RHETORICAL MEMORY, POLITICAL THEATER, AND THE TRAUMATIC PRESENT

Photographs from S-21 does not imagine viewers as voyeurs, but rather works against the spectacle of trauma and "an aversely fascinated mourning" by contesting the sentimentality of finding relief in the image of the dead (Berlant 52). The play aligns the audience with museum-goers, implicating both as potential perpetrators of suffering. "People pass by. And every time their eyes touch ours we're back there again." The young woman asks, "Who are they, who look?" "Ghosts, maybe," the young man answers. "Ghosts of the Khmer Rouge... Why else would they come back again and again to see us? To check on us?" "Perhaps you are right, Vuthy," she says. "Perhaps they are the enemy disguised." Unlike museumgoers, the play's audience is given access to the victims' beyond death. This access extends trauma and memory to the afterlife and positions audiences as both objects and subjects of the play. We become objects of the victims' gaze. Similarly, as David Chandler notes with regard to the archival photographs themselves, "As we observe the victims, they are observing us" (6). Or, as Lindsay French puts it, "The directness of the people's gaze holds us. They are, in effect, facing their executioners in the lens of the camera, and we stare back at them from the place of the executioner. It is extremely unsettling" (135). The photographs, then, also position the audience as pedagogical subjects, prompted to contemplate our role in remembering Cambodia's traumatic past. With the American eye doctor, Dr. Lynn Simpson, [Thida] begins a journey toward healing, but the play does not culminate in a therapeutic resolution. Instead, Dr. Simpson functions as an emblematic figure who stands in for the professional and distant gaze of Western medicine, and its ethos of expertise. Thida describes the doctor as "quick -- she has no time. Empty -- without a soul." Physical exams reveal to the doctor that Thida's eyes are sending signals to the brain, and the doctor becomes suspicious. "Your sister may be malingering, Mr. Lok. Is she applying for disability? Benefits for blindness are the highest in California." "My sister would not lie," he replies. "It's not strange. I've seen many other women like her. They are not making it up." Dr. Simpson seeks a "logical" cause to Thida's silence and blindness, and only at the end of the play does she accept the obvious, that Thida's blindness is a symptom of traumatic witnessing -- a survival mechanism. The audience is not at first made to i