Trees: Killing and the Custodians of Memory

Terence Stone

A few days ago I was with a group of friends talking about trees. One of my friends returned from a year in Australia last summer. She recounted her visit to a Boab tree, called The Prison Baob, in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, near the isolated town of Derby.

 Prison Baob, Nr. Derby, Western Australia

Hollow and over fourteen metres in circumference, it was fitted with a door and used as a prison for Aboriginal prisoners by the British, before they were walked to Derby for sentencing. The Baob has always had deep cultural significance—we might use the word sacred—for the Aboriginal people. We can’t begin to understand how horrifying this might have been for the prisoners and the tree—for another friend listening to the story declared, “Trees don’t like things like that”. For me this declaration was a validation of a troubling secret I’ve held since Cambodia when I found myself face to face with the Killing Tree at Boeung Choeung Ek, within a month or two of my friend’s visit to the Prison Baob in Australia. Here is my story:

I look at trees differently now, ever since Nancy, my wife, and I visited the killing fields of Cambodia. They have a life beyond the visibly statuesque form they take--immobile. Something about each one is different. It takes a special kind of attention to see that we all can recover from the numbness of conditioned alienation. It takes willingness, stillness and time. Trees talk; I'm now sure they weep; and they are certainly the custodians of memory.

Ever since our visit to the killing fields of Boeung Choeung Ek ("Crow's Feet Pond"), fifteen kilometres to the south of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, I've been haunted. In the months since then I haven’t been able to shake the immanence of the killing tree against which thousands of children were slaughtered. At random moments and in fragments of dreams like shards of bone I find myself with images and thoughts of the children who died there—their last moments: the last thing their eyes saw, or ears heard, a split second before the obliteration of consciousness—and now feel increasingly compelled to know more about the killing tree itself.

 The Killing Tree

For example, I discovered that the killing tree was called the chankiri tree. At first I understood this to be Khmer for "killing", but could find no translation that would confirm it. Cumulative hours of web searching revealed little else until I came upon a reference to the chankiri tree as a cottonwood tree, common to the tropics. Somewhere else, shockingly, I found that the chankiri tree is also known as “The Tree of Life”. Since accumulating these fragments of information, I continue to search for other references that might confirm or refute my findings, but have found nothing. Why, I thought, has this become such an obsession?

More than two thousand children were brought from Tuol Sleng by truck with a parent or parents, to arrive as the last of daylight died in the west. There they were torn from the last pair of arms that would ever cling to protect them and were delivered to their executioner, a young Khmer Rouge soldier, who took each by the legs and formally laughed to demonstrate being devoid of compassion or mercy as he swung the child’s head against the trunk of the tree. I’m sure it was over quickly for most, but if it wasn’t, then the executioner would swing and laugh again until the trembling or convulsing form demonstrated appropriate obedience to this terminal law of Angkor.

Baby At Tuol Sleng Before Being Taken For Execution Against The Killing Tree:

A Visitor At Tuol Sleng Leaves A Temple Flower In Memory

The day we walked the path through Boeung Choeung Ek children were singing in a nearby school. Their sweet voices enchanting the loops and harmonies of a beautiful Khmer melody that drifted over this place of cruelty and death. I had not yet come upon the tree. When I did, I read the sign that children were beaten at the tree, but didn’t take in fully what this meant. What I did feel was a compulsion to lay my hand upon the tree and find some kind of pulse—to feel something witnessed by this tree—the only living thing retaining the memory in some form of what exactly happened to each of the children brought here. My hand inexplicably lingered; something was being communicated and I felt death palpable. Nearby, in lyrical defiance of the past, the children still sang.

It was only after stepping away and I read the information sheet that was provided on entry to the site that I understood the grisly details of the method of execution. I was horrified to realize that the very place where I laid my hand would have been the exact place of impact of the children’s heads.

The Children Have Been Playing

Numbly, I tried to take in what had happened in the square metre of ground on which I had stood and to which I now returned. The children still sang golden notes that drifted over the undulating field and through the branches of the trees, and I could neither separate nor put the two experiences together I stared at the place where my hand had rested, expecting that it would surrender some knowledge, but nothing more came to me. My eyes drifted down to the roots at the right of the tree where six bricks were arranged at right angles to each other against the trunk; a termite hill was forming over them from which a string of prayer beads hung; articles of children’s clothing seemed to be emerging from the soil; a rose had been placed in the arrangement; a drinking straw protruded from one of the soil encrusted bricks; a candy wrapper and various leaves were set around. The bricks reminded me of the torture wing and first cell block of Tuol Sleng. After this initial shock of recognition, I remembered how the Jewish children of Auschwitz had drawn butterflies and enchanted forests in order to escape the horror of their fate before they too were slaughtered. I looked down again at the base of the tree and thought, “The children have been playing”; and nearby still the children sang.

I now think that all this has since been the measure of my obsession about the tree. I remember the thousands of photographs we’d seen earlier that day of the prisoners at Tuol Sleng. Few of them were of children unless they were sitting beside mothers as they had their mug shots taken, holding name and number in front. In some of the photographs, the children were mere infants in their mothers’ arms. What were missing were their names—all of them denied even basic identity as each truckload of the condemned brought each of these invisible children closer to obscene sacrifice and perhaps some perverse mercy against the trunk of the killing tree—and the children at the nearby school still sang.

At the very least I want to know the names of the children who were broken on this tree. I want to read each name out loud. I want to struggle with the pronunciations and repeat each name exactly as it was uttered by a loving mother who smiled at her infant for the first time she took it to her breast. This has been my obsession—Naming! But because this is impossible, I turn to the killing tree which still stands and holds an essential part of each child in its memory. It is the only thing that can be known: Chankiri tree; family of the great tropical cottonwood; "Tree of Life" that refuses to give up the spirit of each child that was broken against it and whose blood fed the soil in which it stands year after year after year—and where Khmer children nearby still sing hauntingly beautiful melodies.

The hope for this wounded country is that the children who were singing will grow in safety and hope; but at the time and since I stood with the Chankiri tree, a curious mystery lingered. The tree’s trunk intimately shared the trauma of the children over thirty years ago; and yet the trunk seems to have added little by way of growth. Is it possible, I wonder, that the tree, in sympathy with those infant victims resists growth, and in memory of those whose slaughter it witnessed, refuses to die?