I worried I was making the wrong choice with books this school year. I worried the book was too long, that the students wouldn’t read, and I worried that there was not enough depth of language to warrant the kind of study we needed. But I kept coming back to First They Killed My Father–I had taught it once before, to eleventh-graders in suburban Minnesota, during my first whirlwind of a long-term substitute teaching job. That was the spring of 2012, and the book was handed to me as part of the a curriculum. I read it hurriedly, and I taught it in the way my colleagues shared with me. Looking back, I feel like we skated over the real issues of genocide and atrocity in the book to an embarrassing degree.
I rediscovered Ung’s testimonial of the Cambodian genocide in a cupboard in our school’s literature book room a couple of years ago. Stacks of copies that looked brand new–purchased, the book numbers told me, in 2007. Had they ever been used at all? A Cambodian student at the school asked me to borrow a copy for her IB Extended Essay, and discussing with her the first chapters, I began wondering, maybe I should study this with my class.
But I felt uncomfortable with the book’s title, which felt to me sensational, lacking in subtlety. As I reread passages, I feared the language was too straightforward–would students have enough to analyze? What would our discussions be? And at 279 pages, knowing how busy my students are, I feared there would be no way to do the book justice. Students wouldn’t finish reading. I envisioned sitting in our big discussion circle to an hour and forty minutes of embarrassed (for both them and me) silence.
I brought in ten possibilities for literature to study to my class on the first day. Last year, the class had studied 1984, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denosivich, and The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The latter two of these I had never read, so when I found out I would be inheriting this class, these became part of my summer reading. But these three works were all fiction and by men–the ten options I brought in kept male writers to a minimum. I envisioned us studying Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, and though I haven’t read it yet, I found a bunch of copies of Banana Yoshimoto’s Kitchen. I had Wide Sargasso Sea there on the list, and Salemah al-Sa’id’s Memoirs of an Arabian Princess. And I included First They Killed My Father. I brought in a few male writers too–Witi Ihimaera’s short story collection, and Shakespeare, Langston Hughes poetry, and Euripides. Students had twenty minutes to look through options and write down what stood out to them. I collected the papers nervously. What would I be teaching this term?
I told students I would take their preferences into account, but that I would also use my own professional judgement. The first choice, though, was easy: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea the students were clamoring for. But there was no clear second student preference–Euripides’ Medea, Kitchen, even Shakespeare got a few votes. Ung’s testimonial also had some interest, but it did not stand out in the students’ minds.
At the heart of this school I teach at, beyond the maelstrom of deadlines and demands, we are a values-driven place, focused on humanitarianism, on intercultural understanding, and that starts with the student body. These are young people from eighty countries, most of them on scholarships, who have applied to come join this international community. Global issues take on a new kind of significance here, where a mudslide in Nepal or internet shutdowns in Zimbabwe are connected to people we intimately know. These last four years, it has made me recognize the US-centrism I didn’t know was so deeply rooted into me.
I realized that First They Killed My Father was intimately connected to our values as a school. It might not be the perfect choice, but it would be the right one for this community: we have to look at terrible things and understand them as well as we can, as these young people become adults and move and influence and lead in communities around the world, this can be part of the power of literature.
I wrote two weeks ago about our beginning with Ung’s testimonial, and since that time I have been incredibly impressed by the work these students have done. They come into class saying, “Jimmy, I felt like crying reading this,” and I tell them I’m sorry, and that I’m not sorry. They’re not sorry. I hear them before class reading articles about the Khmer Rouge I didn’t assign–“I can’t believe I’d never heard of this before,” several have said. Others have said it reminds them of stories told by their parents and grandparents about life under other totalitarian regimes.
We’re also problematizing as we read–there are important questions about representation in the text, explored by critics Sody Lay and Bunkong Tuon. Ung was five years old when the Khmer Rouge entered Phnom Penh in 1975–her narrative is mediated through the lens of a child and carries factual inaccuracies: to what extent, then, is it a valid piece of testimonial literature? And as a child of Phnom Penh’s economic elite, to what extent is Ung able to speak for the people of Cambodia as a whole? We can’t answer these questions, but we can ask them and explore them and consider what this means for writers, and for these students as representatives of their countries and their own experiences.
And the language–perhaps my biggest fear was that the richness of language wasn’t there, that the writing was too straightforward, too transparent. I realize now that I was wrong. This past Friday, I handed out copies of an extract from a central scene: the imaginary reconstruction of the father’s death. With highlighters and pens, students spent ten minutes close-reading and identifying what language features were evoking emotion in the reader, how the narrator’s perspective shifted subtly from paragraph to paragraph, and the richness they uncovered made me sigh in relief, because I by myself had not seen it. They found it.
We still have half the book to go, but I’m no longer worried. The students are incredibly busy, yet it seems at least the large majority are finding time to keep up with the reading. And ultimately, the straightforwardness in the language that had worried me before is proving a benefit, because the text becomes accessible to a greater number of students. I know Orwell’s dense prose was difficult for some of these students to parse–here, the story comes through clearly, yet there is the depth for them to dig in and discover too.
It is another of those humbling moments in teaching, when I feel so fortunate to be working with these young people. I am putting a ton in. I am reading Ung’s text closely along with them, taking copious notes, finding these relevant critical articles, teaching skills of inquiry and Marxist critical analysis to help illuminate other aspects of the text, planning our slow trajectory through this powerful text–but these students are proving scholars in their own right. I too am learning as we work.
The lesson for myself is that the depths of a piece of literature are best discovered alongside others. I am a good reader, but when I work alone, I see far from everything. It is so good to read in a community, study together, incorporate multiple perspectives and noticings. Outside of school, how do we make that happen? How can we make reading a more social act?
Thank you for stopping by. Best wishes for the coming week,
Jimmy
Words like trees 