Over these last two decades, I’ve moved so many times between continents, repeatedly disassembling and recreating a home. The world has become so traversable, and I don’t think in terms of representing a group when I write. What I’m searching for is the human story, and the human experience of loss and love, suffering and triumph. If you remove the differences of geography, these are the things that remain.
At the same time, I’m very particular about the language of my narrative. When writing about Cambodian characters and landscape, I want the narrative language to mirror that experience. Though I write in English, I’m trying to capture the rhythm of my birth language. When Banyan came out, very few readers or reviewers understood this, because most are unfamiliar with the Khmer language, both its beauty and the way it was brutalized during the revolution. At that time, poetry was cause for execution. To simply speak with any hint of reflection beyond the rote recitation of slogans invited suspicion. So I’ve made a very conscious choice to invoke the rhythm and metaphor and richness of a language in an effort to rebuild a world that was swiftly destroyed.
What other authors or novels influenced this book?
I continue my habit of reading many different authors at once, and by inclination I’m drawn to novels whose characters are very complex. I can’t point to authors who directly influenced my writing of Music of the Ghosts. More important inspiration came from Cambodians I spoke to while researching and writing—street musicians and students, victims of land mines, archaeologists, former soldiers, demining experts, fishers living on the Tonle Sap Lake. Traces of their voices infuse the story.
You movingly and vividly describe the music of Cambodia, from pop songs to temple offerings. Are you a musical person? What was your relationship to music while writing this novel?
I love to sing. When I walk around the house alone, in moments between writing, I often sing. My voice is probably best suited for the music of smoat, the Cambodian sung poetry. But I’m not a performer. I guess I’m a musical person in the sense that I’m attuned to hear the musicality in almost everything, perhaps most clearly in the quality of a person’s voice when speaking.
The heroine of In the Shadow of the Banyan is only seven; when Music of the Ghosts begins, Teera is thirty-seven, and the Old Musician is nearly twice that. Why did you decide to write in the voices of older characters? What did writing in these voices allow you to express that you couldn’t in a younger character’s voice?
A child sees the world in a very direct way, absorbing events as they happen. Love a child, and that child will love you back. As the child protagonist of Banyan, Raami is like that. Her humanity expands or contracts in proportion to the humanity she is shown. When something scares her, she retreats into her own little world.
For adults, for Teera and the Old Musician, the decision to love or to forgive comes with much more reflection, a sense of risks and consequences. To explore the questions that animate Music, I needed a much larger canvas, with multiple perspectives, and the ability to move across continents and across decades in the periods before and after the revolution.
What has the response from the Cambodian immigrant community been to your writing?
The vast majority of Cambodians who resettled in the United States came not as immigrants by choice but as refugees of war, and most arrived illiterate even in our own language. Those who were educated and survived, and those who came before the war, have reached out to me and speak of Banyan as if it is also their family’s history, as if it also carries their own memories. I’ve had this response not only from those in the United States but also from the Cambodian diaspora in France, Australia, and elsewhere.
The response from younger Cambodian-Americans has been equally wonderful. I often meet those who tell me, “This is what I was never told, what my parents could never say to me.” As the result of their experience reading Banyan, I sense a newfound tenderness for the older generation. Many survivors face the difficulty of confronting past losses, and then in addition they often lack the language to express themselves to their children. Often the English they’ve managed to learn is not adequate to the task, and their children’s grasp of Khmer is similarly limited. How can you talk about such things? Even when you have the language, it’s hard enough.
The more surprising resonance, however, has come from young Cambodians living in Cambodia who read the novel in English. Their exposure to their own history is often cursory or highly politicized. Many have told me they so appreciate the humanity portrayed in Banyan amidst the tragedy. Seeing how humanity could survive even at such a time gives them hope in their own struggles today. I think Music of the Ghosts will speak even more directly to the potential to heal, to forgive, to triumph.
As your author’s note says, you wrote this book in order to “explore the questions of responsibility, atonement, forgiveness, and justice.” What message do you hope readers will take away from Music of the Ghosts?
Not all of us are refugees or survivors of atrocity. Yet, the experience of survivors—from Cambodia or from more recent tragedies in places such as Syria and Sudan—affects us all. How we respond to violence, individually and collectively, ultimately affects all of us.
Music of the Ghosts is about the survivors of one terrible regime. The questions it probes, however, are more universal: How do we account for the crimes we have committed knowingly, and for the suffering we contribute to perhaps without knowing? What does it take to atone? What is possible to forgive?
These are questions for society, but they are also questions for each of us as individuals. More than providing answers, I hope that my novel will spark conversations among readers that probe these questions fearlessly.
Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, Music is a love story. I hope it will speak to those who’ve been displaced and longed for home, to those who’ve suffered and dared to imagine a new beginning, to those who believe in the capacity of love to mend our wounds.
What can readers expect from your next novel?
In a world defined by walls and borders, what does it mean to be free—in the realm of law and conscience, in the realm of art and expression, in the realm of family? There’s little I can say yet about my next novel at this very early stage. But it begins with a question. What is freedom?
Turn the page for an excerpt of Vaddey Ratner’s debut novel In the Shadow of the Banyan