Читать книгу Home SOS - Katherine Brickell - Страница 12

If Berlant’s work on the crisis ordinary reminds scholars ‘to make sense of the ways in which subjects find themselves habituating, situating, desiring, or feeling in the world, day to day, often amid conditions of cruelty’ (Cram 2014, p. 374), then Home SOS shows how systemic crises are entrenched in the home and speak to broader patterns of violences as part and parcel of the vernacular landscape of Cambodia. Both domestic violence and forced eviction can be considered as spatial exclusions or ‘expulsions’ (Sassen 2014) from home and living space as part of a wider diagnosis of unstable and disconcerting times. Yet they are forms of ongoing loss that a language of expulsion risks eliding. Taken together, domestic violence and forced eviction work to underscore the significance of ‘less sensational, yet nevertheless devastating’ dislocations from home (Vaz‐Jones 2018, p. 711). They are singular yet inter‐linked forms of crisis ordinariness rooted in metaphorical and/or physical displacement. Above all, however, they are lived experiences, which the book prioritises. Just as domestic violence can lead to forced eviction from home, empirical data in the book attests to the emergent links that can be drawn between forced eviction, domestic violence, and marital breakdown. In order to start building a holistic understanding of intimate violences encountered by women in contemporary Cambodian society, the equivalences and morphisms that exist between domestic violence and forced eviction are explored in the pages that follow.

Doing so aims to counteract how ‘there are many forms of precarity and disorder not captured under the designation of “crisis” that do not command the same critical attention’ as high profile disasters (Ahmann 2018, p. 147). In this regard, the book thus builds from recently published work in two areas. The first relates to crisis geographies that are multi‐scalar and embedded in political economy dynamics (such as austerity), but are experienced intensely at the personal scale and articulated through everyday fragilities of family life (Hall 2019). In Home SOS, for example, I show how marriage is an intimate yet precarious union that is influenced by wider political structures and processes, including Cambodia’s recent history of humanitarian crisis at the hands of the Khmer Rouge. A second area that Home SOS builds from is the vital importance of ‘non‐eventful geographies’ of violence and everyday life – violences that are too often left out of social science work on suffering and dying (Wilkinson and Ortega‐Alcázar 2019). Such ‘quasi‐events’, Elizabeth Povinelli (2011, p. 13) argues, ‘never quite achieve the status of having occurred or taken place’. My ambition, then, is to reposition domestic violence and forced eviction as events, rather than quasi‐events, that happen, and are happening, in the extra‐domestic realm.

Domestic life for many women in Cambodia, I show, is saturated with crises, which are viewed in ordinary and anticipatory terms. The Cambodian Buddhist expression ‘fire in the house’ embodies the idea, for example, that in order to maintain a harmonious household, women are responsible for suppressing three fires of potential conflict within the home – parents, husbands, and ‘others’ (Derks 2008). Often uttered in relation to domestic violence, the Khmer proverb ‘Plates in a Basket will Rattle’ speaks to the saturation and management of conflict (fire) in everyday life that is normal rather than diversionary. Crisis in this guise can be approached as a ‘prosaic’, ‘the routinization of a register of improvisations lived as such by people and, in this sense, belonging at most to the domain of the obvious or self‐evident, and at least to the banal or that which no longer evokes surprise’ (Mbembé and Roitman 1995, p. 326). The first‐ever survey of domestic violence in Cambodia opens with a vignette that evokes this further: ‘if people live in the same house there will inevitably be some collisions. It’s normal … it can’t be helped. But, from time to time, plates break. So do women’ (Zimmerman 1995, np). Through the life stories of female respondents, Home SOS focuses on these collisions and, in some tragic cases, their fatalities; my argument is that women’s homes and bodies are being broken, time and again, in the making of Cambodia today.

The joint study of domestic violence and forced eviction reveals how this pernicious breaking exceeds baseline expectations of domestic conflict. Not only this, but the home is a dynamic space of potentiality (Povinelli 2011) in which women are innovating under these debilitating circumstances in different ways. Some women I spent time with continued to manage the flames, others felt compelled to ignite them in the public sphere to try and extinguish their threat, whilst others exited marriage to escape the heat altogether. In the ordinary, then, it is possible to read the eventful, the memorable, and also the episodic, ‘occasions that make experiences while not changing much of anything’ (Berlant 2007, p. 760). As Susan Fraiman (2017, p. 123) writes in relation to the reproduction of the ordinary, it is women who ‘generally get the brunt’ of this work. Women’s firefighting takes many forms in contemporary Cambodia and the book ignites discussion of domestic violence and forced eviction as fires with multiple and politically imbued sources, responses, and outcomes.

Home SOS goes on to show, for instance, how the mundanity of the crisis ordinary continues as marginalisation and containment of these supposed ‘non‐events’ to the home by a government unwilling to tolerate its spilling out into public and the concomitant political questions and challenges to its power that this may bring. Government attempts to keep disruption to the established order at a minimum enables the continued production of death, social or actual, through de facto gerrymandering whereby political advantage is achieved by manipulating and regulating the boundaries of home and the ‘fire’ within. Women have the right to dwell free from violence, but in their everyday lives, and in their pursuit of this goal, are subject to a bio‐necropolitical brutality that the book brings into view through its joint focus on domestic violence and forced eviction.