as molecular
as a flawed link, one offspring
to others, a catalyst, too destructive
as if wishing evolution
to repress a killer
too late then and now.
Is this where we are
supposed to be
where every breath
to survive this cruel?
Cross Water
So much is promised by water
& the pasture is a heaven
sky and below
an easy hill burns till the last structure’s
a pile of ashes. & embers
a wounded grey, without wind & rain
to dance the fire to soot
& masks—so little is left without ash
powdered its outside. Anything more is
more than here. More than what
we can only guess what the gods thought
after you slipped past to the garden’s meadow
to toe in the calm water.
I told you the rain’s gone. & the pond’s showing root
bound along the parched edges,
where new growths come like almost all things
is almost a healing—
Morning, a breath of wind quickens the sleepy
necks of switchgrass between desolate & blackened trees—
as random as scars
sorry on something’s made to live—
See. Eventually, the dark marks wane
graduating almost whole shadow
moonlight cast between puddles & holding light.