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영어

This paper analyzes the place of Cambodian testimony as a new form of literary narrative in First They Killed My Father: A Cambodian Daughter Remembers written by Loung Ung, who faces oppression under the regime of Pol Pot, the leader of the killing fields in Cambodia in the mid 70s. The story is about an unfairly painful event that she suffered in an unjust society, but conveys through the use of testimonial narrative, a new kind of cultural and political literary counterattack, a “new form of anonymity” representing the class, group, or community that has shared the same experience. In other words, unlike novels or autobiographical literary forms that deal with an individual’s growth process or success story, testimonies are a public discourse that encourages global interest, ethical responsibility, and political action. Since the testimonial adopts an anti-literature discourse in the form of memoirs or autobiographies rather than a literary form like the novel, questions about authenticity and integrity dramatically increase. Ung’s text depicts the fierce fight of a girl who survived the suffering of oppression and violence in an unjust society full of forced migration, poverty, hard labor, human rights violations, and family loss over a 5-year period from April 1975 to February 1980. However, in 2001, a year after Ung’s text was published, the Cambodian-American Sody Lay reviewed her testimony as “too emotional and overly polarized about the experience of the killing field” and claimed that it consciously manipulated the story to make money. Bunkong Tuon, who analyzed Lay’s critique of Ung’s text and its inaccuracy of historical facts, emphasizes the difficulties between the need for truth obligations and the need for psychological healing when criticizing the testimony. Even though Ung’s text fails to deliver the factual truth as historical accuracy, readers should consider her emotional truth, which is experientially and emotionally meaningful to herself. Ung’s narrative from a child’s point of view reflects a psychological approach, which allows for fictive components depending on her relatives’ memories. Ung’s story is not written as a historical reference but as a memoir, a starting point for people to be inspired to want to know more about the killing fields representing genocide, injustice, violence, and human rights abuses. The narrative of Loung Ung, who personally experienced and witnessed the cruelty and heinousness of the Khmer Rouge regime and the suffering of Cambodians, will become a representative Cambodian testimonial narrative. It excels in the form, content, and function of testimony as a starting point for understanding the survivors of the Cambodian genocide.