The Gate (2000) is the memoir of Francois Bizot, the only Western prisoner of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge to survive. The memoir is set in Cambodia from 1971 to 1979, and again briefly in 1989.
Frenchman Francois Bizot was in Cambodia from 1965 as a research scholar at the Angkor Conservation Office 13 kilometres from Siem Reap. Speaking fluent Khmer, he lived and worked at the well-known Angkor Wat site with his wife and daughter.
In Siem Reap from June 1970, largely unknown to the international community, the Khmer Rouge had surrounded Siem Reap as they were ‘discreetly growing more powerful.’ This was before the Khmer Rouge, under their leader Pol Pot, entered Phnom Penh and imposed its brutal regime from 1975 to 1979.
In October 1971, when his daughter was three years old, Bizot was working in Oudong 30 kilometres north of the capital Phnom Penh when he was taken prisoner with his two work colleagues, Lay and Son. He was accused of being a spy for the ‘American Imperialists’ and tortured at the Anlong Veng prison camp.
Bizot wrote his memoir 30 years after the event, and his writing is emotive and vivid, demonstrative of his physical and mental anguish. He writes of his relationship with his captors, and what he needs to do to survive.
The gate refers not only to the gate of the French Embassy where people sought refuge from the Khmer Rouge, but also the end of one phase of his life and the start of another – when one gate closes, another opens, and when one gate opens, another closes.
There are two main parts to the narrative: his captivity and survival before the Khmer Rouge imposed its rule over Cambodia, and his freedom during the Khmer Rouge regime – first getting his freedom and then his struggle to retain his personal freedom when citizens, and the nation, are losing theirs.
It is historically interesting, revealing the complexity of Cambodia’s international relations with America, Vietnam, and China, and with the international press. The liberators are not always easy to define in a country of mistrust and suspicion, where captor and liberator are sometimes the same person.
It’s not always easy to read, not only for obvious reasons of brutality, but also underlying reasons – Bizot’s relationship with his wife and child, and with his two work colleagues. However, its style is fairly easy to read in the literal sense, despite its fragmented time sequences and academic approach.
When Bizot returns to Cambodia in 1989, after the death of the Khmer Rouge’s ruler, Pol Pot, his recollections and memoirs are blurred, and this too is interesting. What does his mind choose to remember, and what does it choose to forget?
MARTINA NICOLLSis an international aid and development consultant, and the authorof:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom(2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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