#distant geography

[danalanglois-blog]

A letter to my mother, by Chath pierSath

Originally published in After (2011)

  A Letter to My Mother

  My eyes, mother,

are much like yours,

wilted, full of tears.

My hands flail

fighting death in my dreams.

My complexion’s clay blood,

and my face aims for the sky,

with the hope that one day

I will understand

the ways of the world.

    I see you in the distance,

one foot wounded,

limping home on an empty dirt road

looking for your children.

The Khmer Rouge had taken them

taken them

to Angka’s slave labor.

For three years there was no news.

    The one son remaining,

I watched you search for answers

about a war

you could not win.

Like other mothers

you tried to battle it,

your intentions to save

what was left of your children.

    With no rice for our plates,

you shaking with fever,

my two-year-old sister

swelling from starvation,

I went begging and gathering

to keep you both breathing.

I remember you calling my name

while I sat in a tree

eating leaves

to delay starvation.

I tried begging for rice

but the men who were eating

did not care.

They turned their backs

and laughed.

    And I stood watching them.

I wanted to stay in that tree

among foliage rotten from suffering,

but your assurance,

your fine, thin hands stretching

peeled me down

from my hungry embrace.

Like the tree receiving

sun and rain for sustenance,

I took your words and tears

as my food.

But I so feared, mother

when you became gaunt and frail,

that you would leave me

orphaned in that mad country.

    You lived to see

the return of your missing children.

Though on the torture list

of the Khmer Rouge,

the Vietnamese saved you

as their bombardment

sent the Pol Pot army fleeing.

But again, one by one,

your children left:

one killed by Khmer Rouge

one a refugee in a Thailand camp

and three off to the United States.

One son was missing.

    In spite of hunger

you kept living,

chanting prayers,

calling upon your dead husband,

invoking your ancesters, your deity

to pour rain on the earth,

to stop the war and stop others

from disarranging your home,

rearranging your fate,

and deranging your children.

    Oh mother, I am grateful

for your sorrowful strength,

for your woman’s instinct

to preserve life,

and for the dignity of your womb.

When you left us

two daughters remained at your side,

and the grandchildren you knew

starved to death.

The ones you never met

wished for your presence.

    Now waiting is all I can do

to lay flowers on your grave,

to say goodbye,

to embrace you one last time,

to present myself to you

and show you how I am,

    your son.

[danalanglois-blog]

Distant Geography

Distant Geography looks at the work of Cambodian Diaspora artist Chath pierSath, bringing together his collages and writings, exploring language and his unique visual vocabulary as forms of storytelling, history-making and investigation of self.  Autobiographical, and often intimate, writings are found on the backs of collages layered with magazine and newspaper cutouts, paintings and drawings. In many of the writings, pierSath talks to his family, to Cambodia, to warmongers and their victims as if writing them a letter or a diary entry, which is part of the construction of a more complex image.  Like his collages, the words are written, re-written, painted over and layered with prose and imagery, creating works that exist at the intersection of literature and painting. 

The act of displaying such private forms of writing like letters and diaries, is a provocative gesture in a country where emotions are often hidden or carefully coded in daily interactions. pierSath’s process of collage and assembly has been described as performance, a reorganizing of chaos.  Like many collage artists before him, the meaning of the work is not in the individual marks but in the larger work that is created by the combination of the materials, the content and how they relate to each other.  It is an act of re-ordering and in this context one of assertion that the individual is valid and important.

Currently exhibited at JavaArts (Phnom Penh, Cambodia)

[danalanglois-blog]

Artworks by Chath pierSath from exhibition Distant Geography