Roosters Crow, Dogs Cry (Polish Reportage Series) - Softcover

Tochman, Wojciech

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1948830507 ISBN 13: 9781948830508

Publisher: Open Letter Books, 2022

Synopsis

Equipped with the sensitivity known from his earlier reportages, in Roosters Crow, Dogs Whine, Wojciech Tochman addresses people with mental illnesses in Cambodia who are imprisoned in kennels, chained up, and locked in cells―often by their own families, who are desperate and at a loss for what to do. Doctors from the Transcultural Psychosocial Organization, in turn, face a great challenge in helping these people because there are only fifty psychiatrists in a country of sixteen million people. Roosters Crow, Dogs Whine approaches both the doctors and their patients with empathy, and also highlights the country’s other social problems, such as slave labor or the lack of sensitivity in society.

A thematic continuation of Polish journalist Tochman’s self-described "dark triptych" about societies affected by genocides, Roosters Crow, Dogs Whine presents a portrait of a Cambodia in which the memory of the Khmer Rouge terror is still alive, where the nation is suffering from a trauma referred to as baksbat, or “broken courage syndrome.”

About this title

About the Authors

Wojciech Tochman (b. 1969) is one of the best-known Polish journalists and the author of nine books. His books of reportage have been published in English, French, Arabic, Swedish, Finnish, Slovak, Italian, Russian, Dutch, and Bosnian. His book Like Eating a Stone was a finalist for the Nike Literary Prize and for the Prix Témoin du Monde, awarded by Radio France International. It was published in English by Granta in 2008. Tochman runs the Polish Reportage Institute together with Paweł Goźliński and Mariusz Szczygieł.

Antonia Lloyd-Jones has translated works by many of Poland’s leading contemporary novelists, including Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk, Jacek Dehnel, Mariusz Szczygieł, and Artur Domosławski. She has been a mentor for the Emerging Translator Mentorship Program and co-chair of the UK Translators Association. In 2018 she was honored with Poland’s Transatlantyk Award for the most outstanding promoter of Polish literature abroad.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Operation Unchain

[ . . .]

She’s thirty years old. Her son is now twelve. Every day the boy hears his mother chirping, trilling and twittering. He can see how she's growing more distant all the time. A bird in a cage but without a bird’s keen eye: hers are calm, fixed on something her hands can’t reach. Eyes and hands that aren’t interested in anything nearby. Or anyone. Thirteen years ago someone finally brought her home. All the way from the Thai border. Her body was naked, sore and injured, but strong and healthy, ready to give birth. Her soul was absent.

And for her soul, nothing has changed to this day. Apart from that, she has a neat haircut, clean clothes and a plump figure―she clearly gets enough rice. In a cage? She’s been there for several months; earlier, she sat in the old pigsty behind the house, chained by the foot. So she wouldn’t run off into the jungle to look for her soul. So she wouldn’t come back even more badly harmed by people. The pigsty is there as before, on the other side of the house, so we go look at it and take pictures: four pillars stuck firmly into the ground, with a shoddy little roof on top that barely shields the patch of earth underneath. How many years did she spend on that dirt floor? It’s hard to get exact information. One time her father says three years, another time he says eleven. The calendar isn’t his strong point. Like many people here, he lives outside time. Is he happy? More now, perhaps. But when in her state of madness his prodigal daughter gave birth to a child from rape, he wasn’t in the least bit happy. How could he be, when he felt nothing at all? After his wife abandoned him he grew thin, stopped growing rice, and felt a pain in his chest, so he sold the cow, took the money to the pagoda and asked the monks for salvation. Did they give him a miraculous cure for his distress? An elixir, perhaps? Some sacred amulets? Did they promise his mood would improve? In the next life, for sure. At the time, his chained daughter was being fed by her aunt. What about her mother? She never came. According to the father, she still hasn’t come to this day. We could ask him who decided that. And we do. She never comes, we hear, no-one knows why.

“I devoted myself to religion,” says the father. “Every day I drank different herbs, and gradually I understood their miraculous powers, until the angel of God came to see me. It was like a dream, but I was awake. The angel explained to me which plants are for which illnesses, when to pick them, how to chop them up, how much to use, how long to boil them in water, leaves or roots, which to eat raw, which in the morning and which at night. He left when he was sure I had committed it all to memory. Now I heal people’s stomachs, hearts and livers. I can save people affected by black magic, I can break spells. My daughter? I poured water over her head for several hours to cleanse her body, I patiently implored the spirits to leave her. I tried for many years, three, five, eleven. It was all in vain, for the spirits weren’t living in my daughter at all. Finally, not long ago some people came from a foreign organization, a union of Khmers in America and Canada. They were generous. They left a thousand dollars to build a cage. And they left without checking if we’d spent the money on that purpose. I don’t know which organization it was, I think it had the word ‘humanity’ in its name. I built the cage properly, I spent every last cent of the donated dollars on it. It’s nice, as you can see, it’s solid, hygienic and comfortable.”

Aluminum bars sunk upright into concrete, at regular intervals a few inches apart, each ten feet high, form the four walls of the cage. A square, ten feet by ten feet, topped with a tin roof. A padlocked door. The floor is paved with bright terracotta tiles, easy to clean. Down the center there’s a sloping channel to flush away waste matter. It’s surrounded by dense greenery, deep shadows, and a birds’ chorus. When the sun is shining. Because when it sets, it’s so quiet and so dark around here that it’s hard to believe the light will ever return. This will be her home when she gets better too―her father still believes the day will come, or maybe that’s just the impression he wants to give. “I’ll remove the padlock and the door will open forever.”

“A daughter’s home is her father’s house,” says Dr Ang Sody in a chilly tone, looking at the large yellow building standing here. She signals to the driver: end of visit. We move on. We’ll be back to see Talan again. That’s what the woman in the cage is called. Schizophrenia―that’s the name of her illness, according to Dr Sody.

Edition details

• Publisher: Open Letter Books
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1948830507
• ISBN 13: 9781948830508
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 150