“One of the most extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable and reality.” ~Salman Rushdie

Ongoing Discussion Questions What does it mean to evaluate these nonfiction accounts of atrocity from an artistic and aesthetic point of view? What are the implications of the different forms of narration (a genocide survivor telling his or her own story, co-authoring, or another telling a genocide survivor’s story)?

Ongoing Discussion Questions Audience? Who is the intended audience? What does it mean that so many recent works in this genre are “western facing texts”? What conditions made it possible for the author to tell his or her story?

Ongoing Discussion Questions How is plot used within the confines of the genre? How does time operate; how does the author use linear and non linear narrative, flashback, memory, and chronology? What is the relationship between the narrator and his or her narrated subject? What is the relationship between the individual experience and the larger public (or political) experience?

Ongoing Discussion Questions Tone? Language—Style? Figurative Language? Metaphor? Effects of translations? Omission—What is left out of the story? Why? Other apparatus: prefaces, footnotes, pictures, maps, afterword, reviews, cover picture, marketing, etc

Ongoing Discussion Questions Is there any humor or lightheartedness? Why or why not? Setting—time, place, location, surroundings?

Map of Cambodia

History and Genocide At least 2.5-3 million people were killed under the Khmer Rouge's brutal regime, which controlled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979. This photo shows open mass graves in 1979.

Phnom Penh Khmer Rouge guerilla soldiers wearing black uniforms drive into Phnom Penh in April 1975, as Cambodia falls under the control of the Khmer Rouge.

Phnom Penh A woman cries next to a dead body in April 1975 in Phnom Penh, after the Khmer Rouge enter the Cambodian capital and establish the government of Democratic Kampuchea (DK).

The Killing Fields

Killing Fields Execution sites in Cambodia where large numbers of people were killed and buried. Over 20,000 mass grave sites. To save ammunition, individuals were typically poisoned, beaten with spades (shovels), sliced with sharp bamboo sticks, or bludgeoned with a hammer.

Child Soldiers A Cambodian man sits in Choeung Ek Killing Fields near a tree that was used to beat children to death during the Khmer Rouge regime on August 6, 2014 in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

Tuol Sleng (S-21Prison) Former high school in Phnom Penh Tuol Sleng means “Hill of Poisonous Trees” As many as 20,000 people were imprisoned, tortured, and executed. Men suffered electric shock, tortured with searing hot metal instruments, cut with knives, suffocated with plastic bags, and endured waterboarding and beatings. Woman suffered the same tortures along with being brutally raped.

Tuol Sleng (S-21 Prison) A Cambodian man stands by a wall of photographs of prisoners of the Khmer Rouge regime in one of the rooms of Tuol Sleng prison, also known as S-21, on August 6 in Phnom Penh.

Memory Cambodian citizen Sam Vishna looks at a collection of skulls that make up a map of Cambodia at Tuol Sleng Prison Museum in Phnom Penh in 1998.

Memory Cambodian Sao Phen prepares skulls and bones of victims of the Khmer Rouge inside a stupa in Kandal province in 2009.

Memory Cambodian Buddhist monks bless victims' skulls at the Choeung Ek Killing Fields memorial in Phnom Penh on April 17, 2008.