Photo: BBC News
A new film tells the story of a spoken word artist who spent 14 years in US prison, only to be deported to Cambodia
Indefinitely stuck in solitary confinement in the middle of his
16-year sentence for attempted murder, Kosal Khiev thought he was on
verge of insanity.
“I was angry. I was sad. I was lost,” Khiev says in “Cambodian Son,” a
new documentary that traces his life from teenage gangster to prison
poet to award-winning, exiled artist in Cambodia.
After 8 months in solitary at a California prison, there was one night “everything shifted,” he told Al Jazeera.
In 2000, he woke up from a nightmare where he’d been repeatedly stabbed. He walked to his cell’s steel sink and cracked mirror, etched with the names of those who had stayed there before him.
Looking into his reflection, “I saw my fractured self, so many pieces
of me. And all these voices came out: ‘Is this it?’ 'Are you going to
die in here?’ ‘Is your life going to amount to nothing?’” Khiev said the
voices asked him.
But there was also another voice, he told Al Jazeera, “an innocent
one,” the voice of “that kid that once held my grandmother’s hand.”
From then on, he couldn’t help himself — he had to express those
voices. When the lights went off in the hole, “I’d walk to the iron door
and just recite,” he told Al Jazeera.
With the encouragement of his fellow prisoners who could only hear
him, Khiev shared his thoughts and feelings in late-night speeches that
would help him get through another about 10 months in solitary. “Those
conversations in the dark. They were glimpses of light,” he says in the
documentary.
Khiev didn’t know it yet, but those “conversations” were the beginning of an internationally acclaimed poetry career.
“Cambodian Son,” a documentary by Masahiro Sugano with its New York
debut on April 27 and its Washington, D.C., premiere on April 28,
follows the ups and downs of Khiev’s life, tracking him from exile in
Cambodia to London where he participates in the London Cultural
Olympiad, a sort of Olympics of poetry where he was selected from more
than 6,000 nominated poets.
Through Khiev’s journey Sugano highlights a history, an American
prison system and immigration policies that tear families apart and
often leave individuals by themselves to battle hardships.
In the film, Khiev is shown to be imperfect — at one point, he fails
to show up to teach vulnerable Cambodian children poetry — but his
ability to communicate his emotions and to simply keep moving forward
with his dreams make him an inspiring figure.
Khiev says in the film, “You have no idea how strong you are, when being strong is the only option you have.”
That strength and ability to flourish in adversity have already
helped others, Sugano told Al Jazeera. At a recent screening in
Minneapolis, a man set for deportation came up to Sugano and told the
director that the film “gave him strength,” that it helped him deal with
the knowledge that he could be exiled at any moment.
LA streets and prison poetry
Khiev was born in 1980 in a refugee camp in Thailand to a family that
had fled the Khmer Rouge. From 1975 to 1979, an estimated 1.7 million
people — nearly a fifth of the population — died in Cambodia under the
ultra-Maoist Khmer Rouge.
In 1981, Khiev and his family moved to Santa Ana, California — some
of the more than 100,000 Cambodians who took refuge in the United States
around that time. His family of nine lived in a two-bedroom apartment
in public housing “on the wrong side of the tracks,” Khiev said.
A 2005 study found that over 60 percent of Cambodian-Americans who fled the Khmer Rouge have some form of post-traumatic stress disorder, and another study found that PTSD in the Cambodian-American community is passed down from generation to generation.
Khiev told Al Jazeera that he didn’t understand what his mom and
older siblings had gone through. “It was swept under the rug,” he said.
By 14, Khiev had joined a gang with other young Cambodian-Americans, who
seemed to understand him better. "It almost felt," he told Al Jazeera,
like the gang members "knew how I felt. They understood."
Two years later, after his involvement in a gangland shooting, he was
tried as an adult and booked for attempted murder. “In two years, I
changed from a young innocent to a child soldier,” he said.
It was poetry that helped him transform again.
When Khiev finally got out of solitary in 2001, where he’d stayed
sane with those late-night recitations, he found himself in Folsom
prison on laundry duty. One day, there were three prisoners folding
clothes around him, “just sharing poetry, sharing verses,” he said. They
invited him to a weekly poetry class.
That Thursday in class, someone started speaking. “It was so real, so raw, so natural,” Khiev said.
That man, Marty Williams, was the one that finally labeled what Khiev
been doing solitary: spoken word poetry. “Just speak, just speak from
the heart,” Williams told Khiev.
Khiev took Williams' advice and kept doing spoken word, but it didn’t improve his luck.
When he was let out of prison, he’d done 14 years of his 16-year
sentence. But he was immediately taken to an immigration detention
center, where he spent another year behind bars, waiting to be
permanently ejected from the country he grew up in.
Second punishment
Even though he could hardly speak the
language of Cambodia, had been in the U.S. since before he could walk
and had already served his time, Khiev was being deported to Cambodia.
With no money, no passport and no family members in the country, he had
to start again.
In 1996, Congress passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant
Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), which stipulates that any non-citizen in
the U.S. can be deported if convicted of an aggravated felony. The term
"aggravated felony" has become a broad one. Cambodian-Americans have
been deported for crimes as minor as public urination and shoplifting.
Cambodia initially refused to accept the Cambodian-American exiles,
but in 2002, under U.S. pressure, the Cambodian government gave in.
Cambodia’s former ambassador to the U.S. told Macau’s Closer
magazine that the U.S. threatened to remove privileges granted
to the children of Cambodia’s elite leaders: “The U.S. told us that
there would be no more visas issued, and our kids couldn't go to school
in America."
The Department of Homeland Security was unable to provide official
statistics in time for publication, but since 2002, well over 200
Cambodian-Americans have been deported, and another nearly 2,000 live in
limbo, waiting for a deportation that could happen at any moment.
While some Cambodian-American exiles have prospered,
they have not all fared as well as Khiev. At least two
Cambodian-Americans have committed suicide after being dropped off in
Cambodia, and at least two have been murdered. One of them is believed
to have been killed in relation to his involvement with local criminals.
Both Khiev and Sugano said they hoped the documentary would help
viewers see beyond the labels of “deportee” or “felon.” Khiev said he
wanted to film to help people be “a little more compassionate, a little
more understanding and have more empathy to those whose stories might
not be so pretty.”
Khiev told Al Jazeera, “it’s not just my story.” It’s the story of
gangs, of prisons and of an immigration policy that doesn’t get much
press. But it’s also the story of the power of an individual to
flourish, even in the hardest of circumstances.
As Khiev explains in the film: “The human spirit will always search to thrive, not just survive.”
Future screenings of the movie can be seen here.
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