“The dead pass by and brush past us, they greet us. Their silence does not weigh, it is like a seal, an expectation, an appointment that must be accepted” : even more, a meeting that Rithy Panhthe filmmaker of S21, the Khmer Rouge death machine (2003) and Christophe Bataille, writer, provoke since they return to S21, this high school in Phnom Penh transformed into a detention and torture center by the regime of Khmer Rouge (1975-1979). Why this return to the “headquarters of fear”? So that nothing is erased, to unravel the enigma of Evil, to write History by questioning an ideology.
“To walk here is to cross invisible matter (…) It’s as if the wounded flesh had ravaged everything, taken everything away. As if the suffering had soiled it, impregnated it even to the metal”writes Panh. And also: “Entering here is a bursting, an exhaustion of being. » The invisible matter he talks about is bodies “folded” who sign their presence, a whole invisible people who moan and call. The sensation is physical: as proof, Panh and Bataille soon feel “pulled backwards”. Thus they confess to us: “Everything is perfectly true when we face absolute darkness. » A world communicates with them, a buried world whose pain is “fossil” but powerful since it emerges in reality.
Our two authors will capture the sounds of the “killing cooperative”. They still track down the graffiti on the walls of the jails, collect the testimonies of survivors and those of the executioners. They search the 700,000 pages of false confessions extorted from the condemned to make their execution morally legitimate. Here is a revolution which sought to legitimize itself: mystery of lies! In Phnom Penh, between 1975 and 1979, words were assassins; today Panh and Bataille found those “who repairs”.
Ghost Quarter is a moving testimony, a formidable investigation into the heart of genocidal intent. Reader, you will come away from this book unscathed!
Ghost QuarterRithy Panh and Christophe Bataille, Grasset, 128 pages, 15 euros.
