A book review will often tell you what a book is about. Prisoners of Class is the memoir of Chan Samoeum, a survivor of the Khmer Rouge genocide. It’s a book much like the dozens of others and tells a similar story. However, in this case, what’s important is not what the story is about, but rather how the book was written.
While there are many biographies from survivors of the Pol Pot regime, they have mostly all been written decades after the fact, often by people who were very young when it happened. While all of these accounts are important, many of them take many liberties for the sake of the narrative, aided by ghostwriters, filling out scenes and conversations in ways that work well for the story, but only serve to fill gaps left by faded memories.
Chan instead scribbled his story in notebooks immediately after the genocide ended. He didn’t write it with an intent to publish. He wrote it because he had to. It was his way of dealing with his trauma.
“I wrote it in my bedroom with the door closed so that my wife and children would not see me. I feared my wife would think I was crazy, as tears flowed down my cheeks while I wrote. There was not a page of that manuscript that was not soaked by my tears.” This was October of 1979, only months after the genocide had ended.
For twenty years he kept his story to himself, his handwritten notebooks tucked away. And then, in 1999, he decided to share it.
He self-published his story in a five-parts series that he attempted to sell at The Russian Market in Phnom Penh. Originally titled One Thousand Three Hundred and Sixty Six Days in Hell, it was written in Khmer and went almost entirely without notice.
And then Matthew Madden, an American who was working as an interpreter with the Red Cross, discovered it. Madden, who had read a number of other memoirs, knew he had found something special. Chan’s detailed recollection of the events, written in his native language, were full of vivid, poignant imagery, self reflection and interspersed with poems. Madden knew the book deserved more attention, but it would take him another twenty years before he could do something about it.
Madden, in his spare time, slowly started translating the work, originally just as a hobby. Finally finishing his translation in 2020, he then set out to find the author to get his permission to publish it. Not only was Chan still alive, but he was more than willing to take Madden around to the locations where the the events took place, allowing Madden to create the detailed maps and photos that fill the book.
Prisoners of Class is a heartfelt account of Chan’s experiences that feels more like a diary. The detailed descriptions of events, written only shortly after they occurred, are not only unique to the genre but historically significant. The descriptions of mass labour projects he endured are often the only written account that exists today. It’s not just one of the earliest firsthand accounts of life under the Khmer Rouge, but a work of significant importance for the history and literature of Cambodia.
Prisoners of Class was published in 2023 by Mekong River Press and is available through their website, or for purchase at Monument Books in Phnom Penh.
You can hear an interview the the translator, Matthew Maddon, on the In The Shadows of Utopia podcast, Season 2, Episode 27.