Metta Means I’m Sorry you’re Sorry: Intimate Enemies and Intersubjective agency

Metta Means I’m Sorry you’re Sorry: Intimate Enemies and intersubjective Agency in Cambodia

Darcie De Angelo
McGill University

Scholars have asserted that because Cambodians are Buddhist, they rationalize violence and trauma through ontological alterity, that is, a Buddhist ‘lack of agency’ (Cassaniti 2012). Karma, reincarnation, codes of strict behaviour, and hierarchy weave the ‘red thread’ that explain how people ’allow’ violence to take place. But, in Cambodia, these arguments risk repeating colonial convictions of ‘docile’ subjects, which do not correspond to histories of political uprisings, sanctioned revenge, and genocide. Today, former Khmer Rouge leaders and cadre must live and work side-by-side with their victims. How can we ‘archaeologize’ the ‘lack of agency’ or rather, the contemporary understandings about self-expressed in Khmer Rouge survival narratives in another way? What are the logical extrapolations of different expressions of agency when Cambodians say they feel metta for demining rats and dogs, that means, according to a deminer: “I’m sorry you’re sorry”? My fieldwork among deminers, who work with mine detection rats, shows that metta, or ‘pity-love,’ a Buddhist sentiment, when taken on its own terms rather than translated, helps to understand Khmer Rouge survival stories as a way to provoke pity in the listener. To be pitiable in Cambodia is to be loveable, but, more importantly, for a postgenocidal nation, to be pitiable proclaims the teller’s innocence. This is especially significant when Cambodians must confront the material remnants of war, when Khmer Rouge leaders manage demining organizations, and where every survivor, including one’s self, is an “intimate enemy” (Theidon 2012).