After Genocide

Refugee Lifeworlds was on the syllabus for October 24, 2023. I had listed the keywords and concepts for that graduate seminar at the University of British Columbia’s Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice as debility, refugee studies, and southern disability studies. Somehow I had bypassed genocide, but my students refused to mirror this elision, remarking on the “triggering” nature of the text, given the televisual experience of the mass murder and impairment of Palestinians in Gaza with which our myriad and various screens were currently inundated. They couldn’t read the book; they wouldn’t read the book; at some point, the two became the same refusal. 

I let it go; I let them go. I, too, struggled to process the implications of Y-Dang’s story about the 4 million Cambodians who survived the genocide, only recently recognized as such in 2018. I thought about the temporal lag between the event of genocide and the recognition of the event of it; that perhaps the insistence of this lag is by design, built into the frameworks that govern genocide’s epistemic and juridical recognition: genocide cannot be perceived as it is happening. Y-Dang reminds us that to “speak of the genocide as an event separate from the calculations of empire that came before and after it enables an eclipsing of the longue durée of imperial violence” (xi). We, as scholars and witnesses to the unfolding violence, were immersed in debates between so-called genocide experts about whether—by way of the extent, the intent, the scale, the quality, the quantity, all being the very metrics on which such adjudications rest—Israel was genociding Gaza. The United Nations’ 1948 international genocide convention—itself an artifact of numerous genocides and forged by imperial and settler-colonial powers that selectively respond to some genocides while refusing to acknowledge others—defines genocide as “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” I am most intrigued by the “calculated” conditions of life—there is that word again, calculated—that bring about the destruction of life itself, a biopolitics that induces necropolitics, creating conditions of living that propel life, at variable speeds, towards death. 

But then there were our screens: How could we not know what we were seeing? And then there was Y-Dang, forty years after she survived the Cambodian genocide, telling us in Refugee Lifeworlds what she now knows that she could not know then. Or perhaps what she now can say or claim that she could not then. I could not help but wonder, what will we know forty years from now about the genocide in Gaza that we do not know today? Who will be that counterpart, or the many counterparts, of Y-Dang, telling the story of what we can only know in the long aftermath of genocide? What is a genocide if what remains of genocide is the story that never ends, never comes to an end? In this regard, her focus on aphasia as a sort of signature debility of Cambodian genocide survivors, the cannot–will not nexus of the blockage of speech, becomes a parable for the limits of narration itself. Beyond language escaping us, or language being inadequate to the task, is the refusal to give shape to, to represent, that which has been intimately known, perceived, lived. 

In Refugee Lifeworlds, Y-Dang reminds us that the legal definition of genocide has never benefited those who were genocided, not to mention those who survive: “[O]ur families lived through a war and genocide that the world scarcely remembers” (3). Y-Dang pokes at the apparatuses of transitional justice, the process through which war criminals are brought to trial, evidence amassed and displayed, legal parameters established and conferred. Y-Dang quotes Gayatri Spivak who writes, “because the effort to establish a name becomes all-consuming, the fact of what remains after naming is ignored” (qtd. in Troeung xxvi). Y-Dang’s own ambivalence towards surviving is one not encased in life-or-death drives, but rather a wry, sardonic approach to what Neferti X. M. Tadiar calls “the violence . . . of humanization” (12), the liberal technologies of according life that secretly yet not-so-secretly operates in the service of necropolitics. “Of course, anyone in my position would rather be ‘saved’ than left behind to die in a genocide or refugee camp” (6), writes Y-Dang. Yet the “violence of benevolence” haunts her daily in the “inescapable space of being made a refugee” (9). 

Y-Dang’s conceptualization of lifeworlds—“registers of meaning in the wake of colonialism, war, and genocide that can account for duress without flattening out states of existence that can attend to pleasure, creativity, and the heterogeneity of life in blocked passages without idealizing or romanticizing the site of the subaltern” (10)—is such an important, beautiful, capacious offering. And yet I think, for now, the afterlife of the book is one of carrying grief: our collective grief at watching history repeat itself; our political grief as we struggle so mightily against the killing machineries, knowing we are making a difference, but never one big enough, never fast enough; our individual griefs as all of this new grief interacts with the pile-up of injuries, wounds, and scars we already carry, often precariously. 

I have my own grief, too, of never having known Y-Dang, the most brilliant theorist of debility I have encountered, of never having met the person who has taught me how much more my own work had to be refined. I blame genocide for taking Y-Dang from us, as crude as that may seem, because the forces of debilitation that compose the afterlives of genocide are coming for us all, and why should we not be clear about that? But I know that, when this genocide of Gaza ends, and when Palestine is free, and when two million Palestinians teach us what it means to survive a genocide, to survive mass impairment and maiming on an unprecedented scale, to remember both what being Palestinian has been and can be, and to re-member bodies torn asunder so as to be differently whole—I know that when this time comes, Y-Dang’s words will intersect with these worlds anew and teach us, yet again, what remains after genocide. 

Works Cited

Tadiar, Neferti X. M. Remaindered Life. Duke UP, 2022. 

Troeung, Y – Dang. Refugee Lifeworlds: The Afterlife of the Cold War in Cambodia. Temple UP, 2022. 

United Nations, General Assembly. Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Resolution 260 A (III), 9 Dec. 1948. United Nations, https://un.org/en/genocideprevention/documents/atrocity-crimes/Doc.1_Convention%20on%20the%20Prevention%20and%20Punishment%20of%20the%20Crime%20of%20Genocide.pdf. 

Jasbir K. Puar is distinguished Faculty of Arts professor in the Social Justice Institute at the University of British Columbia and Extraordinary Professor in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa. She is the author of the award-winning books The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017), which has been translated into Spanish and is forthcoming in Portuguese, and Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007), available in French, Spanish, Portuguese, forthcoming in Japanese, and re-issued as an expanded version for its tenth anniversary (2017). Her articles have been published in journals such as Social Text and South Atlantic Quarterly, mainstream venues such as Al-Jazeera and the Guardian, and translated into more than twenty languages.