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sarvatri · 16 days ago

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កូនក្រក [Koan Kroach]

In relation to Khmer /Cambodian Esoteric Practices

Disclaimer:

My ancestors are more into divination and practices related to those fields versus actual baneful magick (or what some may call black magic) as baneful magick is still perceived as a taboo.

However, I personally like to explore and inform myself of other forms of magic within Khmer Culture because the differences of practices are interesting.

This post is based on my research and brief encounters of it. Like when I was a kid, I saw one at someone's house and was freaking out internally because I literally thought I was next and that my folks were selling me out to this person lmfao like Hansel and Gretal vibes.

What is Koan Kroach?

The phrase, កូនក្រក [koan-kroach], literally translates to “dried child” but in a cultural context, this refers to a type of mummified fetal amulet. The creation of this amulet is considered an esoteric practice where the fetus is obtained from the first pregnancy of a woman who has either: 1) died in childbirth (OR) 2) obtained from a living pregnant woman

Quick Info

The veneration of “Koan Kroach” in Khmer/Cambodian culture has similarities and differences to “Kuman Thong” from Laos, Thailand and other SE Asian countries such as the Philippines. In accordance with the previous information and in relation to Khmer/Cambodian practices, it is important to mention that this is one of the most important rules: To successfully make a “Koan Kroach”, the fetus must be willingly gifted by the mother to the father. As a result, this kind of implies that the making of a “Koan Kroach” relates to an “ancestor/spirit” from the wife’s lineage but up to your discretion/interpretation as the research I did also said that if you obtain a “Koan Kroach", you should never tell anyone you have it because of the heavy spirituality purposes attached to it.

The Origins and Purpose:

It is said that there is a long tradition of the use of “Koan Kroach” in Khmer/Cambodian and the first foreigner to report this practice in Cambodia was French ethnologist, Etienne Aymonier. In his report, he states that... "In-laws would avoid keeping a young couple too far during the first pregnancy as a means to protect the pregnant mother and her baby in the womb." But what is “Koan Kroach” exactly? The amulet itself is like a symbol of protection or as a way to grant supernatural powers. The person who usually becomes the “father” of the “Koan Kroach” has to mummify it while making offerings and rites. This is not done without a practitioner who has expertise in magic. In this ritual, the practitioner will include awaking the “fetus” with magic.

There’s actually more to this ritual where it also includes stones, offerings and all of that but I am not informed of all the details.

Now, it is said that if the Koan Kroach are twins, then the amulet is believed to be highly powerful.

So, in the ritual where they awaken the fetus, it is said that they would appease the spirit and the fetus would be sewn into a pouch. If we compare this practice to modern times, there’s a lot of ghost related stories and songs about this and according to a Cambodian anthropologist, the usages of “Koan Kroach” tends to be greater during periods of national instability.

Let's explore the Cultural Context:

Disclaimer:

First, these types of things all varies as not every individual or family practices this. From my knowledge of it, there are people out there who do believe that they can gain supernatural powers, guidance and/or protection from the fetus of someone's first pregnancy.

The actual power of the amulet is derived from the spirit, and not the actual fetus, itself. The “fetus” is considered to act as a “vessel” but you are supposed to treat it like a child and take care of it as this amulet is supposed to protect you. Additionally, the requirement to make a “Koan Kroach” is a human embryo that has not yet come to term.

The individuals who usually end up wearing this amulet are male soldiers and he who wishes to benefit from it, should first get his wife or girlfriend pregnant.

Scenario 1:

When the time is right, he may then jokingly asks if she will give him the child in her belly; the woman, believing this is a game, says yes. Saying “yes” is essential as words of willingness is to provide the amulet power. [Warning/Explicit] So, he then would cut her open, removes the fetus, and smoke/mummifying it basically.

Scenario 2:

The man can also retrieve it another way and this would be from the corpse of the woman (who has been buried with her unborn fetus). He must first awaken her and he should be able to overcome the fear and backlash that is to come about from awaking the dead as it is a belief that you should not disturb the dead. If he is able to overcome this backlash and retrieves permission from the corpse, he can proceed with the process of creating a Koan Kroach and will wear it as an amulet around his neck or waist. The smoked or golden fetus becomes the guide and protector of its owner, speaking to him in dreams to give guidance and warns him of dangers ahead.

Media and Entertainment Adaptions:

A blockbuster horror movie titled "Koan Kroach" was released to cinemas in Cambodia on November 9th, 2018.

However, this was blocked from advertising online by major social networks and platforms as they said it contained high levels of violence towards women.

#necromancy #death magic #shamanism #black magic #baneful magic #southeast asia #khmer #cambodian #oral stories #witchblr #occultism #kumanthong #gumanthong #Dualities of Khmer Magic #amulet

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fvisualvomits · 7 years ago

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Dragons and Graves: Fantasy and Genocide Writing in Ratner’s In The Shadow of the Banyan

“The child must have a secret world in which live things that never were. It is necessary that she believe. She must start out by believing in things not of this world. Then when the world becomes too ugly for living in, the child can reach back and live in her imagination”

- Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

No living dragons reside within the landscape of Cambodia under genocide’s conditions. Instead we witness their colossal graves, and mourn what has been lost. The supplementation of fantastical tropes into genocide writing allows for the creation of a transcendental plane. This area of duality permits escapism from genocide. Mzali defines escapism as “allowing postcolonial writers to eschew the concrete, pending concerns of their respective countries through extensive references to mythical and magical events” (Mzali 13). Ratner, however, does not ‘eschew’ the concerns of her homeland. Instead, she infuses rich mythology through the methodology of “Buddhism, oral storytelling, and folklore tradition” (Dong 120). These tropes, highly evocative of pastoral and spiritual imagery, are able to provide an area of self-preserving sanctity for our child narrator, wherein she can cling to the pre-genocidal past. This arguably unrealistic model appears as Raami reads the ‘Reamker’ at the onset of the novel. Herein, the “bodies of men and monkeys and deities alike” (Ratner 24) fall from the sky. Through oral storytelling and folklore tradition, we relive Ratner’s experiences through the eyes of Raami, her fictionalised vessel in which to portray her memoir. However, the infusion of folklore corroborates Raami’s inability to assimilate the egregious conditions of genocide as a child ‘blinded’, and the liminality of trauma accessible through a child’s eyes materialises. In comparison, Madeline Thien’s Dogs at the Perimeter prioritises the assimilation of facts, and knowledge of events. Thien’s descriptions are resultantly closer to the ‘truth’ of reality. However, Thien’s narrative mentions the imperative facet of genocide: there are “no landmarks” (Thien 121). As over “1,968 temples and 104 mosques” (Stearn 96) were ravaged by the Khmer Rouge, Ratner divulges the necessity of cultural preservation as the topography of spiritually was destroyed across her land. Fantasy may hinder upon the truth of genocide writing, but it remains a vital resource in the reclamation of identity. Fantasy used in conjunction with genocide writing resultantly allows for a space outside of liminal reality and linguistic spatiality: a place of necessity within genocide.

Raami’s folklore tales are gleaned via her deceased father through ‘oral tradition’. He creates a plane of combined reality and fantasy, such as “when we look at the full moon, we see a rabbit!” (Ratner 129). Her resultant devotion to the fantastical practice of folklore within the novel is thus inspired by a duality: to bear witness to both her father’s legacy and Cambodia itself, and moreover to extricate herself from the conditions of suffering. She firstly bears witness as “a writing back into history of what has deliberately been erased” (Hamdi 24). The deliberate erasure of her father by the Khmer Rouge can only be remedied if Ratner re-embodies him into the linguistic world within her narration. Reiterating the tales of her father to the public domain via fiction resultantly memorialises him. This is not only linguistically, but more importantly, by introducing his presence through narrative, he is reintroduced back into the human psyche through the reader’s eyes. The most succinct example of this is when she reiterates her father’s poetry. “A butterfly preening herself... a god waxing lyrical out of the silence” (Ratner 3). The delicate ‘butterfly’ is her mother, while the strong, patriarchal ‘god’ is her father. Above normative familial tropes, this original poetry stands as testament to the changes of circumstance. Raami’s father’s poetry once the genocide has begun is staunchly different. “Mine is a broken land, scarred and broken by hate – on a path to self-extermination” (Ratner 121). The language is markedly different, ‘preening’ and ‘silence’ standing in staunch opposition with ‘broken…scarred…hate’. This is because through genocidal events, we enter the realm of the impersonal. While few may relate their maternal figures with the imagery of the ‘butterfly’, the ‘broken land’ would be relevant to all who endured the genocide. These landscapes are “inextricably entwined in the production of the past” (Dwyer 425) and thus these words are psychological monuments, which this essay will later return to. Raami subsequently invokes not only idiosyncratic poetry to reference her own family, but uses the language of her father to ‘tell’ the ‘tale’ of genocide. Bearing witness within this text resultantly does not only bear witness to the entirety of Cambodia through memorialising the genocide itself, but bears witness to personal familial relations. Folklore thus helps to raise the ‘spirits’ of the death and bring their linguistic presence back into reality, even if genocide succeeds in murdering the physical body.

Continuing upon the theme of physicality, folklore furthermore helps to transcend physical liminality within genocide writing as a form of escapism. Raami’s father tells her:

I told you stories to give you wings, Raami, so that you would never be trapped by anything: your name, your title, the limits of your body, this world’s suffering (Ratner 134).

The metaphorical ‘wings’ that he implies are the gift of imagination. Imagination provides access to escapism outside of ‘this world’s suffering’ and ‘the limits of the body’. In providing the ‘extensive references to mythical and magical events’ that Mzali defines as escapism, these ‘stories’ allow Raami’s psychological interiority to flourish after her physical exteriority has been laid to ruination. It is important to note her father mentions that he writes, “because words give me wings’” (Ratner 120). This reiteration of ‘wings’ comes shortly before he is taken away by the Khmer Rouge, as “a hundred tevodas joined him… their wings beating across the dusty sky” (Ratner 135). Through his physical disappearance and eventual death, he is transmuted from man to angel. It is this angelical presence that allows her father’s voice to continually flow throughout Raami’s mind throughout the text. He is “neither present nor absent, neither dead nor alive” (Davis 373). However, he possesses a voice present within Raami’s mind that keeps him ‘tied’ to the earthly plane. This is made more complex as Raami, like many others, never learns the outcome of her father’s fate. In places such as S-21, over ‘12,000 prisoners’ entered, while “less than 300 detainees are known to have survived” (Schindel 27). We can thus assume Raami’s ‘hundred tevodas’ are in fact the souls of other Cambodians murdered, flying upwards to one of the several Buddhist heavens. Through the trope of ‘rising’ to the heavens, it is important that physical wings ultimately rescue Raami. This is her main way ‘to escape the world’s suffering’, rather than simply the words of her father. This materialises as a UN helicopter rescues Raami and her mother from Vietnam.

Invoking the folklore trope, ‘the dot’ of a helicopter “became a dragonfly, then a helicopter” (Ratner 313). The word ‘dragonfly’ preceding ‘helicopter’ highlights how Raami has retreated into her own psychological interiority by the conclusion of the novel. She rejects reality in preferentiality of mythology wherein imagery is flexible, less traumatic: a dragonfly is no danger, whereas a helicopter may signify an enemy. Moreover, within Buddhist cosmology, the dragonfly represents “the reuniting of heaven and earth” (Harvey 12). This duality emerges as the dragonfly is physically able to inhibit both elements of water and air. This is subsequently a reunion for Raami and her father. Through the metaphor of wings, she flies upwards to meet him within the heavens. However, mistaking the helicopter for a ‘dragonfly’ is somewhat problematic. Raami’s excursions across the countryside as she regularly rides in “caravans of oxcarts” (Ratner 141) purposefully transform the landscape into a wholly pastoral scene. We leave our original setting of Phnom Penh, wherein Raami’s father possesses a “BMW” (Ratner 30) and migrate outwards, towards a land “broken and scarred, with holes and ditches” (Ratner 273) where “haunted forests” (Ratner 278) appear. The landscape free of capitalism is hence more imbued with mythology. Perhaps this is due to capitalism generating “arbitrary and unsustainable levels of inequality” (Veetil 21). We observe clear differentiations within class as Raami’s mother warns Raami’s Auntie to “use a knife… scrape it off” (Ratner 94) in regard to her nail varnish. To stand out is to bring attention to oneself, to attract danger. Yet even in the barren hills, inequality exists through the Khmer Rouge policing the civilians of Cambodia. Resultantly, and especially to a Western reader, the idea of Cambodia in itself throughout the 1970s, is a place devoid of futurism. This turns Cambodia into a place of mythology itself. The pastoral imagery stands within direct opposition to the state of genocide. The landscape of fantasy is thus transformed, taking on the aesthetics of Dante’s Inferno.

While I have outlined various reasons wherein fantasy is beneficial within genocide writing, there remain various implications. Bronfen asks: “do we see the real, while denying the representation or do we see the representation, thus putting the real under erasure?” (Bronfen 304). In infusing fantasy within genocide writing, we encounter upon the problem of factuality. ‘Representation’ cannot accurately portray genocide when infiltrated by mythology. For example, written linguistics do not return Raami’s father to us in a physical sense – the voice we hear internally, as we read, is not his own. Nor do Ratner’s pages correctively state the figures of the Cambodian genocide, or provide the namesake to places laid to ruination. One may argue that fiction is a wholly inappropriate model for genocide, unless it is heavily imbued with factual event. Madeline Thien’s Dogs at the Perimeter directly challenges Ratner’s text as such. The infusion of mythology and hope within Ratner’s text disguises the degradation of the genocide. Despite the death of her close family, Raami still describes the world through mythological starred eyes. “The sky a brilliant blue after the usual deluge, brandishing a pair of rainbows, like Indra’s crossbows” (Ratner 250). Even the ‘long, jagged slope’ of the embankment walls of a mass grave are disguised, subject to liminality via a child narrator. Raami questions if the Khmer Rouge are forcing the workers to bury a “dragon yiak” (Ratner 272). The spatiality of a ‘dragon giant’ is enormous, designating the physical immensity of the mass grave. However, through the lens of folklore, our own theorisation to the identity and spatiality of this hole is questioned.

In comparison, Thien’s text reveals the reality of the atmosphere within Cambodia:

A space grew around me, it rose from the soil, a space in which there were no doors, no light or darkness, no landmarks. No future, no past. (Thien 121)

The liminality of both future and past preys upon Thien’s text. This transfixes a space that evades time itself. This stands within direct opposition to the place that Ratner creates, a plane of escapism. Herein Raami can avoid the reality of trauma. She can avoid the factuality that within genocide, there is ‘no future, no past’. Genocide itself cannot occupy spatial time because living amidst such atrocity is timeless, as “the past is done” (Thien 209). This is a duality. The past is done because there is no representation of the past. The cultural narrative is eradicated, replaced and burrowed beneath a new, horrific narrative of pain. This is due to Pol Pot’s ‘Year Zero’ methodology. Raami cannot access the entire truth through her mythology, as she allows a space wherein there are landmarks. Here she attempts to revive the ‘past’ of her father, and allows the ‘prophecy’ of the genocide to “become my story” (Ratner 315). In her dedication to her father and her fierce love for her country, Raami’s narrative can resultantly never exceed representation to become reality. After all, the author “is your personal projection, your idea of the author’ (Bennett 21). Everything is subjective to the mind, it is impossible to create objective fact.

Similarly, Tyner reflects that, “it is not just the identity of a place that is important, it is also the identity that a person or group has with that place… as an insider or outsider” (Tyner 24). Those who identify as being from the Western world cannot have encountered the narrative of the Cambodian genocide. Similarly, those who are not Jewish cannot encounter the narrative of the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel corroborates as a Holocaust survivor, that “we speak in code, we survivors, and this cannot be broken, cannot be deciphered, not by you no matter how much you try” (Wiesel 7). Wiesel is correct, there is a unity amongst survivors and the true narrative of genocide is

unapproachable by the outsider. Yet the narrative of the ‘insider’ must be approachable in some form. This is my personal reasoning for the fictional piece that accompanies this narrative. I understand from a critical viewpoint that this is not my ‘code’ to decipher, yet a grotesque fascination to understand the events of human suffering through human nature inspires my writing. My words take inspiration from Ratner’s, yet I cannot truly replicate her style. As “he or she who did not live through the event will never know it” (Wiesel 7), I will never experience the scorching sun, the killing fields as raw holes within the earth, the impact of genocide itself upon my psychological wellbeing. However, this does not excuse the fact that there should be a motivation to educate oneself on the narrative of trauma as an ‘outsider’. We must ‘try’ through the liminality of ‘code’ to ‘decipher’ in a way that is not appropriating, offensive, nor self-indulgent. However, Wiesel speaks only for the Holocaust; the western world is not possessed by the Buddhist values that preoccupy Cambodia. In 2013 over 150 million Theravada, or Southern Buddhist adherents existed, compared to roughly seven million Buddhists being found outside of Asia (Harvey 5). However, the lack of mythology does not detract from holocaust writing.

For example, in Art Spiegelman’s Maus, the Holocaust is represented via the medium of cartoon mice. However, unlike Ratner’s narrative, Spiegelman’s text does not stray from the ‘truth’ of genocide. “The Germans swung them [mice] by the legs against a wall, and they never anymore screamed” (Spiegelman 110) is not only a horrific image, but one transformed further into the depravity of the Holocaust through animal connotations. With the ‘mice’ representing the Jewish and cats as Nazis, the interplay of power relations and anti-Semitism is increased. One may argue this is inappropriate, following Adorno’s statement that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” (Adorno 34). The reason we do not find it ‘barbaric’ to inhibit Cambodian culture is due to the western narrative: it is unfamiliar, we cannot grasp it. However, the Holocaust is nearby, familiar, and thus while being known to the western world, as the style in which we live, Wiesel accurately encapsulates the fact that it is simultaneously unknown, as all who preside today can never ‘decipher’ the code, as ‘hard as we try’.

The reason that genocide is not the aforementioned ‘land of fantasy’ is mostly to the notion of childhood innocence. One must question, would this novel be effective as genocide writing if Raami had been an adult narrator? Children are not limited by “participation in social, cultural and ideological institutions and discourses”. They are thus able to “penetrate emotional danger zones” (Wilkinson 125). Under normative circumstances, children embody a freedom from the societal norms that govern the body. They moreover possess a form of agency secondary to their parental commands. However, Raami is arguably simultaneously isolated and involved within the ‘social, cultural, and ideological’ institutions that surround her, due to her unconventional circumstances. It is only due to childhood innocence (reinforced by folklore tales) that she is able to ‘penetrate emotional danger zones’ to keep stable. The reality of events such as genocide may cause an adult to succumb both mentally and physically to the depravity. It can thus be argued that being far beyond a necessity for the childhood realm, folklore is vital within this context as a form of stabilisation and self-preservation for all.

Despite fantasy stereotypically having no place within the horrors of genocide writing, Ratner’s text proves that it is a necessity within the particular realm of the Cambodian genocide. As ‘the Khmer Rouge created a moral and social order base on the inversion of Buddhist virtues’ (Harris 4) the land becomes foreign to residents. However, ‘once shared, poems generate a common sense of place” (Lorimer 181). All those who were afflicted within the Genocide, whether they remained within Cambodia or not, are able to find solace in the fact their suffering is not isolated. The poetry that remains is not beautiful. The linguistics are scarred by the damage enacted upon both the physical and psychological landscape of Cambodia. Yet it provides a voice of solidarity. A comfort in mass consciousness. The poetry of U Sam Oeur, who survived the events of 1975-1979, reveals that “I can’t see across those three wildernesses”. These represent the “killing, disease, and starvation” (McKullough 116) that ravaged Cambodia throughout the genocide. As “all Khmer poets chant their work” (McKullough 116) it transforms poetry into something transcendental. Raami observes her father’s final poem is “an incantation. To bring him back into the world of the living” (Ratner 313). The repetition of these phrases is thus a necessity to Raami, Oeur, and all other Cambodians due to their ability to reclaim the past, to restore humanity into a narrative that has been destroyed. This is symbolic of the Buddhist tenet of reincarnation.

Ratner’s text is wholly involved with the narrative of Buddhism, by invoking the cyclical style of repetition, similar to the notion of the Buddhist circle:

The image of the circle, an allusion to the spiritual concept of samsara, or continuous movement, recuperates the symbol of the wheel of history from its Khmer Rouge iteration and returns it to its nonviolent, Khmer-Buddhist association. (Troeung 104)

‘Continuous movement’ alludes to the idea of the ‘wings’ her father provided her throughout his literature. The connotations of ‘movement’ furthermore remind the reader of Raami’s continuous journey throughout the novel. This is not only in a physical sense, as she migrates across Cambodia, but the ‘continuous’ voices she carries internally. And so:

A story, I had learned, through my own constant knitting and re-knitting, can lead us back to ourselves, to our lost innocence… he carved his silhouette in the memory of the sky for me to return to again and again. (Ratner 310)

Raami ‘reknits’ the narrative of the genocide through mythology. This leads Cambodians ‘back to’ themselves, and returns the ‘lost innocence’ of the land prior to genocide. I wish to compare the idea of Raami’s ‘reknitting’ to the Buddhist circle in explaining the necessity of fantasy within Cambodian genocide literature. While Bronfen wishes to separate the ‘real’ from the ‘representation’ – is it not possible to have the two in mutual coexistence? Regardless of the imperfections imbued upon the circle, there is necessity in possessing any form of representation. A circle will always be a circle, a father will always be a father, even if a reader cannot truly grasp his ‘truth’. The importance is simply that he exists.

“In the isolation of pain, even the most uncompromising advocate of individualism might suddenly prefer a realm populated by companions, however imaginary” (Scarry 11). Pain itself demands escapism. The fictional piece I wrote as a response to Vaddey Ratner’s text tries to emulate the spirit of this. Although my unnamed protagonist is scarred by the Cambodian war, her past reveals dedications to Buddhism and pastoral links via her heritage. To ‘plentiful shrines’ and the bones of a ‘blessed Buddha’. Similarly to Raami, she is only able to continue within her present landscape by clinging to the familiarity of the past. Ratner herself states that “The losses and the brutality in the ensuing years deepened my desire to understand what happened to him, to my loved ones, to my country” (Ratner 318). Ratner could have easily done so in the form of a literal memoir, recalling the facts of her childhood through a narrative that would exclude a ‘outside’ reader, unable to ‘decipher’ the ‘code’ as Wiesel eloquently states. Yet through the trope of fantasy, Ratner is able engage her readers in a dialogue accessible to all readers: the language of childhood innocence, of fantasy and imagination. Through her evocative language we gain more than a duality of knowledge pending to the genocide and folklore, but we receive a personal narrative within which we learn of her family. Ratner can “show us the beauty of her culture and the landscape as only a child can see it, bursting with colour and hope” (Fox 2012). Cambodia’s landscape retains a beauty, despite the atrocity that mars the psychological landscape of the land. And yet these “rainbows” (Ratner 250) that Ratner implies are not only aesthetic, but infer to the hope that ‘bursts’ within civilians eyes, years on. These ‘rainbows’ illuminate Raami’s language and provide optimism in the way only children’s literature is possible.

Ratner resultantly seeks to shift the image of Cambodia as a monolithic place of killing through literary acts of the imagination. Her writing remains responsible to history while importantly unconstrained by it; her dedication to her father’s memory potently memorialises his presence upon each page. Ratner succeeds in a creating not only exploring a transcendental plane of liminality wherein genocide and childhood innocence may co-exist. Yet, rather creating her own folklore, the ‘voice’ of her father lives on within his linguistic embodiment. A mythological ‘god imbued in all who read him to pass on. And thus, Ratner succeeds, as:

“If you make the truth survive, however terrible it is, you are retaliating against humanity, in the only way the powerless have” (Hynes 269).

Works Cited:

• Adorno, Theodor W., and Rolf Tiedemann. Can One live after Auschwitz?: A Philosophical reader. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2003. Print.

• Agamben, Giorgio. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone Books, 1999. Print.

• Bennett, Andrew, and Nicholas Royle. An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory. Harlow, U.K. New York: Pearson/Longman, 2009. Print.

• Bronfen, Elisabeth. “Violence of Representation – Representation of Violence”. LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, vol.1, no.4, 1990. Accessed 12 May 2018.

• Craps, Stef. Postcolonial Witnessing: Trauma out of Bounds. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Print.

• Davis, Colin. “Hauntology, Spectres and Phantoms”. French Studies, vol.59, no.3, 1 July 2005, pp.373-379. Taylor and Francis, doi: 10.1080/10436929008580039, Accessed 9 May 2018.

• Dong, Lan. Asian American Culture: From Anime to Tiger Moms. Santa Barbara, California: Greenwood, 2016. Print.

• Dwyer, Owen J. “Symbolic Accretion and Commemoration”. Social & Cultural Geography, vol.5, no. 3, 2004, pp.419-435. Taylor and Francis, doi:10.1080/1464936042000252804, Accessed 5 May 2018.

• Hamdi, Hahrir. “Bearing Witness in Palestinian Resistance Literature”. Race and Class, vol. 52, no.3, 2011, pp.21-42. Sage, doi: 10.1177/0306396810390158, Accessed 10 May 2018.

• Harvey, Peter. An Introduction to Buddhism: Teachings, History and Practices. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Print.

• Fischer, Rachel K., “Genocide”. Reference & User Services Quarterly, vol. 52, no.4, 2013. www.questia.com/library/journal/1G1-351948619/genocide. Accessed 11 May 2018.

• Fox, Genevieve. “Debuts”. Review of In the Shadow of the Banyan by Raddey Vatner. Daily Mail. 18 October 2012.

• Lorimer, Hayden. “Poetry and Place: The Shape of Words”. Geography, vol. 93, no.3, pp.181-182, 2008. Accessed 17 May 2018.

• Mzali, Ines. Approaching the Real through Magic Realism: Magical Realism in Contemporary Indian Literature in English. Diss. Concordia University. 2003. Web. Accessed May 3 2018.

• McCullough, Ken. “Tuning in to the Poetry of U Sam Oeur.” Manoa, vol.12, no.1, 2000.

• Ratner, Vaddey. In the Shadow of the Banyan. London: Simon & Schuster, 2012. Print.

• Schindel, Estela, and Pamela Colombo. Space and the Memories of Violence: Landscapes of Erasure, Disappearance and Exception. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Print.

• Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor's Tale. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986. Print.

• Thien, Madeleine. Dogs at the Perimeter. London: Granta, 2013. Print.

• Veetil, Vipin P. “The Mythology of Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Journal of Private Enterprise, vol.31 no.1, 2016, pp.21-36. Accessed 2 May 2018.

• Wiesel, Elie, and Elliot Lefkovitz. Dimensions of the Holocaust: Lectures at Northwestern University. Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 1990. Print.

• Wilkinson, Robyn. "Broaching ‘Themes Too Large for Adult Fiction’: The Child Narrator in NoViolet Bulawayo's We Need New Names.", 27 Apr. 2016. Web. Accessed. 10 May 2018.

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