This is a guest post by Jessica Mack. Jessica Mack is a Senior Editor at Gender Across Borders.
This summer while traveling in Southeast Asia, I learned a new term: dark tourism. If you haven’t heard it before, you probably already know the concept. Dark tourism is what happens when former places of tragedy and horror become memorialized, then patronized by droves of tourists. Like Ground Zero in New York City, or Nelson Mandela’s prison cell on Robben Island. It’s where dark memories, human curiosity, and capitalism mix. As the travel blog Vagabondish points out, with dark tourism there is a fine line between curiosity and exploitation. When I travel, as a feminist – and a very privileged feminist at that – I am constantly aware of that line.
I’ve written before about the value of shock in catalyzing meaningful social change, especially around issues of women’s rights. Graphic images and disturbing details are deeply troubling, and are triggers too difficult for many. But if bearable, they can be critical and experiential ways to deepen our work as activists.
It was in this spirit – part human curiosity, part social justice drive to witness, and part boredom – that I took a dive into the land of dark tourism one hot Cambodian afternoon a few months ago. On my last day in Phnom Penh, I hopped a motorcycle taxi to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum. Tuol Sleng, also known as S-21, is a former high school that was converted into a prison by the Khmer Rouge from 1975 to 1979.
During those four years, an estimated 20,000 people were imprisoned, tortured, and killed. Right there, in the place you walk through. The museum’s website boasts 500 visitors a day now, which means that in just two months, as many voluntary, paying tourists will shuffle through as did torture victims and prisoners over four years.
Anyhow, I’m not really a new age-y person, but the energy in this place is heavy. Traveling through the maze of rooms is like walking through a spaghetti carwash of grief and horror. This becomes even more acute at the end, when you’re confronted with several walls of large, black-and-white prisoner mug shots. You stand there, gaping, and staring back at you, with deep fear in their eyes, are hundreds of men, women, and children who lived and died within those walls.
The photos are great quality so you can see very single detail of their faces. One woman’s prisoner number is obscured by the nursing baby at her breast. Seeing those eyes looking back at me – in particular the young girls and women – was too much. I sat down and heaved sobs.
For a second I wondered, why the hell am I here? Am I a weirdo that I chose to spend my last day in Cambodia like this? All alone, sweating profusely from the god-awful heat, and feeling absolutely helpless against the waves of horror I was taking in. I knew I wasn’t, I just had to remind myself that I was there on purpose.
When I finally exited, catching my breath, my motorcycle taxi driver smiled and waved me down. As we rode back through the evening rush hour, he began to tell me his own experience with the Khmer Rouge. His father, he said, had been a well-known army doctor. When the Khmer Rouge took power, and began systematic killings of the educated, elite, or suspected subversives, his father fled with his family to the country. There they set up in hopes of a simple, anonymous life. But his father was too well-known, and to save his own skin a neighbor alerted the authorities. Soon after, members of the Khmer Rouge arrived and shot him.
Immediately after delivering this horrible punch line, my driver nonchalantly offered me a stick of Doublemint Gum. In that moment, like a flash of lightening, I glimpsed the odd marriage of the mundane and the gruesome in Cambodia, where genocide is a solid part of the foundation on which the country’s present is built.
It’s not only like that in Cambodia, but other places around the world. When you travel almost anywhere in the world, you will see this, and it’s important to witness. Pain and suffering really are an integral part of reality – I think it’s just like the Buddhists say. In the US, Europe, and Canada we mostly have the funds and infrastructure to sanitize death or shut away horror.
Watching the world through feminist eyes, we see these walls break down and the result can be life changing. It’s not a result of hopelessness or helplessness, but one that should simultaneous deepen awareness of privilege, and strengthen commitment to action. Particularly among feminists who have the privilege to do so, it’s especially crucial to bear witness. So often in history’s tragedies – the Holocaust, the Khmer Rouge genocide, DRC’s ongoing war – women have either lacked the political, social, or financial power to change things, or have been singled out in their vulnerability to violence.
Traveling and participating in dark tourism, to a certain degree, is an important schooling in privilege as well. When I was in Ghana for work earlier this year, I visited Elmina Castle, the first slave-trading post in sub-Saharan Africa. It was built by the Portuguese, then served the Dutch and finally the British. An estimated 30,000 Africans passed through Elmina’s famous “door of no return” as they were loaded onto America-bound slave ships.
A black colleague and I took a guided tour, along with a plucky group of white Europeans who looked alternately clueless and troubled to be standing where their ancestors one might have. Some took typical smiling snapshots in the dungeon-like cells and I tried not to judge. I don’t believe my ancestors were slave-owners, but I knew that didn’t make me blameless in the hegemony of white power, by any stretch.
Walking through the stone-cold cells, I was mortified to realize how flimsy and one-sided my public school education had been on the history of the African slave trade. I had learned all about slavery’s proliferation and emancipation in the US, but next to nothing about the horror leading up to it: life for Africans in Africa during the trade. I was acutely aware of my privilege standing there, not only as a white person, but as an American. I was overwhelmed by the eloquence of our tour guide and the vibrant, gorgeous culture of this country I was spending several weeks in. I was so god damn sad, but also so lucky, to be standing in that castle amid the weight of history.
These experiences – which are deeply challenging on a personal and emotional level – mean so much to me, and I truly think can be a constructive, deliberate measure of deepening social activism. I call myself a “global feminist” because I strive to be globally minded. I live in a whole wide world, not just a house or a country. I want to connect, consider, and empathize with the realities of women 7,569 miles away. Or at least I will keep trying.