Only if you’re lucky, will you catch a glimpse of him. He swoops in and then disappears, now giving his blessing to newlyweds at a sunrise shaman wedding, next whispering in the ear of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s loyal allies. Moments later, he reappears on horseback, trotting by in a procession of horsemen in medieval garb — Hungarian flag in hand, his long black hair tied in a low ponytail, — to greet high profile guests from Turkey, Azerbaijan and Central Asia.

Andras Biro is the master of ceremonies for a biennial gathering, in Hungary, of 27 Turkic-speaking tribes called Kurultaj. It is where the right-wing government is promoting a policy of redefining itself as part of the Eastern world. Wrapped in a heavily embroidered silk robe, Biro is the leading ideologue of Hungary’s spin on ethno-nationalism: it asserts that the nation’s true roots are not in a Christian Europe but with Turkey and among the Turkic-speaking people of Central Asia, the descendants of the Huns.

Once banned under communism and pushed to the margins of the far right, this alternative history — known as Turanism — is being revived by the Hungarian government at the highest levels. Some of the central claims of Turanism have already made their way into Hungary’s national school curriculum, presenting an alternative Hungarian origin story. For Orban, Turanism has provided a convenient ideological basis for turning away from the EU and promoting closer ties with authoritarian regimes in Central Asia and with Turkey. In November, he said that “Hungarians are the only Eastern people left in Europe.”

The Kurultaj gathering is a mecca for this anti-establishment movement. The festival is financed by the government and designed for a family-friendly weekend. Kurultaj draws pilgrims from across the political spectrum to a scorching semi-desert in Hungary’s south. Right-wing historians, LARPers, horse-lovers, uniformed members of the banned Hungarian Guard, eco-activists, committed neo-Nazis, yogis and families from the suburbs mill around a vast, dusty field with hundreds of delegates from Central Asia, Turkey and the Caucasus.

The centerpiece is an irrigated, verdant pitch where skilled riders re-enact Byzantine battles and compete in ethnosport. An actor playing Attila the Hun makes regular dashes across the field on horseback to cheers from the crowd in between speeches from a range of special guests — among them youngest son of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, along with the former prime minister of Turkey, speaker of Hungary’s parliament Laszlo Kover and the president of the Organization of Turkic States. The sounds from the field are a constant echo across the festival grounds: heavy metal and Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No. 5, the boom of speakers’ voices intoning the moral corruption of the West and its “woke” culture and the ever-present percussion of horse hooves.

Largely dismissed by Hungary’s liberal elite, Turanism proponents — like Biro — have reinvigorated an ideology that was popular nearly 100 years ago. The idea first appeared in Hungary in the late 19th century, during a time of political collapse, when a circle of Budapest intellectuals began to question Hungary’s fixation with catching up with the West.

Historian Balazs Ablonczy traces the emergence of the word “Turan” in Hungarian to the 1800s, to describe the territory that is divided between modern-day Iran and Central Asian states. Turanism reemerged during the 2008 economic crisis from the margins of Hungary’s ultra-right wing. Over the last decade, Turanism has evolved into an amalgam of ideas bringing together disparate and at times contradictory beliefs. 

In their weaponization of nostalgia, Orban and his political party Fidesz have shown just how well they understand what is often lost on Hungary’s, and Europe’s, left wing: the power of a good story.

“The left wing has left history to Fidesz,” said Adam Kolozsi, a Budapest-based journalist who has been attending Kurultaj for years. Since the first gathering in 2008, event organizers — who refer to themselves as “tradition keepers” — have been fusing together right-wing politics with history, entertainment and horses. 

Turanic messaging expresses a yearning for a lost national greatness and a connection to a much larger role in the world, which a pan-Turkic identity offers. “Even if we’re small at the moment, we are a great nation,” one festival attendee, Mate Herzsenath, told me while drinking a beer. Herzsenath lives in Germany, where he says he can make more money, and was one of many Hungarians I met living outside of the country who returned home for Kurultaj.

“The entire 19th century was all about westernizing Hungary — inventing Hungarians as civilized, liberal, western, constitutional individuals,” said Gergely Romsics, a senior fellow at the Research Center for the Humanities at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Many proponents of Turanism view those efforts as criminally wrongheaded and consider the Hungarian defeat in World War I, which brought the loss of 75% of its territory, as proof.

Hungary is not alone in its turn east. Turanism is in step with a similar movement called Eurasianism in Russia, a pet project of Russian President Vladimir Putin, that argues that Russia is the heir apparent of the Mongol empire, destined to keep expanding its borders. In promoting kinship with the East and fostering a yearning for a greater past, both Putin and Orban stoke a popular mandate for embracing authoritarianism. The Huns, after all, didn’t conquer the world with democracy.

Since 2008, the crowds at Kurultaj have multiplied, and an entire academic and political apparatus has sprouted around the idea of a Turkic brotherhood.

Hungary’s pride

The day before marching out onto the main pitch at the festival in his knee-high leather boots and sparkling silver and turquoise jewelry, Biro spoke before Hungary’s parliament, in a suit, about the importance of preserving traditions. 

For the next three days in the sweltering mid-August heat, I chased the tails of Biro’s floor-length, blue-and-silver robes, hoping he could explain how he managed to bring 200,000 visitors (according to the official event count, though it appeared to be fewer than half this number to me) to a festival celebrating the genetic ties between white European Hungarians and Asian, Turkish and Middle Eastern nations. After all, this year’s Kurultaj festival followed remarks from Orban in which he asserted that Hungarians are not “a mixed race” and that countries where Europeans and non-Europeans mingle are “no longer nations.” It made no sense.

I caught sight of Biro as he prepared the seating arrangements in the VIP section along the main parade pitch. He adjusted the angle of chairs and name tags, giving out directions to an assistant. The biggest names this year were prominent speakers from Turkey and Central Asian countries. But many festival attendees seemed wary of the politicians. The men — all of the invited speakers were men — were easy to spot as they sweated through their crumpling business suits and moved through the festival grounds with entourages and security details.

Many attendees, on the other hand, wore colorful native clothing from various continents. One couple I met had borrowed their elaborate costumes from the local theater where they worked. “It’s difficult to live in modernity,” Balazs Lengyel told me. “It’s gray and empty.” He and his wife Erika Lengyelne attend Kurultaj every year to be reborn at the gathering. Balazs seemed lost in thought as he spoke to me of his longing for a link to a shared past. Erika was more direct: “We are opposed to the EU. We have nothing to do with the West. It’s all a lie made up during communism. Fifty years of communism took away our pride.”

Katrin Kremmler has studied Kurultaj since 2014. She is now finishing her PhD on the subject at the Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt University. Kremmler and I met up in Budapest where she had traveled from Berlin to attend the festival with a Hungarian friend. Before driving over to Kurultaj, she warned the friend to tear off a LGBTQ bumper sticker, worried about the car being vandalized while parked.

As a seasoned Kurultaj attendee, Kremmler had a few other pre-Kurultaj tips. I had asked her about fitting in at the festival, and she kindly sent over a couple addresses for Kurultaj lifestyle shopping in Budapest. 

In one shop in central Budapest I found head-to-toe traditional Hungarian costumes for sale, along with the legendary Hungarian sudar: a bull whip up to eight feet in length. The end of the whip makes a sonic boom as it reaches the speed of sound. Hungarians claim that it’s the first human-made tool to cross the sound barrier, and it’s a staple at Kurultaj for both the professional horse riders and drunk attendees taking a crack.

There were also more modern clothing options: black t-shirts with a Christian cross stenciled next to “HETERÓ,” shirts with the slogan “Europe Belongs to Me” and multiple apparel options showing maps of “greater Hungary.” Orban has been spotted in a scarf that shows a map of Hungary with its imperial territories intact, which includes parts of modern-day Ukraine, Romania, Austria, Serbia and other countries. At another Turanism shop, this time on the Buda side of the city, I looked through a collection of anti-Covid lockdown buttons next to more anti-LGBTQ slogans and adverts for a children’s summer camp.

“Everyone finds something that they like and tunes out what they don’t identify with,” said Kremmler, trying to explain the mish-mashing of ideologies brought together by Kurultaj and Turanism. Her PhD focuses on the contradictions within the right wing’s anti-Muslim rhetoric and its embrace of Eurasia. She noted that Bugac, the village where the festival takes place, is about an hour’s drive from Hungary’s southern border with Serbia, a major corridor for migrants from the Middle East attempting to enter the EU. Men dressed in the all-black uniforms of the Hungarian Guard, a paramilitary group outlawed in 2009, patrolled the festival grounds.

Kremmler believes that for years Hungary’s liberal elite failed to understand Turanism. Today, the festival is able to attract top researchers from the Hungarian National Museum and other academic institutions. This is also the first year she’s managed to convince any of her Budapest friends or colleagues to join her at Kurultaj.

“It’s parallel realities,” said Kremmler. “Urban liberal elites think they can ignore these developments because they consider it pseudoscience. But it’s not fringe. It’s the new mainstream because the government is working hard to make this the new popular mainstream.”

Some of the claims of the Turanism movement have now entered Hungary’s schools. Curriculum updates in 2020 included an intense focus on medieval history and introduced alternatives to Hungary’s accepted consensus on its national origins. Hungarians had learned that their language is most closely related to the languages spoken by the Finno-Ugric people found in Finland and Estonia and by indigenous tribes living in Russia. 

When this was first discovered by scholars in the 18th century, it came as a bit of a shock. Surrounded by German, Slavic and Romanian speakers, some people found it “degrading,” said Gabor Egry, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Political History in Budapest. It also encouraged a sense of ethnic uniqueness. 

The new school curriculum introduces the idea that the origin of the Hungarian language is up for debate and that Hungarians may in fact be closer relatives of the Turkic-speaking tribes originating in Kazakhstan. 

Archaeogenetics, a field of research championed by Biro, is supercharging the argument that Hungarians came from Central Asia. Archaeogenetics relies on gathering a set of historic DNA samples — sometimes centuries old — that the researchers evaluate as representative of an entire population. The research requires expensive equipment that the government has helped to fund, to look at DNA samples from the 9th and 10th centuries. The field often faces criticism on how the results are interpreted. 

“It fits this broader rewriting of history: a more nationalistic, more triumphalist narrative which must emphasize Hungarian victories and greatness,” Egry said. ”Emphasizing these Eastern origins could imply that Hungary belongs to this emerging world and not the declining one.”

The new history was played on repeat at Kurultaj.

“Everything they were teaching at school is not true,” said Malinda Kovacs, who described herself as a proud Hungarian, a mother and a homemaker, is captivated by Native American traditions and had a full-back tattoo showing the busts of several Native American men.

Hungary’s school curriculum changes also included replacing the works of writer Imre Kertsz — a Hungarian Jew who is the country’s only Nobel Prize winner in literature — with the assigned reading of Jozsef Nyiro, an admirer of Joseph Goebels, and Albert Wass, a convicted war criminal. Some teachers have protested online under the hashtag #noNAT, as part of a wider movement of ongoing teacher unrest in the country. 

Memory warfare

Kremmler, the Berlin academic, has studied 21st-century Turanism and its leader, Andras Biro, who has a PhD and is affiliated with the Hungarian Museum of Natural Sciences.

“When Biro started his whole genetics project I guess this could have been contested if someone from the genetics field, in Hungary or internationally, had actually taken the time or energy to review his research,” she told me over lunch in Budapest. Instead, critics of his work came almost exclusively from among scholars in the humanities who didn’t engage with the genetic research he was touting.

“This is about a new construct of ethnicity that the government is producing,” Kremmler said. 

Kremmler, whose mother is Hungarian, first came to Hungary in the 1990s to learn the language and join the academic community. She remembers it as an exciting time, a period of critical research burgeoning in the wake of communism. She’s now watching the pendulum swing the other way.

“It’s all really fascinating, unless it’s happening in your own country,” said Margit Feischmidt, laughing when we met at the Research Center for Social Sciences in Budapest, where she is the head of sociology and anthropology. I told her about some of my Kurultaj-themed shopping earlier that day. “It’s fascinating, and at the same time catastrophic,” said Feischmidt. Over three decades, she has watched an exodus of researchers from Hungary who leave out of an unwillingness to collaborate with the government.

When I finally caught up with Biro at Kurultaj, it was in the large yurt at the festival where the guest speakers convened for meetings. He has just finished a closed session with some of the guests from Turkey and Central Asia, among them President Erdogan’s youngest son.

“There has already been cooperation in the field of science or sport and now it’s on a political level,” Biro said, smiling with his white teeth flashing.

“From several thousands kilometers away, a Kazakh or an Uzbek comes over here and they do everything as we do, they understand everything: the common legends, the names, the ceremonies, the food,” Biro said. “Besides, legends don’t come from nowhere.”

The post In Hungary, it’s Central Asia to the rescue appeared first on Coda Story.

My parents moved from Bombay to Kuwait when I was six weeks old. We moved because the money was good, the living was easy, and it had none of the grime of India, the clamorous crowds in the cities we left behind. Their kids, my parents told themselves, would have better opportunities in the Gulf. Not that any of us had it all that hard in India. But India was not Kuwait.

Then, when I was 12, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi soldiers, hardened by a ruinous, nearly decade-long war with Iran, annexed Kuwait.

I slept through the invasion, waking to the sound of the news on my shortwave radio, which my father had commandeered. This radio — an industrial slate-gray Grundig Satellit 650, stolid, weighty and unglamorous, “just like German girls” as my Calcutta-born, Germany-educated father would say — was a major presence in my life. 

This radio, or rather the hours I spent with my ear soldered to it, listening to the BBC World Service, was at fault for what my mother called my “Britification.” My Anglophilia had long made me the object of family scorn. Hobson-Jobson, or Suited-Booted, my dad would call me when he was feeling affectionate, “ingrej” (meaning Englishman, albeit spat contemptuously from the side of his mouth) when less so. 

Football was where my devotion to all things English was most manifest. I lived then for Saturday evenings, coming home from school — the weekend in Kuwait was Thursday and Friday — to coax from the radio’s bleeps and crackles the poetry of the classified football results, the sounds of those long lists of British provincial centers and market towns.

For all the evocative power of England’s various Wanderers, Rovers and Rangers, it was the Scottish teams that were unmatched for euphony. Cowdenbeath, Stenhousemuir, Partick Thistle, Queen of the South and, most stirring of all to my seven-year-old ears, Heart of Midlothian. Only the Scottish league could have produced, though it never did, such a scoreline as East Fife 5 – Forfar 4. Read it out loud for yourself.

My experience of football was more vivid because it was untainted by television coverage. What mattered to me were the stories, the lore and the private pleasures of the imagination rather than the community solidarity of following one’s local football club.

“Listen,” my father said, retaining, in the midst of crisis, the paternal imperative to needle his son, “it’s your prime minister.” Margaret Thatcher was denouncing the Iraqi invasion as “absolutely unacceptable,” her peremptory tone typical of the more fearsome teachers in my British school. 

My father thought the whole thing would blow over. “Bush and Thatcher won’t allow it. Saddam will pull out within a week,” my parents told me and my sister, told their friends, told our relatives around the world, told each other. After all, the previous day’s Arab Times, the bigger of Kuwait’s two English-language dailies, had announced on its front page that the problem “between brothers” had been settled. And then the Iraqis cut the phone lines.

In 1990, globalization was an idea gaining currency in academic circles. As cosmopolitan pre-teens, defined not so much by where we came from as by what we read, watched, heard and thought, you could say my friends and I anticipated the zeitgeist. So in that tiny, undistinguished country in the Arabian Gulf, I drank the British fruit cordial Vimto and ate Hardee’s roast beef sandwiches. I spread Danish butter on my toast and only ate Granny Smith apples. I loved “The Real Genius,” starring Val Kilmer, and also loved the movies of Satyajit Ray that I watched with my parents. I supported Liverpool Football Club. I listened to New Order and The Smiths and Gang of Four and Orange Juice. On my bookshelves, Tintin and Asterix comics shared space with Archie digests and Amar Chitra Katha. 

Such scattershot particulars, such quirks of personality, I understood. “Indian,” “Bengali,” I did not. My migrant parents — though migration is surely the ultimate expression of the individual over the community, over the ties that bind — still sought succor in a collective identity, in their sense of themselves as part of a community.

When my father joked that Margaret Thatcher was my prime minister, he knew that Thatcher, the leader of a country to which I had no ties that any immigration officer would recognize, might as well have been my prime minister, just as George H.W. Bush might as well have been my president, or Sheikh Jaber al-Ahmad al-Jaber al-Sabah my emir, because I did not know what it meant to have such allegiances.

What he didn’t seem to know was that my Anglophilia was a result of moving to Kuwait, of flailing for identity in a country to which I could never belong. Identity, I knew from an early age, was nebulous, its edges as unruly as an ink stain.

India offered me my external identity, Britain my interior one and Kuwait was the metaphorical suburban bedroom in which I played out my fantasies. For our family, Kuwait wasn’t as final as emigration. It elicited no real grief, no loss. Even if it lasted years, decades, it was a temporary condition. Home was elsewhere.

Before the invasion, an exasperated teacher once accused me of daydreaming with the words: “You really do live in your own utopia.”

Looking the word up in the dictionary that night, I discovered that utopia meant “no place.” It occurred to me that I might be living in Utopia, in no place, nowhere that could be recognized as somewhere. Even at 10 years old, I viscerally felt the truth onto which my teacher had stumbled.

I knew I was “Indian,” a transplanted Bengali. I had an Indian passport. I ate regionally specific Indian food, like the fish curry Bengalis called “macher jhol” and, on weekends, “luchi and begun bhaja,” fried puffy flatbread and aubergine slices. My father was one of the founders of the Bengali Cultural Society, an outlet for Bengalis in Kuwait to put on plays, sing songs and make their children recite the nonsense verse of Sukumar Ray. It gave them a space to assert their identities and retain their connections to what Indians like to call their “native place.”

My parents had no difficulty filling the blank canvas that was Kuwait with the colors of the culture they left behind. What could be easier in Kuwait than pretending you had never left India? Your social life revolved not just around other Indians but mostly around Indians just like you, in terms not just of ethnicity, region, religion and language but class, education, even profession. Kuwait dented none of their cultural confidence. Their leisure time was filled with the Bengali language and Bengali food.

For me, though, Kuwait was quite literally no place. Children like me were not like the children of immigrants to the U.S., U.K., Australia and so on — children torn between cultures, negotiating a fraught terrain between the domestic experience and the world outside. We were instead bereft of culture. Bereft of cultural context.

My claim on India was almost as tenuous as my claim to Britain. And the unstated policy of the country in which I lived was to deliberately keep at arm’s length a population of expatriate workers that outnumbered citizens. With its broad boulevards and American fast-food restaurants with cheery signage, Kuwait looked and sometimes felt like an international airport.

The Iraqi invasion had little effect on my self-absorption. I felt no fear, no swell of sympathy for my few Kuwaiti friends, mostly teammates on the school football team, all of whom were still on their summer holidays in luxury hotels and yachts across Europe. I thrilled instead to the novelty of the invasion and the promise that the school term might not begin as scheduled. The early days of the occupation passed slowly. For news, we were reliant on the elusive shortwave signal for the BBC World Service. 

The only Kuwaiti we really talked to was Asrar Al-Qabandi, a young woman my mother knew who had been educated largely in the United States. Asrar was different from other Kuwaiti women. My mother had met and befriended her when she applied for a job at the playschool my mother ran. Asrar kept her hair short and usually wore baggy trousers. Her incorrigible habit of expressing her opinion made her unpopular with her family and a frequent visitor to our apartment.

Asrar used to complain to my mother about Kuwait, the country’s conservatism, the easy money that had made its people lazy and insipid, their lack of interest in education and their prejudices. She seemed to have few friends apart from my mother. Until the invasion, I had never heard her express any affection for Kuwait. I imagined Kuwait as a scab on her knee, irritating and unsightly but comforting to pick at.

Occasionally, the invasion would make its presence felt. We heard our parents talk anxiously about a close friend, a man with a pendulous belly and spry wit, who had been arrested in Iraq for carrying counterfeit dollars. Our parents panicked about their own dollars. These were bought at five times the usual rate and were the only currency Iraqis would accept in exchange for a plane ticket to Jordan, the only country that had kept its border with Iraq open.

Our encounters with the occupying soldiers were infrequent and sometimes farcical. As Indians, we were relatively safe in occupied Kuwait. We were of no interest to Iraqi soldiers, unlike Westerners who made valuable hostages and, for obvious reasons, Kuwaitis, small bands of whom, Asrar among them, were organizing and mounting a sporadic, flickering resistance. The stories told about Iraqi soldiers among Indians were mostly of buffoonery, tales tinged with condescension for soldiers stealing computer monitors they thought were TVs, for soldiers who were not Iraqi at all but bewildered Bangladeshi gardeners or Filipino drivers forced into the army as casualties in the eight-year war with Iran mounted. It was only after we left Kuwait that I read about the rapes and torture that happened during the occupation.

In the opening pages of “The Satanic Verses,” as Gibreel Farishta and Saladin Chamcha plunge towards “Proper London, capital of Vilayet,” Salman Rushdie puts the words of a famous song into Gibreel’s mouth:

O, my shoes are Japanese

These trousers English, if you please

On my head, red Russian hat

My heart’s Indian for all that

For an Indian living in India, the song is about pride, jauntily nationalistic lyrics written for a newly created nation. In contemporary India, the song is relevant and resonant as a simultaneous embrace and rejection of globalization — some things, your heart and soul, are forever local. For the immigrant Indian, the song is a defiant but futile resistance. For the Gulf-based Indian, the song is matter of fact, an accurate expression of the expat life. Of course, your heart is Indian, whatever the imported fripperies of your new, materially comfortable life. What other choice is there?

But for the Indian expat’s child, the child put into a British or American school to suit their parents’ aspirational, upwardly mobile sense of themselves, the song seemed foolish, sentimental.

How do you keep your heart free from the influence of your shoes, trousers and hat? What does it mean to have an Indian soul? For me, the idea of an authentic self was muddied, perplexing. If you come from somewhere, a particular place, and you live there all your life, an authentic self that grows organically from your sense of place is something you take for granted, so strong and defining a part of who you are that it’s hard to imagine what could diminish that land-based identity.

For us, those cosseted children of Utopia, of no place, what could fill the place-shaped hole in our identity? It’s not that the question of where you come from becomes hard to answer, it’s that it no longer has any meaning. This is distinct from the struggle of the immigrant’s child to negotiate between the place to which they now belong and their “place of origin” so inadequately represented by the short, rickety bridge of the hyphen — Vietnamese-American, say, or Afro-Caribbean British. Or from the immigrant’s division between the place remembered and the place in which you found yourself.

Part of my love for English football was for its unabashed tribalism. I remember being in my neighborhood bookshop and coming across a copy of E.P. Thompson’s canonical text “The Making of the English Working Class” and begging my bemused father to buy it. I was too young to make any sense of what I was reading but I was powerfully drawn to the idea that an entire class of people could be “made,” as if you could pull a community whole from a kiln, as if a shapeless, shifting mass of individuals could be given contours, shape and coherence.

We left Kuwait in the last week of September 1990.

My father and some of the other men staying with us had arranged for a bus and a driver to take us to the southern Iraqi city of Basra and then on to Baghdad. At dawn, we arrived in the Iraqi capital, where we stayed at a hotel for a week before we were able to board a flight to the Jordanian capital Amman.

Bengalis are, of course, India’s doughtiest tourists. For that week in Baghdad we reverted to type, eating fish and chips on the banks of the Tigris, riding the creaky rollercoaster at the empty but functioning amusement park and visiting the National Museum. Reality, the reality in which we were refugees fleeing from Kuwait, a country occupied by Iraq, the international pariah in which we were now vacationing, only occasionally intruded — in the form of empty supermarket shelves and a tour guide who begged us for our cartons of chocolate milk for her baby because the powdered variety was all that was available in Iraq.

In Amman, we slept at the airport for one night before we were able to board one of the many free flights Air India had organized to transport Indian refugees to Bombay and safety. Two months after Iraq invaded Kuwait, we were on a plane to India. I didn’t know then, still arguing with my friends about the relative merits of Liverpool and Manchester United, AC/DC and Iron Maiden, how lucky we were.

Smothered by relatives in Bombay, in my grandmother’s apartment bursting with books, art and furniture accrued over the course of entire lives of entire generations, I began to realize how ephemeral my life in Kuwait was, how thin my connection was to that place, or this place, or any place outside my own head. I was fascinated by Bombay, by its noxious drains, its rusting red double-decker buses, its panoply of streets. But I knew I didn’t belong in the city like my mother did.

Being a perpetual migrant might have been new in 1990. Today it is unremarkable. By 2020, some 280 million people around the world were estimated to be international migrants.

In “Identity and Violence,” the Nobel-winning economist Amartya Sen makes a forceful argument for the essential heterogeneity of identity, the value of each of the many parts that constitute the whole:

“The same person can be, without any contradiction, an American citizen, of Caribbean origin, with African ancestry, a Christian, a liberal, a woman, a vegetarian, a long-distance runner, a historian, a schoolteacher, a novelist, a feminist, a heterosexual, a believer in gay and lesbian rights, a theatre lover, an environmental activist, a tennis fan, a jazz musician, and someone who is deeply committed to the view that there are intelligent beings in outer space with whom it is extremely urgent to talk (preferably in English).”

Wonderful as this passage is, my response is an impatient “yes, but…” The global response to such blithe cosmopolitanism has been the parochialism espoused by the likes of Narendra Modi, Donald Trump and recently elected right-wing governments in countries like Italy and Sweden. Months after Britain voted in 2016 to leave the European Union, then-Prime Minister Theresa May told a Conservative Party conference that if “you believe you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.”

I know what she means. I am a middle-aged Indian man. I have an Indian wife and two Indian children. We live in India. My wife and I are both Bengali and, though neither of us is even slightly religious, our surnames place us safely among the Hindu upper castes that control India.

Protected by these markers of “Indianness,” my place in Indian society is unquestioned, even as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi does the bidding of his ideological masters and remakes India from a pluralistic, secular nation into an increasingly belligerent, nostalgia-fueled Hindu nation. This state that makes life so difficult for the poor, the disenfranchised, the lower caste and the Muslim looks upon us with benevolence and avuncular affection.

It’s discomfiting to have spent so much time feeling out of place, only to find that it is the external, most superficial markers of my identity that both define and legitimize me in Modi’s new India.

All I have to do is keep my mouth shut, lest I give myself away.

Ensconced in India, ostensibly an unimpeachable citizen of somewhere, I remain indelibly marked by my years in “no place.” I have spent most of my life in cities to which I have no claim other than temporary residence. My perspective has been that of the perpetual, if privileged, outsider. It’s a common enough modern condition but, as former Prime Minister May argued, still suspect.

In a speech in 1993 — ironically in defense of greater integration with Europe — another former British prime minister, John Major, offered a lyrical, classically rural vision of “timeless” Britain. “Fifty years from now,” he said, “Britain will still be the country of long shadows on county grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers… Britain will survive unamendable in all essentials.”

Similarly, the real India, we are always told, is to be found in its villages. Indeed, only 35% of Indians live in cities. And in many of those cities we retain a parochial suspicion and fear of outsiders, of behavior that we consider strange and do not recognize as our own. Just a few years ago, for the first time in its long history, China became a predominantly urban society, with over 50% of its people living in cities. The 2009 documentary, “Last Train Home,” showed the toll of urbanization on one poor Chinese couple who work in a factory, cut off from their village, their growing daughter, their values and everything they’ve ever known or taken for granted. The annual trip home only emphasizes their alienation.

Yet their daughter, despite her parents’ unhappiness, abandons her own education to seek work in the city, drawn by that same desire for independence, for freedom from the social bonds of village life. India is headed in this direction.

Global cities remain vast agglomerations of outsiders. It is partly why these monstrous conurbations are so reviled. Back in 1987, Hanif Kureishi offered a stirring defense of London in “Sammy and Rosie Get Laid,” the movie he wrote, directed by Stephen Frears. Sammy’s father, a compromised Pakistani politician, points out that London is a “cesspit.” 

What can Sammy possibly like about this city? London is beset by race riots, poverty, violence and crime. “Well,” Sammy tells his father, “on Saturdays, we like to walk on the Towpath and kiss and argue.” It’s the beginning of a short disquisition on metropolitan pleasures. “Neither of us is English,” he says of himself and Rosie, “we’re Londoners, you see.”

Community feeling can emerge even within collections of outsiders. Kureishi’s London in the 1980s — resistant to authority, carnivalesque, an ad hoc and mutable community of outsiders — is distinct from the country around it. Major’s Britain is inimical to Kureishi’s London: one “unamendable” where the other is protean, one a sun-dappled, bucolic idyll where the other is unrestrainedly rough and urban, one faithful to what has been before where the other craves the new, the mixed, the composite culture of a city marked by migratory flows.

Shortly before the Allies began Operation Desert Storm on January 17, 1991, I began my first semester at a boarding school in the Palani Hills in Kerala. In the library at my new school, I discovered in an issue of TIME magazine that my mother’s old friend Asrar had been arrested by the Iraqis. She had been shot, I read in one account, seven times in each breast and seven times in the vagina. In another, I read she had been shot four times in the head, once between the eyes, and that the right side of her face had been cut open with an ax. The accounts of the work she did for the Kuwaiti resistance — running guns and money from Saudi Arabia, destroying Iraqi communications systems, disguising herself as a cleaner to smuggle out vital records and documents from ministries now guarded by dozens of occupying soldiers — are impossible to reconcile with the small, bespectacled woman I remember. But even back then her size belied her spirit.

Asrar was hailed in death by her family as she had never been in life, hailed as a martyr for the cause of a country she had little regard for until it was taken away. I thought of Asrar in 2019, when young people in Delhi began protesting the Modi government’s exclusive, narrow, parochial view of Indian citizenship as expressed in the Citizenship Amendment Act. Before the pandemic forced them off the streets, the protestors, many of whom would have been unaffected by amendments aimed at Muslims and minorities, were fighting for an idea of India. An India forged in the constitutional ideals of plurality and democracy. They were saying, “We are not a Hindu nation.” We will not be refashioned into a theocratic state built on principles of exclusion and prejudice. Perhaps, like Asrar, these young people were motivated to fight for an India they saw was being taken away from them, to fight for the secular ideals with which they had grown up, whatever the failings of the state to live up to those ideals. 

In Modi’s new India, words such as “secular” and “plural” were to be jettisoned as the follies of governments past. But the protests did not reflect the smug cosmopolitanism of an elite diaspora or a cosmopolitanism that offered no challenge to the prevailing order. Instead, it struck me as a revivifying commitment to community as a cobbled-together, living thing that expands rather than contracts.

It showed me a path forward, out of a complacent, calcified nostalgia for my utopian “no place.” What I thought I missed growing up in Kuwait was community. In my hermetically sealed room, in my imagination unsoured, uninflected by experience, I tried to understand what it was to be a part of something larger than yourself, to belong somewhere and to claim it as your own. 

The wrongheaded answer I came up with was to fetishize the local, to fetishize community as a club from which I was excluded when — to borrow from Woody Allen borrowing from Groucho Marx — I would never want to belong to a club that would have someone like me for a member.

What I didn’t know was that communities cannot be so easily confined, so neatly shaped. That outsiders, too, can form communities. That outsiders, too, can find their place.

The post When globalization was king and home was elsewhere appeared first on Coda Story.

Part 1: Losing home

Madigan Traversi, 17, gives the property tour in Northern California’s wine country like a seasoned real estate agent. We’re standing on top of a hill in Santa Rosa, overlooking a sweep of golden ridges and green oaks. The two-story home is surrounded by redwoods, fruit trees and a carefully maintained vegetable garden. Traversi, in oversized sunglasses and brown leather boots, leads me to an outdoor pool with a panoramic view of the hills, and then to one of her favorite spots on the plot of land, a majestic old oak tree. As a little girl, she used to spend whole afternoons beneath its branches. They were so large she could duck under them and play make-believe for hours, lost in her own world. “I just turned it into this little haven,” she told me. “When I was there, it was my happy place.”

Traversi and I are standing in front of where the tree once stood, staring at the open air. Nothing we are looking at is actually there, not now anyway. The massive oak tree, the garden, the living room with the big glass windows — it was all lost in October 2017, when the Tubbs Fire devoured 36,807 acres of Sonoma and Napa counties, destroying thousands of homes and businesses and killing 22 people. It was the second-most destructive wildfire in the state’s history, and for many people living here, the marker of a new chapter in California’s story: an era bound by flames.

Traversi’s home was among those lost in the blaze, burning down in less than 30 minutes after she evacuated with her mom on the evening of Sunday, October 8. Traversi, who was 12 years old at the time, was still awake when the landline rang just before midnight. A recorded message explained that three homes were on fire eight miles away and urged them to leave. Traversi and her mom evacuated shortly after, taking their dog, Traversi’s school backpack and the bare necessities. They waited it out in a nearby hotel, assuming they would be able to go back home the next day. But the blaze grew bigger, Traversi’s school closed, and they relocated with some friends to a place just outside San Francisco. A few days later, they learned that their home burned down shortly after they fled. Gone was Traversi’s bedroom and the photos, art projects, journals and family heirlooms that anchored so many of her childhood memories.

Even the cherished oak tree did not survive. All of it was gone, engulfed in a roar of flames propelled by 50 miles per hour winds.

Five years later, Traversi walks around the property and can picture everything just as it was, straddling a split screen between the present and the past. Through her eyes, the open air in front of us flashes into a kitchen, a bedroom, a living room with a wall of glass windows. 

She can still see it all, vividly, in color and texture. A home that no longer exists.

The road leading up to the house was transformed, too. The street is now lined with rebuilt  homes. Traversi pointed out the changes as she drove me to the property on a scorching late summer afternoon. “The houses look so different than they did before,” she observed, as we passed an immaculate two-story home with gleaming windows. “You can see how new everything looks.”

Outside our windows, the sky is a bright blue and the vegetation is achingly dry — so parched that it’s hard not to think about when the next spark might ignite. This is what it’s like to live in California in 2022, a golden state blazing red. Fire is omnipresent, and the last seven years have accounted for 15 of the 20 most destructive wildfires in the state’s history. They have left their imprint on the land and our minds. 

A building that burns can be rebuilt. But if fire incinerates a state of mind, can that be put back together? After neighbors move, new homes rise from the ones that burned, and the landscape is marked by the fingerprints of flames – the time before can feel like a past life. It’s the kind of rupture that transcends space and time, shaping our memories, our goals for the future and even our understanding of where we belong. Part of living here now means grappling with apocalyptic scenes and with whether this version of California can still be called home. 

But this is not just a California story. These emotions will spread as the climate crisis intensifies, as biblical floods, hurricanes, heatwaves and drought displace communities from Puerto Rico to Pakistan. 

We are just beginning to contend with these phenomena and how they are shaping our collective well-being. “These losses are enormous,” said Robin Cooper, a San Francisco psychotherapist and the co-founder of the Climate Psychiatry Alliance, a group of psychotherapists focused on the mental health impacts of climate change. It’s “really important to know that climate distress is not a pathology.”

Cooper’s organization is part of a broader movement of people — activists, artists, psychologists, young people and residents — centering emotions in conversations about climate change. Experts are developing resources, therapeutic treatments and even new language to help people process the psychological impact of climate change. ​​Universities in California and Washington are offering courses for students about navigating the emotional landscape of climate change, including anxiety, hope and grief. The Climate Psychiatry Alliance offers resources and training about the psychological effects of climate change and curates a list of climate-aware therapists. There are also online forums where strangers from all over the world can gather and discuss the emotional toll of climate change and natural disasters, and dozens of virtual and in-person groups across the U.S. focus on processing the grief of the climate crisis.

The Finnish academic Panu Pihkala, whose research focuses on the emotions surrounding climate change, has created a detailed database of peoples’ responses to the climate crisis in what he calls a “taxonomy of climate emotions.” In Finnish, Pihkala has also developed a detailed vocabulary of climate emotions as specific as “winter grief,” mourning the loss of traditional winters, or “snow anxiety,” related to uncertainty about whether it will snow.

lumiahdistus: snow anxiety

talvisuru: winter grief

talvi-ilo: winter joy

lumihelpotus: snow relief

longing for snow: lumikaipaus / lumikaipuu

The Australian environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht came up with a word in 2003 to describe a concept he believed language hadn’t yet captured: the psychological distress caused by environmental changes. Albrecht’s term, solastalgia, drew on the meanings of solace, desolation and nostalgia, but deviated from the latter in one crucial way. Rather than describing the melancholia experienced by people away from their home and yearning for it — nostalgia — it referred to the pain felt by those who stayed put.

Solastalgia, Albrecht wrote, “is not about looking back to some golden past, nor is it about seeking another place as ‘home.’ It is the ‘lived experience’ of the loss of the present as manifest in a feeling of dislocation; of being undermined by forces that destroy the potential for solace to be derived from the present. In short, solastalgia is a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home.”

Solastalgia: Solastalgia has its origins in the concepts of nostalgia, solace and desolation. Nostalgia, from the Greek nostos — return to home or native land — and the New Latin suffix algia – pain or sickness, and solace from the Latin verb solari with meanings connected to the alleviation or relief of distress or to the provision of comfort or consolation in the face of distressing events.

I relate to this, intimately.

When I read about solastalgia for the first time, I felt unburdened, that particular flavor of psychological relief that comes from having someone else articulate a previously felt, but unidentified, emotional state. Yes, that’s precisely how I felt about living here: solastalgia. Finally, I felt like I had found a single word that embodied my complicated and often sad relationship with California, a place I couldn’t imagine leaving but also cannot bear watching burn year after year.

My journey through solastalgia would probably start in the fall of 2018, when I moved back to California after spending the better part of the decade living unhappily on the East Coast, where everything felt muted, cold and bland. I never felt like I fit in there: I hated the frigid air and prep school energy. Before going to college in Maryland, I went to a big, raucous public high school in downtown Berkeley. The student body numbered in the thousands, and it was diverse and eclectic, including everyone from the children of ‘70s radicals who staged Iraq war protests at lunch to kids immersed in the Bay Area hip-hop scene of the mid-2000s. My most vivid memory of those years is laughing.

In the spring of 2018, I decided to move back to California permanently. For weeks after I moved back, I wandered around with my cell phone camera propped open like a tourist, giddily snapping photos of the Pacific, the deep green forests and the lavish gardens blooming with succulents and fruit. I had arrived.

But shortly after I moved back, the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in the state’s history, the Camp Fire, tore through Northern California’s Butte County, killing 85 people, torching the town of Paradise and choking the air with smoke. A friend in D.C. texted me a link to an article with the headline: “Is California becoming uninhabitable?” “I think they’re trolling you,” she joked. It didn’t help when I later drove past a bar throbbing with music, and two men wearing hazmat masks to protect themselves from wildfire smoke were in line. It all felt like a slow-motion existential crisis. Staring out my window at the scene in front of me, I had a dawning feeling that my home was changing — quickly, in front of my face — and may never be the same.

The fires have not abated. As I sat down to write this article, there were multiple fires burning at both ends of the state, including one in the Sierra Nevada foothills that, as of publication, burned more than 76,000 acres. Fueled by climate change, the traditional fire season is stretching further beyond its traditional lifespan of spring to fall.

Those who choose to stay must learn to inhabit this unsettling liminal space between our imagined apocalypse and the reality of hazmat masks and smoke-filled skies. To recognize that home can vanish even as we never leave.

After the fire, Traversi’s family decided not to rebuild their home on the hill. 

They moved to a new place about 10 minutes away. Eventually, the chaos unleashed by the fire receded, and life resumed. Traversi went back to school, played piano, hung out with her friends. Traversi didn’t seem too outwardly sad about the aftermath of the fire, and her mother worried about how — or if — she was processing it at all. She went to a therapist. But Traversi was 12 and wasn’t ready to unpack all of that trauma. 

Over time, though, the weight of Tubbs began to sink in. As a teenager, Traversi dealt with anxiety and depression, and as she started peeling back the layers of those struggles, she began to recognize the ongoing toll the fire had taken on her mental health.

Traversi was not alone in struggling with the painful aftershocks of Tubbs: a recent survey conducted by the Sonoma County Office of Education found that nearly 3,000 students in the county, and 400 school employees, are still showing “increased anxiety, stress, depression, behavioral problems, or decreased academic performance as a result of the 2017 wildfire.” One of the educators surveyed pointed to an increase in suicidal threats or attempts in the wake of the fire. “Teachers reported kindergarten children crying and running inside after seeing the smoke while on the playground.” Years after the fire, the county superintendent of education concluded, schools are still dealing with students and staff who have been traumatized.

For Traversi, the grief became acute. Processing the loss felt “very similar to how I felt when I’ve lost family members or close friends,” she told me. The home, the property and everything inside the house had been anchors of stability throughout her childhood. As she began grappling with the toll these losses had taken on her, she got her driver’s license and found solace in going back to the old property. Up on the hill at the site of the blaze, taking in all that had been destroyed and all that was still standing, Traversi’s sadness finally had space to breathe. “I found it really healing to go back and sit there and just ignore everything around me,” she said. “It was the first time that I was really able to objectively think, ‘wow, I went through something huge and I lost a really big part of me.’”

Living through Tubbs also helped lay the groundwork for Traversi’s path to climate activism. In high school, she joined a local climate action campaign run by students and educators. Like returning to the property, becoming involved in the effort helped her process the trauma of losing her home. As part of the campaign, she and another local youth climate activist worked with their congressman to help co-author a resolution introduced in the House last spring, which calls on lawmakers to incorporate mental health into disaster preparation and provide funding to schools for youth mental health support after climate-related disasters.

While working on the resolution, Traversi came across a piece of research that blew her away: a survey of 10,000 people aged 16-25 across ten countries about the mental health impacts of climate change. Nearly half of the youth surveyed said their feelings about climate change negatively affected their daily lives and functioning, and 75% described the future as “frightening.” More than half of the 10,000 youth surveyed — 5,566 — agreed with the prompt “humanity is doomed.”

For Traversi, the findings were revelatory. “It was the discovery that kids aren’t stressed because they have this irrational fear that they need to work through with a therapist. They’re stressed because there’s a genuine threat to their futures,” she said.

Part two

The grievers

Over the last several years, as wildfires throughout California have threatened some of the state’s most cherished places, from its splendid redwood forests to its picturesque coastlines, they have unleashed an outpouring of collective anxiety and sadness. It’s the grief of lives lost and iconic landscapes altered and the awareness that the state will become even more unrecognizable.

As this grief becomes ubiquitous, so too are the grievers. They are part of a nascent movement of climate mourners, people who see grief as a central — and overlooked — human response to the climate crisis. They are meeting up in person and online over the climate’s great unraveling, absorbing darkness so that they ultimately may come blinking into the light.

An assured mother of three living in Northern California, Kristan Klingelhofer joined the mourners nearly three years ago. It was the beginning of the pandemic and she was searching for resources that might help her manage her emotions over parenting and climate change. Her children began asking her about mass species extinctions and reading United Nations reports about global warming when they were in elementary school, nearly a decade ago. Klingelhofer was torn on how to appropriately respond. “Do you shelter them?” she asked. “Empower them?” One day, she opened her computer to see if she could find anything that might help and stumbled across The Good Grief Network, a 10-step, peer support program to help people process their climate grief. The program, which was inspired by Adult Children of Alcoholics’ 10-step approach, runs a weekly support group designed for people grappling with climate distress. The organization doesn’t heavily market or advertise its groups on social media, “so if you found this, it’s because you needed it,” executive director Sarah Jornsay-Silverberg told me.

Step 1: Accept the severity of the predicament

Step 2: Be with uncertainty

Step 3: Honor my mortality and the mortality of all

Step 4: Do inner work

Step 5: Develop awareness of biases and perception

Step 6: Practice gratitude, witness beauty and create connections

Step 7: Take breaks and rest

Step 8: Grieve the harm I have caused

Step 9: Show up

Step 10: Reinvest in meaningful efforts

The first class focused on the program’s first step: “Accept the severity of the predicament.” Klingelhofer and her husband emerged from the meeting in tears. “It was like we took our masks off,” she explained. Ten weeks later, they finished the course, and Klingelhofer signed up to be a Good Grief facilitator.

“People come in feeling so isolated, and with such a bottled-up bunch of emotions,” Klingelhofer said. “Whether it’s outrage or panic or numbness or depression or fear,” she said. “There’s always grief at the bottom of it. And it just comes out.”

In 2021, The Lancet, a medical journal, published an investigation into young peoples’ attitudes towards climate change. As part of the landmark study, researchers surveyed thousands of young people globally and uncovered a persistent future-facing dread. From Nigeria to France, respondents expressed sadness, anger and despair. Two-thirds of youth in the 10 countries surveyed reported feeling afraid. More than half said they believe the things they value most will be destroyed, and nearly 60% felt their governments had betrayed them because of how they were responding to climate change.

The study’s authors posited that governments’ failure to address climate change may be contributing to “moral injury,” which they describe as “the distressing psychological aftermath experienced when one perpetrates or witnesses actions that violate moral or core beliefs.” This often manifests in feelings of not just betrayal but abandonment.

The findings underscore what may be a generational gap in expressions of climate grief. For many young people, the heartache of climate change is slanted toward the years ahead. As they contemplate carving out a life amid a series of cascading environmental crises, they wonder: Where will I be able to live? Work? Find community? And in the absence of any certainty, how can I plan ahead? One Washington-based student I talked to, who just graduated college, told me the threat of wildfires in California had thwarted her plans to apply to graduate school there — a decision her parents couldn’t comprehend and found “ridiculous.” She described the process of climate mourning for her generation as “grieving the potential futures we could have had.”

That includes a future with kids. Nearly 40% of the youth surveyed worldwide in The Lancet’s study said that concerns about climate change have made them hesitant to have children. Traversi, whose home burned in the Tubbs Fire, said the subject comes up regularly in her peer group. “Everyone is looking at what they’re going to do after high school. There’s such a huge conversation about, like, ‘I really wanted to have kids, but now I think I don’t want to because of climate change,’” she said.

This is a different flavor of mourning than the nostalgic sadness that has punctuated my relationship with California. Solastalgia is rooted in the past and present, the feeling that your home environment is moving away from you and your relationship with that place has changed because it’s no longer what it was. The younger people I talked to, however, are grieving something different: children they may never get to meet, glaciers melted, species lost, life plans derailed. This is grieving for a future that may never come to be, as opposed to a past that was.

“I think we see that future orientation much more with young people,” Jennifer Atkinson, an associate professor of environmental humanities at the University of Washington, said. “So many of them really are mourning the loss of the future, the children they will never have or the security from their parents’ generation that won’t be available to them.”

Atkinson has been a professor at the University of Washington for more than a decade, but about five years ago, she told me, she began to notice a plunge in student morale. People were coming into class telling Atkinson they couldn’t sleep or focus because they were consumed with thoughts of climate breakdown. The future looked too dark. Atkinson observed that her students’ sense of despair was interfering with their ability to learn: they were feeling powerless and despondent, unable to process the material she was trying to teach. So Atkinson decided to create a seminar dedicated to helping students navigate the emotional landscape of climate change. The idea was partially inspired by Good Grief’s 10-step program.

In Atkinson’s class, students study the academic literature on climate emotions while also delving into their personal responses to ecological loss. Her seminar was the first time that 22-year-old Joe Lollo, who took the course last spring, began to explore and later articulate his climate-related feelings and anxieties. That included his sorrow and dread when he visited Mount Rainier, an active volcano looming above Washington’s Cascades, and saw that one of the glaciers draping the mountain was melting, part of a trend that has seen glaciers across the state shrink dramatically as the world warms. Lollo had learned about glacier loss in his high school environmental science class, but coming face-to-face with Mount Rainier’s receding ice mass was the first time he had seen anything like it firsthand. As Lollo absorbed the changes, he began to cry. “I remember this being overwhelming for me, but I kept it inside,” he told me. “I had a lot of emotions that I didn’t know how to express.”

Much of Atkinson’s work in class is focused on making grief acceptable to students. She encourages them to think of grief not as a pathological feeling to run from or bury, but as an emotionally healthy response to climate change. “If we got rid of these feelings, we’d lose so much of the motivation to stay in this fight,” she explained. “The core of all of it is to emphasize that grief is an expression of love.”

Part three

The end of magical thinking

There is another character in this story, hovering over the page as I write. Frustratingly, I cannot interview her. Outside of my dreams, I cannot talk to her. She is gone. And mourning her death taught me how to recognize grief wherever it lurks, including the edges of flames.

When you lose someone prematurely, there is always a before and an after: a moment when life as you understood it disappears abruptly and you are tasked with creating a new one out of the absence that remains. Mine came in May 2018, just before midnight, with a call from my sister. “You need to sit down,” her voice taut on the other line. The next sentence came so quickly that I didn’t have time to process the instruction, or why her voice was cracking. A handful of words that changed it all. Your best friend, she told me, had ended her life.

I bolted up from my bed: What? Through the receiver I could hear my sister crying, my mom sobbing and my dad calmly telling me to buy a flight back to California because her funeral would be in a few days. I was in too much of a state of shock to cry, so I sat at the edge of my bed repeating the same question in disbelief: What? What? What? “But she just emailed me!” I wailed. Indeed, she had sent me a routine email the day before she died — “just saying hi” — and in my rush to meet a deadline I hadn’t responded. I fell forward, my palms smacked onto the ground, and I screamed. I don’t remember anything after that.

Four days later, I was in California, eulogizing my best friend at her funeral, in front of hundreds of people. Everybody was in black, weeping, in shock. I was inconsolable. My right hand wouldn’t stop trembling. Even though I was surrounded by friends, family and community, I had the sensation that the only person who could understand what I was feeling was the person we were all there mourning. I wanted to gossip with her about the people who unexpectedly showed up at her funeral and talk to her about how profoundly alone I felt without her. More than anyone else in my life, I knew she would see what I was feeling in its fullest, truest form. Nothing prepared me for the heartbreak of realizing that could never happen again and the anguishing mental exercise of training myself away from reflexively texting or calling her first when something happened to me.

I’ve never recovered from that call, and I know that I never will. If my phone rings after 11 p.m. my stomach drops and my palms sweat, bracing for the impending news that someone I love has died. She was my oldest friend, the closest person to me outside of my family and partner. We met when I was two years old. She was like an exaggerated version of myself. My hair was big, hers was enormous. I was a silly dog-obsessed kid, but she was way quirkier. She collected handmade tiny mouse figurines dressed up as British royalty from a specialty store 30 minutes away. I was extroverted, but she took it to a whole other level. She would talk to anyone, anywhere, and inevitably find a way to relate. She was also the funniest person I’ve ever known — so charismatic that friends I introduced to her once would ask me about her for years after they met. After she died, laughter was in short supply for a long time. I felt so out of sorts I wondered if my sense of humor had permanently vanished.

The year before she died, she visited me in North Carolina. One weekend, I took her to the local farmer’s market. She decided to wear a graphic t-shirt with a uterus above the expression “Don’t tread on me.” I wandered around the stands for a few minutes and found her deep in conversation with an elderly pig farmer in overalls working at a stand selling meat, talking about the complexities of adult female friendships. He gave her earnest advice about how to handle a conflict with a friend. I was amused, but not surprised. It was so completely her, charming her way into the hearts of the pig farmers of the world in a uterus shirt.

While this recollection makes me smile, it also makes me confused. Lots of my memories with her are that way. I think back to different moments of our friendship, like the afternoon at the farmer’s market, and I wonder if she was unhappy and I had missed it. I wonder how, or if, her missed unhappiness should change how I remember our past. This confusion makes many of my memories with her strangely inaccessible, like childhood photos engulfed in flames.

This is the part of the story I’ve been avoiding writing. Reliving the call is agonizing; the funeral, gutting; the death, nearly impossible to talk about. My ability to mourn was blocked by the way she died. I didn’t see it coming and couldn’t understand it, poring over the last text she sent me (a close-up of a pug’s face with no context), searching for clues about what I missed, what I could have caught and prevented if only I had seen it first. 

In “The Year of Magical Thinking,” Joan Didion’s classic book about grieving, she writes about her obsession with her husband’s shoes after he passed away. She was unable to get rid of them, because, Didion reasoned, he might need them in case he came home. Although she knew perfectly well that her husband was gone, she clung to the illusion that he might still stroll through the front door as a psychological salve for her grief. The behavior became an example of what she describes in the book as magical thinking: “thinking as small children think,” she writes, “as if my thoughts or wishes had the power to reverse the narrative, change the outcome.”

I am very familiar with this chaotic line of reasoning.

My best friend died a few months before my birthday, and a few months after her own. We were planning to celebrate both when I moved back to California permanently, in the fall of 2018. Two months before I was scheduled to drive across the country, she passed away. I couldn’t hit pause on my decision to move home: I had already quit my job and given up my lease, and my partner had enrolled in graduate school in California. I was moving home — back to the place I had grown up with my best friend, where she was living when she died — whether I was ready or not.

My return to our hometown plunged me into a grief deeper than what I had felt when I was living on the other side of the country. To make myself feel better, I came up with an illogical psychological salve. My friend had a habit of sending me eclectic handmade cards on my birthday, and so I convinced myself that a birthday letter would arrive from her posthumously, explaining everything with her characteristic humor and observations. Although this imagined letter would not bring her back, it would at least give me a semblance of closure about why she took her life and leave me with words to revisit when I missed her. I would finally have answers to the questions that kept me up at night.

Of course, a note like this would never arrive. But I felt confident that it would appear in my mailbox before my birthday, this letter-turned-death-Rosetta Stone, giving me a coherent narrative to understand her death. When my birthday came and went without a letter, it marked the end of my magical thinking and the beginning of my painful descent into reality. I recognized that I had to accept that she was gone, and that I would never get the answers I wanted. Sometimes things just don’t make sense. My future wouldn’t include her in the ways I had always imagined, and my childhood memories would now always be imprinted with her loss.

Death, like fire, had upended my past, present and future, as well as my relationship with home — a place that no longer included her. In order to exist in the world as it was, the one that I reluctantly saw in front of me, I finally needed to grieve.

In retrospect, when I moved back to California, I was actually mourning two things at once: the loss of my friend and the loss of my sense of home. It took me years to identify the latter because the former was so all-consuming.

But after I acknowledged my solastalgia and began working on this story, I started to recognize the familiar shape of my California fire heartache. The homesickness, the urge to stay rooted in the California of my past, the despair lurking beneath my nostalgia — that all began to feel like my entry point into mourning. I started to see solastalgia as the first stage of my climate grief.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, in the book “On Death and Dying,” laid out the process of grieving the loss of a loved one in five separate stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. This doesn’t necessarily describe a linear process, and plenty of people don’t relate to this framework, but I found acceptance to be a transformative stage of my grieving, a process that has left me much more attentive to the quiet pain of so many people moving through the world. While imagining a reality that included my best friend provided me with great nostalgic comfort, it also kept me locked in denial and magical thinking. It left me unable to process and exist in the present, like wearing a jacket of despair lined with silk sleeves. Eventually, I had to accept that she was permanently gone. The world I thought I knew had changed, the ground had hollowed out beneath me, and I needed to figure out a way to find my footing over the fragments that remained.

I’ve been wondering if a similar process is needed to confront the realities of climate change. Maybe our collective fear of descending into grief is sabotaging our ability to emotionally process the depths of the crisis. Grief is generally regarded in our society as a scary and unpleasant emotional state to avoid at all costs, or, if we must, to push through quickly and overcome, not voluntarily submit to. But my process of grieving my best friend was essential. It forced me to digest the depth and pain of my loss. It taught me that some losses are just too big to ignore.

“Every wisdom tradition and psychologist will tell you that sitting with grief is a necessary part of recognizing and internalizing a new reality in the face of a loss,” Jennifer Atkinson, the University of Washington professor who teaches the climate grief seminar, told me. “And one of the things that I’ve encountered in a lot of the research and work and interviews that I’ve done is how valuable and productive grief is in finally shaking us out of this collective denial or disavowal. You don’t have to really be a climate denier, deny the science, to sort of deny the fact or disavow the fact that our lives are truly unraveling and will not be what we thought they were.” Grief, Atkinson argued, “is the opposite of indifference.”

What would it look like to let go of our denial and magical thinking, and instead open ourselves to climate mourning? For people who take part in the Good Grief Network’s course, it means beginning with what, for some, is an emotionally overwhelming task. The program’s first step is to “accept the severity of the predicament.” Acceptance is not the last step of the process, but the first.

Part 4

Ritual

One summer night, I descended down the mountains for a concert in the city of Santa Cruz. I wound down the redwood-dotted hills, watched the surfers bobbing on the deep blue waves of the Pacific, and then made my way to the final stop of my day, the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music.

The evening’s headliner was “The End of Rain,” a multimedia performance reflecting on Californians’ emotional responses to fire and drought. The composer, Scott Ordway, spent more than a year traveling across the state, collecting firsthand accounts of wildfire and drought from more than 200 Californians. He used their words to create a text and a musical score, which was performed by a chorus and accompanied by his own videos and photos taken from visits to different sites of wildfires.

Ordway, a Santa Cruz native who now lives on the East Coast, followed the 2020 Santa Cruz wildfire from his home in Philadelphia. He watched the fire, which was sparked by lightning, descend on his hometown, evacuating his parents’ town and bearing down on places he knew vividly from his childhood. “I knew immediately that I wanted to respond artistically,” he said. So he hit the road, asking people throughout the state about how the wildfires are reshaping their relationship to land, community and self.

That night was Ordway’s composition’s world premiere. The theater was packed, and he stepped onto the stage. “When the lightning struck, I never felt so far from home,” he told the crowd. The lights dimmed and the chorus began to sing the words culled from dozens of Californians, as photos of fire-scarred landscapes flashed on a projector behind the performers. For the next 45 minutes, the audience listened in rapt silence. It felt like a mourning ritual, a public space where a community razed by fire could hear the words of others who had gone through the same thing.

Ordway told me that when he began working on the composition, he thought he would end up writing “a funeral piece for my beloved landscape, for my home, for California.” But in the process of traveling across the state and collecting peoples’ stories, it went in a different direction. Ordway explained that the people he spoke to did not want him to write “a requiem — a sad, somber piece about what was going on” but wanted something that left open even a sliver of room for a salvageable future. He recalled an elderly woman who grabbed him by the shoulders during an interview. “Young man,” she ordered, “don’t you dare put a sad ending on this piece.”

Ordway tried to encapsulate those feelings in the composition’s last two lines of text:

We must change now.

Things will grow back.

Maybe this is where grieving leaves us, suspended between heartache and hope. Staring at an unrecognizable home, with so much left to save.

The post Grieving California appeared first on Coda Story.

Near Cambodia’s border with Thailand, in a two-story home, a group of teenagers watched a black-and-white video projected onto a screen. It was only 8 a.m. on a gray Sunday morning, but the kids, clad in flip-flops and jeans, were rapt with attention.

The video flashed images of the Tuol Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh, where thousands of Cambodians were tortured and killed during the Marxist Khmer Rouge regime of the 1970s. The classroom walls were decorated with photos of figures from the era. A row of filing cabinets held thousands of pages of Khmer Rouge documents from the surrounding district.

In Anlong Veng, it is widely understood that Vietnamese people — not the Khmer Rouge — were behind the worst violence that devastated Cambodia and that Khmer Rouge war heroes tried to stop them.

When the video ended, the soft-spoken workshop leader Ly Sok Kheang asked the kids: “Do you think Cambodian people could have killed other Cambodians?”

A girl sitting in the back stood up. “No, it’s probably not true,” she said. “I’ve heard that people took on fake identities to kill innocent Cambodian people.” A tall boy in the row behind her agreed: “The Vietnamese faked their identities as Cambodian people. But the journalists all broadcast that Cambodian people killed other Cambodians.”

The journalists had it right in this case. When the Khmer Rouge officially ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, its leaders orchestrated the genocide of roughly a quarter of the country’s population of 7.8 million people. Regime leaders were hyper-focused on exterminating educated people and minorities, leading to mass atrocities that politicians and historians today still struggle to make sense of.

Although the Khmer Rouge movement was considered the “younger brother” of Northern Vietnamese communists and initially received their support, the reality was more complicated. Fearful that Vietnam — a historical enemy — intended to gobble up their land, Khmer Rouge leaders officially broke diplomatic relations with the larger neighbor in 1977 as border disputes escalated.

In most of Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge fell in 1979 when Vietnamese troops toppled the regime. The Vietnamese occupied most of the country throughout the 1980s, hailed by some as liberators and others as oppressors. But in this remote, 60,000-person district called Anlong Veng, the Khmer Rouge retained its political power for nearly 20 more years. Today, most families still include former cadres for whom guerilla warfare is a not-so-distant memory. And anti-Vietnamese sentiment, handed down from Khmer Rouge leaders over decades, remains strong.

“It helps to compartmentalize the idea that somehow we screwed up and we did this to ourselves,” said Sophal Ear, a political scientist at the Arizona State University whose family fled the regime when he was a child. “It’s the narrative that permeates anti-Vietnamese sentiment and re-appropriates the whole Khmer Rouge episode of Cambodia as like, ‘No, no, no, this was all Vietnamese-done. We were victims. The genocide was Vietnamese killing Cambodians.’”

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Anti-Vietnamese racism is nothing new in Cambodia, where many resent both France, for ceding contested land to Vietnam in 1949, and the Vietnam-installed government that took over Cambodia after the Khmer Rouge. Opposition leaders have long relied on anti-Vietnamese rhetoric for support, even when it has led to violence.

On a national scale, the country has struggled to confront the genocide that occurred under the Khmer Rouge, and formal education about the regime was practically nonexistent for decades. Current Prime Minister Hun Sen, a former Khmer Rouge soldier himself who defected to Vietnam, famously said that Cambodians should “dig a hole and bury the past” and has been accused of interfering with the Khmer Rouge Tribunal.

In Anlong Veng, aging troops aren’t a political party or even a re-emerging insurgency looking to launch a new movement. But their ahistorical telling of the genocide plays into Cambodia’s worst tropes about its old enemy, exacerbating tensions and pushing a confrontation with the country’s own past further out of reach.

But some are trying to provide a counterweight. Ly Sok Kheang works for the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), an organization that serves as the main keeper of the country’s Khmer Rouge documents and archives, with support from Yale University and both the Cambodian and U.S. governments. A few years ago, the Center launched a program teaching kids in Anlong Veng about the genocide, hoping to spur a more candid reckoning between generations.

When the teens cast doubt on what they saw in the video of the Tuol Sleng Prison, Kheang didn’t correct them. Instead, he gestured towards the thick history booklets he had passed out. It was time to read.

A small country nestled between Vietnam and Thailand, Cambodia spent most of the 20th century mired in a series of power struggles. It was a French protectorate for nearly a century until 1953, when Prince Norodom Sihanouk led a successful bid for independence. Then in 1970, a U.S.-backed military leader overthrew Sihanouk, and American troops invaded the country to fight against alleged Vietnamese strongholds.

Those chaotic years set the stage for the Khmer Rouge to take over in 1975. The movement — led by a Paris-educated man known as Pol Pot — claimed to return Cambodia to “Year Zero,” an agrarian society free from colonialism and foreign influence, which had dominated for decades. 

In reality, well-educated and middle-class people were targeted for torture and killing. Troops ordered everyone out of Phnom Penh and sent them to forced labor camps in the countryside for “re-education” where they dug ditches and toiled in rice fields. Some died from starvation and disease. Others were simply executed.

A zone leader called Ta Mok ruled the country’s southwest. Although he wasn’t in Pol Pot’s inner circle, Mok was both ruthless and charismatic, with a kind of “earthiness” that won the loyalty of farmers, said Andrew Mertha, a Khmer Rouge historian and director of the SAIS China Global Research Center at Johns Hopkins University.

Mok’s troops were responsible for “cleaning up” other zones after purges, including hauling off, interrogating and killing so-called traitors — which came to include just about anyone as the regime became increasingly paranoid and violent. 

“He had a reputation for burning people alive in ovens,” Mertha said. “When he was tasked with eliminating a group of people for a political or material incentive, he was more than happy to do it.”

Mok also hated Vietnam with a passion. In the only known interview with Mok, conducted in 1997 by American journalist Nate Thayer, he defended the murder of another zone leader and his thousands of followers on the grounds that they were secretly Vietnamese. “I have never taken a nap in my life, in order to go faster than the Vietnamese, to beat the Vietnamese, to not allow the Vietnamese to attack us,” he said.

After the regime fell and a new Vietnam-backed government was established in 1979, Mok fled north to the Thai border and led guerilla warfare in Anlong Veng, then a thicket of jungle at the base of a mountain range. Now, a roundabout marks the town’s center at the junction of two country roads, surrounded by cassava and rice fields that glowed green from rain when our team visited in July.

After Vietnamese troops exited Cambodia in 1989, Ta Mok assumed full political control over Anlong Veng. Even today, his fingerprints are all over the town. Up the street from the roundabout is the town bridge, constructed over the river where tuk-tuks and motorbikes stream toward the central market. Here, Mok oversaw construction of a damming system that feeds into an amoeba-shaped lake — a plentiful source of fish. 

Nearby, the red-roofed hospital and local school were also built under his watch. His grave is marked with a giant glittering mausoleum, and a guesthouse bears his name. 

Residents’ stories about Mok evoke a different leader: Kind, generous and hardworking. One woman remembered knocking on his door when she was heavily pregnant and walking away with fistfuls of cash. Another man said Mok liked to sit with his legs dangling over the riverbank as he directed soldiers in construction projects. Anyone passing by his compound hungry got rice, salt, fish or sugar, no questions asked.

“Everyone here in Anlong Veng thought of Ta Mok as a second father,” one former soldier told us. “He took very good care of them.”

Mok was finally arrested in 1999 and the district was reunited with the rest of Cambodia. When he died in 2006 — before he could be tried for war crimes — hundreds poured into the streets of Anlong Veng to mourn. “He was a direct person and did everything himself,” said another soldier’s son. “That’s why most people in Anlong Veng really love him.”

Out of the roughly 15,000 people held in the Tuol Sleng or S-21 prison in Phnom Penh — now home to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum — only about a dozen survived. Prisoners were electrocuted and waterboarded. They were tortured with metal rods and pliers. They had their fingernails and toenails ripped out and their wounds doused with acid.

Norn Chantha discovered Tuol Sleng for the first time in 12th grade. On a whim, he opened a history book a nonprofit had given his school. “I wasn’t really interested in reading the book because I thought that since I was a Khmer Rouge soldier’s kid, I’d already heard quite a lot about the Khmer Rouge story,” said Chantha, now 29, from the office of the Anlong Veng high school where he teaches English. The book was lined with photos of victims being maimed with long metal wires — the first inkling there might be more to the story than what he had been told. 

“It shocked me,” he said.

Until 2011, the same year that Chantha graduated, Cambodia’s Ministry of Education avoided teaching Khmer Rouge history in schools, in part to skirt criticism from Prime Minister Hun Sen, who ordered that 12th grade social studies textbooks be withdrawn from classrooms in 2002 on the grounds that Khmer Rouge sections needed to be “rechecked.” After defecting from the Khmer Rouge, Hun Sen returned to Cambodia with the Vietnamese-installed government and has resisted a public reckoning with the regime during his 37 years as prime minister. He has even gone so far as to say that trying Khmer Rouge leaders would lead to civil war. For kids in school today, curricula about the regime are based on a short history volume produced by DC-Cam and vary greatly in their thoroughness.

Many families have come to see their personal histories as the whole truth of what happened. In Anlong Veng, where people still live in villages known by their Khmer Rouge-era numeric military names, those histories are often inverted versions of what other Cambodians believe, with Khmer Rouge soldiers presented as protagonists instead of perpetrators. Until 12th grade, Chantha never thought twice about his parents being soldiers. “It was normal in Anlong Veng,” he said.

Now as an adult, a combination of internet searches and the school’s teaching materials have led Chantha to believe “the entire regime was horrible, because so many people were killed.” But his north star is still his mom’s stories — which tend to come back to the same refrain about why some people suffered while others were spared.

“She said in any places where the Vietnamese were secretly involved, the food and the living situation in that area would be difficult,” Chantha said. “If there were no Vietnamese masquerading as Khmer, people living in the area would live a normal life.”

One example goes like this: In 1977, his mother was helping to build a dam near the Vietnamese border. At a nearby Khmer Rouge hospital that she often passed by, patients were dying so often that it was considered a local mystery among soldiers. Once, when Chantha’s mother visited herself, she saw patients so thin “they didn’t even look human,” she told him.

The deaths were so frequent because the doctors were secretly Vietnamese, she said, and they were injecting Khmer patients with poison or water on purpose to make them sick. When Khmer Rouge leaders “discovered” the charade, they killed or disappeared the doctors for re-education, and the hospital was shut down.

“I think what my mother told me seemed reasonable,” Chantha said as he recounted the tale. “There were spies, and that’s why patients like soldiers and civilians were killed.”

Khmer Rouge hospitals were notoriously plagued by starvation and disease and lacking in basic care. Historian Stephen Heder, who worked on the Khmer Rouge Tribunal and is now a research associate at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, said that while it’s plausible that incompetent medics killed patients either inadvertently or on purpose in some instances, there is “zero evidence” of Vietnamese spies having been involved.

When we asked how Chantha squares his mom’s viewpoint with the facts he’s picked up elsewhere, he said he has decided not to view the regime as entirely good or entirely bad.

“If people weren’t lucky, and they lived in an area that wasn’t good, they experienced bad things,” he said. “For me personally, I can’t differentiate whether Ta Mok was a good or bad person because my parents’ experience was good compared to other people’s.”

But he’s certain of one thing: “If any unit had a Vietnamese spy, people would definitely be massacred.”

Chantha’s mother Mong Tim first met Ta Mok in 1993, when he invited a group of soldiers’ wives to his home. Cambodia had just hosted its first general elections under the United Nations, and the rest of the country was moving on from the Khmer Rouge — but Ta Mok was determined to keep control of the district.

As the women sat in a big circle around him, Ta Mok paced around the living room and drew up  plans to protect Anlong Veng’s borders on a blackboard. He wore a simple cloth and addressed the women in a quiet voice. Afterward, the group ate a lunch of beef and pork together at long tables, sharing tips on how to raise chickens and cows. 

In all, the women spent 10 days like this at Mok’s home, the daily blackboard sessions only interrupted for big meals prepared by a chef.

“He said if we didn’t do our best to protect our land, the Vietnamese would take our land and it would end in misery,” Mong Tim recalled. “What he told me inspired me to survive for my children’s future. I didn’t want to lose our land or have another government to govern us. If we lost the battle with the Vietnamese, they would abuse us.”

We spoke with Mong Tim, now 63, in the living room of her wooden home, where framed photos displayed her six adult children along the mantle and a talking bird screeched out Khmer greetings in the garden. The wives’ meeting sparked a yearslong friendship: Ta Mok regularly gifted her rice and seasonings and even taught her to sew.

In the early 1990s, Khmer Rouge soldiers flooding into Anlong Veng were pulled into his system, working together to raise farm animals and sharing goods amongst themselves. Many soldiers had lost their own parents or families. “Cambodians relocated from every part of the country. We learned to love each other like a family in order to help each other and to survive,” Tim said.

It was a big improvement from her life before. During the 1980s, when Vietnam occupied Cambodia, fighting dragged out in Anlong Veng, even though the Khmer Rouge movement was effectively dead. Tim moved daily between different parts of the jungle, and while she tried to seek refuge in Thailand, “people didn’t allow us to enter their village,” she said. Instead, she built a hut and lived there for a year, surviving off bitter roots. She lost all her hair.

Still, she doesn’t blame Ta Mok or other Khmer Rouge leaders for refusing to capitulate.

“I felt pain when thinking that the Vietnamese invaded us​​ and abused us. I felt pain because we could not settle anywhere,” she said. “We kept running because the Vietnamese army kept chasing us. We ran all the time, and we ran while exhausted and starving. We slept mostly on the ground, anywhere we could.”

“I didn’t suffer with Ta Mok, but I did with the Vietnamese invasion,” Tim said. 

In recent years, Tim has come across Facebook and YouTube videos that say Ta Mok murdered people in the country’s southwest, but that was before she knew him. Under his rule, she told us, people had rice and fish. The forest was protected. He even traded small bits of gold at the Thai border to bring back noodles and rice. 

We asked if her feelings about him have changed at all since they first met, and she said no.

How Anlong Veng residents should grapple with the past has been a point of debate for years. Back in 2003, the government said it wanted to memorialize the district as a tourist destination, prompting local outcry and a slew of articles stereotyping it as the “Wild West” of Cambodia. Youk Chhang, director of the Documentation Center of Cambodia where Kheang works, rejected the plan on the grounds that it would commercialize memory.

Complicating matters was the Khmer Rouge Tribunal that sought to try war criminals through a joint Cambodian and international court. Although the tribunal was only meant to focus on high-level architects of the genocide — and struggled to even do that — it had a chilling effect in Anlong Veng. One researcher recalled villagers physically running from his white car during a visit, scared that a U.N. vehicle had arrived to take them away.

By 2015, the tribunal had stalled, and Youk established the program in Anlong Veng to teach kids about Khmer Rouge history. The sessions bring 15 kids from local high schools to a day-long workshop — led by Kheang — to explain the basic history of the regime and visit historical sites like Ta Mok’s compound and Pol Pot’s grave.

In a Zoom call, I told Youk about Chantha and his mother and asked how he saw the organization’s role in interpreting the older generation’s narratives for young people.

Youk himself straddles seemingly contradictory positions. As a child, he survived being tortured in a Khmer Rouge work camp and eventually fled to the United States. His extended family is from Ta Mok’s home province of Takeo and lost all but two relatives there. And yet to do his work effectively, he must defend the humanity of Anlong Veng to outsiders.

In 2011, researchers found that both soldiers and high schoolers in Anlong Veng tended to view themselves within a victim-hero mindset against the Vietnamese, bolstered by poverty, intergenerational trauma and isolation. All told, this led to “difficulty in observing the emergence of coherent narratives,” they wrote.

That lack of cohesion, along with omissions or outright lies, doesn’t matter, Youk told me, so long as people are talking in the first place. “I don’t expect one narrative,” he said. “The more complex the history, the more we learn.”

Historians themselves are not settled on much of what happened under the Khmer Rouge regime and the precise role Ta Mok played. While it is clear that he would have been found guilty of crimes against humanity and genocide, his reputation for having orchestrated huge massacres has been exaggerated over the years, Heder, the historian who worked on the Khmer Rouge Tribunal, said.

“What we know among us about what happened under this regime is not one thousandth of one percent of what we know about the Holocaust, maybe one percent of what we know about what happened in the Soviet Union, and a hundredth of one percent of what we know about China under Mao,” Heder said. “We’re all wandering around in the dark grabbing onto little beams of light trying to put together a coherent picture.” 

Youk said his long-term goal isn’t to adjudicate specific beliefs or memories in Anlong Veng. Eventually, he’d like to see the district reconnect culturally with the rest of Cambodia — but first that means helping kids talk to their parents and grandparents about why they think what they do. “They have to reconcile within their own family first before they can reconcile with their neighbors, the community, outside,” he said.

Youk said he doesn’t expect that to happen right away, especially through a single workshop.

“In the beginning, I only expect them to learn the word genocide, that’s all,” he said. “If you can just say that, that’s fine.” But when kids grow up, “they have the responsibility to find their truth.”

Not everyone in Anlong Veng is nostalgic for Ta Mok’s rule. An Horn, a slight, wiry cassava and rice farmer who we met outside his wooden home on a winding dirt road, quickly brushed aside the idea that the leader was anything special.

In fact, only the higher-level Khmer Rouge benefited from the food and unlimited handfuls of money that other residents had ascribed to Ta Mok. “I never dared to go near him,” Horn said with a shake of his head. “He was one of the top leaders and I was a low-ranking soldier. I wouldn’t go near him.”

Horn was around 10 years old when the Khmer Rouge swept into his rural province. Troops separated him from his parents and forced him into a camp with other kids, where he was trained as a child soldier. His first job was carrying older boys’ food and drink and then hauling soil to construct dams. “We didn’t have any freedom at all. They forced small kids to work as hard as elders,” he said.

As he became a teenager and started moving between provinces in a mobile unit, Horn’s life consisted of staying up for hours on night watch and stealing sleep on the ground “like an animal.” By 1980, he was sent to the mountain range above Anlong Veng, where soldiers had more clothing and food than he’d ever seen before. But the luxuries didn’t win him over. 

“At that point, I just prayed that the war would end,” he said. “I was so scared I would die.”

Horn remains unimpressed with the things that people often point out as generous acts by the Khmer Rouge regime. Leaders built roads to connect Anlong Veng’s villages and the mountain to move their own supplies, not help residents, he said. And bridges and schools are simply what should be expected from any government. In his own village, “the majority of people prayed the war would end so we could live a normal life, reunite with our family, make a living.”

If that was the case, we asked, why did some people in the district remain so loyal to Ta Mok? “You supported [the] group to which you belonged,” Horn said. “If you were under the shade of a tree, you admired that tree.” 

Sorpong Peou, a political science professor at Toronto Metropolitan University who likewise survived the Khmer Rouge, calls this mentality the “politics of survival” that still plagues Cambodia today. Opposition leaders, frustrated with Hun Sen’s longtime authoritarian rule, have continued to trot out anti-Vietnamese racism, using the slur yuon and accusing the prime minister of being a Vietnamese puppet. 

“Cambodian politics is very deeply personalized, not institutionalized. Everything is personal,” Peou said. “The court is Hun Sen’s court, the armies are Hun Sen’s armies. Everything is personal, and because of that, personal attacks are the norm, demonizing your opponent is the norm.”

But it’s also “self-defeating,” he said. “You destroy your country by not being able to move toward reconciliation.”

As the house across the street from Horn’s kicked off an evening karaoke session, we realized it was too late to call a motorbike back to town. Horn said he couldn’t ask his neighbors for a ride because people in the village still don’t trust each other after dark.

We made small talk while waiting for another pickup. Had Horn visited any of the local sites the memory organization was fitting with plaques and guides, like Ta Mok’s old compound? Horn said he hadn’t. He wants kids to know what happened, but the places from the past don’t interest him.

By the end of the Ly Sok Kheang’s workshop, the high schoolers were getting antsy. We had watched them sit through Kheang’s morning talk, a movie and history tour on the mountainside, plus a break to take selfies on the cliff overlooking Anlong Veng’s lush farmland.

Now we stood in a small muddy clearing, where under a mound of dirt, protected by a rusting roof and a sagging wire fence, lay Pol Pot’s remains.

It was an unassuming resting place compared to Ta Mok’s towering shrine. Across the street, a casino with a busted-out window and a graying facade loomed over the mountaintop. As the kids stood around the grave, an elderly woman who works as its unofficial cleaner tottered up the path and started talking. She joined the Khmer Rouge, she told them, because she “believed that it was a good thing to do.”

“If you all persist both mentally and physically to do something like I did in the past — if the next generation persists in expanding and protecting our land from the neighboring countries — I believe we will have a sustainable country,” she said, a hand resting on the wire fence. “If we’re all weak, the neighboring countries will interfere, and we will lose our land bit by bit until it is all gone.”

The kids tossed out questions: How long have you looked after the grave? “Twenty years.” Do people celebrate here? “Sometimes.” As is their custom, the workshop leaders didn’t try to intervene, letting the kids take in as much or as little as they wanted: Kheang, who had swapped his button-down for a T-shirt during the mountainside excursion, said that the cleaner always makes an appearance during visits. “Kids can feel the narrative themselves,” he told me later.

We rode down the mountain to our final destination, Ta Mok’s compound. Overlooking the lake dotted with lilypads, we sat near the storerooms where the Khmer Rouge had once squirreled away records and artifacts, talking to the 17-year-old Phal Rampha as the other kids crowded around.

His grandpa sells palm cakes to make a living, but before that, he was a bodyguard to one of Ta Mok’s right-hand men. Sometimes, a bite of palm cake reminds him of a specific story: Once, Rampha said, his grandpa dodged a bullet that bent the tree behind him all the way back. 

“Before, I thought that the Khmer Rouge regime was rescuing the nation from war,” he told us. “From today’s session I learned that there was torture, which made me sad. It seemed atrocious.”

Rampha said that didn’t think his grandpa would have lied about Ta Mok being a kind person who gave people everything he had to help them. His eyebrows knitted together as he spoke.

“I think he couldn’t have been the one who did all of those brutal things to people,” Rampha said. “I believe there were spies in the government.” But it also seemed clear that Ta Mok and other Khmer Rouge leaders had caused internal fighting and divided people into groups.

“I want to know more,” he said. “How cruel was it? Where were the mass graves?”

I asked if he had specific questions for his grandpa. Not yet, he said. “But I want to tell my grandpa that the Khmer Rouge regime was more horrible than what he told me,” Rampha said.

How would he feel bringing that up?

“Hean,” Rampha said, using the Khmer word meaning “brave enough.” “Hean. Hean.”

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