A Nail the Evening Hangs on by Monica Sok (Copper Canyon Press)

“Who is this history written for,” Monica Sok asks when she reads about Cambodia. “Is it written for me?”  In her book of poems, A Nail the Evening Hangs On, Sok writes for and about her family, people who survived a time “when family was being destroyed.”

Sok chronicles the words of survivors without ever mentioning the names of the force that tore Cambodia apart. She tells of an afternoon in 1998  when she and her brother were sent outside to play as her parents sit in front of the television, watching “an old man die in his bed.” Only the title reveals that the dying man was Pol Pot.

Words her parents have told her are fired like bullets in her poetry. Sisters search for water but instead “find, full of air, a balloon...swollen in the river.” A man who survives through lies stays awake in the dark: “I thought I heard escape.” A woman watches her husband, “the last historian,” scratch words with a stick onto tree bark; “he burns a dangerous light.”

After the war, Khmer fishermen poison egrets to sell at Thai border markets, “knowing the pendulum of war could swing anytime...They were sure it wasn’t over.” The egrets let them  have food to ration, to save in case they needed to leave again.

In Pennsylvania, Sok’s grandmother weaves silk on her loom, “her hair falls, not as the rain does but as nails the evening hangs on.” Her silk received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. It’s shown on the cover of Sok’s book, saffron and deep turquoise, its texture palpable in the photograph, holding memories and promises, loss and sorrow, transformed into beauty.

Sok has spoken in an interview of “Cambodian experience contextualized to fit into an American gaze.” On her visits to Cambodia, her own gaze is divided by her family’s history and her American upbringing. Eating foie gras prepared by a French chef in Siem Reap, she’s watched by a local family having a meal in their shop, wondering if she, “sitting so fancy on a restaurant patio alone,” is Khmer. “In America I don’t get to do this rich people thing.” In Cambodia, Sok is unable to stomach it, vomiting it up  as she rushes to the toilet. In a Phnom Penh hotel with other university students from the U.S., she says, “The Americans hate me and I hate them, but they’re the only students with me, and maybe I’m American too.” It’s the time of the Water Festival and as people crowd onto a bridge to give their offerings to the river, there’s “a human stampede...347 reported dead, 755 injured.” On the following evening the American students go dancing at The Heart of Darkness, “they still don’t understand but I go with them anyway.”

Trauma, Sok reminds us, is passed down through DNA, “molecular scars in the genes.” But the “revolutionaries who wanted so-called Year Zero so bad” have been turned into mosquitoes, she’s told in Cambodia. “Don’t bend. Slap.”

“We can make our own  worlds as easily as we can laugh,” Sok has said in an interview. Her poetry reveals new worlds while remembering the old one, as her grandmother did when she turned her memories into radiant silk.~Janet Brown

Available from ThingsAsian Books