Paris (France), 2005. Keng Vannsak © Khim Hoc Dy
Ka-set
By Stéphanie Gée
Professor Keng Vannsak died after a long illness on December 18th at the age of 83, at the Montmorency hospital in Paris, France. He influenced generations of Cambodian intellectuals and leaves behind him a legacy including two drama plays, many poems and his research work. A true admirer of Khmer civilisation, he stood up all his life for these values. Strongly opposed to the Cambodian monarchy, he was also well-known for his role as a mentor for young Saloth Sar, later to be known as the sanguinary Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot.
Keng Vannsak was born in 1925 in a village in the Kampong Chhnang province. After obtaining his baccalaureate in Philosophy in 1946 in Phnom Penh, he continued his studies in Paris with a scholarship and worked as a Khmer-language assistant at the National School of Modern Eastern Languages (Ecole Nationale des Langues Orientales). During the course of his studies, in the capital he took two years out to go to England and teach Khmer at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.
He married French national Suzanne Colleville, who shared with him a passion for Eastern languages: she held diplomas in the Cambodian, Lao and Thai languages but also obtained a degree in Physical Science at the University of Caen, as revealed by Khing Hoc Dy, a former student and friend of Keng Vannsak's, in an article soon to be published. In 1952, he returned to Cambodia with his wife and a brand new B.A. Degree which he obtained at the Faculty of Literature and Human Science University of Paris in 1951. He took up the position of teacher at the prestigious Lycée Sisowath in Phnom Penh and stayed there from 1952 to 1958.
A mentor for Cambodian students in Paris
Keng Vannsak became one of the key-figures of the Cambodian student community in Paris. As reminded by historian Philip Short in his book entitled Pol Pot – Anatomy of a Nightmare[*], during the winter of 1950, more exclusive student meetings took place several times every month at Keng Vannsak's Paris flat “to discuss political issues and more precisely about the future of Cambodia, a country which, for the first time, was directly affected by the war in Vietnam”. The historian explains that these meetings “marked the beginning of [Saloth Sar's] political training”.
At that time, Philip Short details, communism was not their main worry. The historian recalls that “Keng Vannsak himself, however more aware of political reality than most of his fellow-students, involuntarily offended a young Frenchwoman of the high bourgeoisie by offering her, a year before, to go and spend the afternoon at the Fête de l'Humanité, organised by the French Communist Party. 'I had no idea it was a Communist do', he protested. 'I thought it was just a celebration for humanity, that's all'...” Keng Vannsak's studies Circle, as summarised by the historian, “stayed away from political labels”, since its members considered themselves more as part of a “progressist” trend.
Very quickly, however, the most radical of his friends began distancing themselves from him. He covered for the president of the Cambodian Students Association when the group was invited to attend “youngsters' world peace celebrations” in Berlin but was eventually asked not to go with the group just before they were due to leave. “Half a century later, Vannsak still fulminated” at the simple idea of it, Philip Short says. Keng Vannsak explained to him that the other ones wanted to get rid of him. He quotes him: “They knew that I was not the tough kind like them. I thought too much... I was not a stubborn person and did not act with fanaticism nor like an extremist. ..] Ieng Sary [a former high school classmate who later became Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Khmer Rouge government] himself told me later: 'You are too sensitive. You will never be a politician. In order to make politics, you have to be tough... You will not get there, brother. You are too sentimental'”.
A Khmer culture lover
In 1958, Keng Vannsak went to teach at the national Pedagogical Institute, and was in the meantime a member of the Secondary Education Khmer Language and Literature Programme. He then took up the position of Professor of Khmer Literature, Culture and Civilisation at the Buddhist University of Phnom Penh, where he worked until 1968 before being in charge of the Khmer inscriptions department at the University of Fine Arts from 1969 to 1970, applying himself to dedicating his work to the promotion and defence of the Khmer language and culture. In the 1960s, he campaigned for the simplification of the Khmer language, thus spurring a decisive will for reforms. The necessity for such change appeared to him in 1952 as he was developing the first typewriter keyboard with Khmer signs.
In April 1970, Keng Vannsak went back to France to prepare a PhD Thesis entitled “Recherche d'un fond culturel khmer” (Research on a Khmer cultural inventory), which he presented the following year in Paris. Like many other researchers, Khing Hoc Dy sees Keng Vannsak as a “great scholar, one of the rare intellectuals in Cambodia – if not the only one - who had a long-term, universal vision and concept of our Khmer culture and civilisation”.
A staunch anti-monarchist
In 1952, as he was in Paris, Keng Vannsak had strongly criticised Norodom Sihanouk who had just granted himself extraordinary powers and had launched a “Royal Crusade” as a response to troubles caused by Son Ngoc Than and his followers. The exiled teacher wrote a series of poems and published them in 1954 under the title “Coeur Vierge” (Virgin Heart), in which he “used Buddhist metaphors to launch encrypted attacks against the monarchy”, Philip Short observes, adding that the intellectual became, from then on, one of Norodom Sihanouk's “bêtes noires”. Under his regime, Keng Vannsak was sent twice to prison.
At the end of 1954, Kang Vannsak became a member of the Democratic Party, aiming at launching an internal reform of the Party. Being the leader of the Democratic Party and representing it in the 1955 legislative elections, “He was openly against the throne and especially and directly opposed Samdech Norodom Sihanouk, founder of the Sangkum Reastr Niyum Party”, Khing Hoc Dy details. After the the Democratic party failure in the elections, he was sent to prison by the Sangkum government from September 13th to October 10th 1955. After his release, he published poems he had written while in jail, which had a very strong influence on Khmer writers at the time.”
"Keng Vannsak never supported Communist ideas; however, he always opposed monarchical power. All the political currents which later opposed the Throne found their inspiration in Vannsak's ideas; and afterwards, each one of them reformulated them with their 'idealogical touch'. This goes for the Khmer Rouge but also the Republican anti-monarchical trend”, Nasir Abdoul-Carime writes in an article published in the AEFEK Bulletin (Association for Khmer Studies Exchanges and Training).
In 1968, after the Samlaut uprising, followed by severe reprisals, he was placed under house arrest with an interdiction to teach after being accused inciting sedition among his students. When his house was searched, Khing Hoc Dy reports, policemen found in his personal library books about Marx, Mao Tse Toung, Lenin and magazines about China... The discovery led to his arrest.
The Jayavarman VII controversy
In an interview given in early February 2007 with Radio Free Asia, Professor Keng Vannsak revisited the generally laudatory portrait of Jayavarman VII, and somehow darkened it. He is said to have declared that the great King at the origin of the building of many temples including the highly-revered Bayon temple, had Cham blood running in his veins, and that he had lent part of the Khmer territory to the Siamese... These assertions gave rise to a vigorous outcry and anger on the part of many.
Following the outcry, Keng Vannsak explained that he only aimed at re-establishing a certain historical truth, and certainly not destroying national unity by attacking one of its main symbols.
The intellectual retained a certain aura even in exile
Keng Vannsak was only rehabilitated after Lon Nol's military coup in March 1970 and took up the leadership of a Khmer-Mon Institute, founded by Lon Nol, “in order to make Khmer citizens proud of being Khmer and reunite all Khmer around this cultural inheritance serving as a weapon capable of opposing Vietnamese communist imperialism”, Khing Hoc Dy points out.
Appointed in 1971 as deputy representative of Cambodia's permanent delegation to UNESCO and chargé d'affaires of Lon Nol's Khmer Republic in France, Keng Vannsak never left Rfrance from then on. When the Khmer Rouge came to power, he instantly sensed, with amazing precision, the extent of the disaster befalling his country. In a long poem written in French, he was one of the first to denounce slaughters and purges, without however managing to break the silence on the situation of Cambodia. He tried to publish the poem in Paris, without success.
He lived on the outskirts of Paris until his death, and although he never returned to his homeland, he never forgot it.
In a last eulogy, Keng Vannsak's friend, Khing Hoc Dy described him as a person filled with kindness and always ready to answer all the questions of his Cambodian and foreign former students, colleagues and researchers about Cambodian history and civilisation [...], the memory of a welcoming man who spoke with energy and with a voice as pleasant as the sound of water running on rocks. A true linguist, he could speak for a whole day without ever stopping”.
No comments:
Post a Comment