A harrowing tale of slavery from the Cambodian graphic artist and author Vannak Anan Prum – the man who experienced it all

Long the go to place for ‘ex-pats who lunch’ mid-September found me in Phnom Penh’s Java Café, its fan adorned balcony providing a panoramic view of Hun Sen Park, its statute of King Norodom Sihanouk looking northward, seemingly unimpressed at the view of the inglorious monstrosity that is the Naga World casino. Inside, away from the street noise and the miasma of Phnom Penh, I navigated to the air-conditioned room that lies to the left of the upstairs entrance. Here, as my eyes adjusted to the low light, I was able to make out what I had travelled from Siem Reap to see. 

Along the room’s walls hung a series of prints, some of them bright and colourful, others rendered in the more sobering lines of black and white. On these walls, a million miles away from the smells of coffee and polite conversation going on outside, the images documented a world of hardship and exploitation— a place of slavery—men hauling nets, sorting fish, trying to survive in a place where the shackles are the waters of the ‘deep blue sea’. 

The origin artist of these images is Vannak Anan Prum, a Cambodian national who, unwittingly, found himself enslaved on a small vessel plying the fishing grounds of Southeast Asia.

As a child Vannak had enjoyed drawing pictures in the dirt outside his rural home (Bruce Lee was a favourite subject). This interest evolved into a skill that followed this remarkable individual into adulthood—a journey that saw him spend time as a monk, a soldier and then a farm hand. 

But it is what happened after he left rural Cambodia for an alleged job in Thailand, five harrowing years at sea and on land as a slave, which is laid out starkly in The Dead Eye and the Deep Blue Sea, the book documenting these dark chapters in Vannak’s life.

The volume, described as a ‘graphic memoir of modern slavery’, is an astonishing body of work which, in 230+ pages of images and words, offers as much insight into modern slavery as any number of reports and conference proceedings can ever hope to do.

Some of these insights come by way of episodes that are truly harrowing. Take this experience from Vannak’s three and a half years at sea:
“One night I woke up needing a piss. I walked on deck toward the rope toilet at the stern and heard a strange noise nearby. It sounded like someone trying to kill a big fish. I crept to the end of the cabin and peeked around the corner just in time to see Kay cutting Dam’s head off with a cleaver.”

There are numerous similar stories scattered across the pages of The Deep Eye and the Deep Blue Sea , each one of them reinforcing the inhumanity that arises when people are treated as mere cogs in an exploitative economic machine.

Balancing out these episodes are depictions of the personal turmoil that Vannak endured over his half decade of enslavement – the hours spent longing for loved ones and home, the despair of not knowing if he would see either again, and the physical exhaustion experienced from long hours, with little sleep or food, of retrieving fishing nets and harvesting palm nuts. 

That Vannak escaped his holders and was able to eventually return to his wife and child in Cambodia—at first his wife did not recognise him and doubted the story that this ‘strange man’ told of his recent life—means that he is one of the ‘fortunate’. At the same time he acknowledges psychological scars that match the physical ones from his ‘slave days’. And one suspects that translating his story into pictures and words has been an important part in his path back to normalcy.  

A tale that is illuminating and tragic, Vannak’s survival and return home means that his story is also a triumphant one (in 2012 Vannak was presented with Human Rights Defenders Award for his work in documenting the fishing boat slave industry).

However one should not leave the final page of The Deep Eye and the Deep Blue Sea with the feeling that all is right with the world. The truth is much more sobering, for as Vannak and others have repeated and the recent Australian live-action film Buoyancy shows, millions remain locked in slave conditions across the globe (40 million by some counts) – not just on fishing boats, but also in factories, brothels and on plantations. In fact official records indicate that more people are enslaved today than in any other period in human history.

With this in mind the frozen fish section of your local supermarket may never look the same again. 

Available at all stores of Monument Books

A Savaged Dreamland. Journeys in Burma.

Author: David Eimer

Bloomsbury (2019)

Howl dines on David Eimer’s superb new account of modern day Burma, a land where the past is never that far away.

Appertiser

Five years ago, in a leafy café in the heart of Phnom Penh, I sat down with David Eimer whose new book, A Savaged Dreamland: Journeys in Burma, was published in August. Back then, however, our conversation centred on another book, also by Eimer, The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China, which I was reviewing for a city paper. 

Eimer was newly arrived in Phnom Penh, having escaped from Bangkok for a planned new beginning in the kingdom’s fair capital (it did not work out, Eimer moved on a few months after our interview). 

The Emperor Far Away was an excellent piece of travelling reportage and I enjoyed the opportunity to sit down and to talk to the man who had ‘fathered’ the tome. Time quickly passed and with the second latte kicking in David announced the need to leave for another appointment. There was, though, time for one last question as he made his way towards his bicycle.

“So what are you working on next?” 
“Something on Burma . . .’ David replied, “it’s more in my head than on paper, but it’s coming together.” 

And then he was gone, pedalling off into the monsoon sun of a lazy Phnom Penh afternoon. 

But now Mr. Eimer has returned and that ‘Burma book’, referred to several monsoons ago, has passed through its gestation and now seats prominently on the hollow shelves of the globe’s bookshops.

Main Course

‘Fractured land’: it is an oft-used term but in many ways it seems the best phrase to describe contemporary Burma. This was not how things appeared four short years ago, in 2015, when the National League for Democracy (NLD) swept to power, voters inspired by the promise of its Noble prize winning leader Aung San Suu Kyi’s  (or Daw Suu as she is know to most Burmese). In the aftermath of the election the number of international tourists arriving in Burma, previously in the low thousands, swelled to 3+ million, with Yangon, Bagan and Mandalay on the ‘hot list’ of places to visit. The end to isolation also saw foreign companies navigating to Burma’s shores, drawn by an inexpensive labour force, copious natural resources and the knowledge that they would no longer be called to account for trading with a pariah state. 

Four years on and this flush of optimism has given way to disappointment. Tourists numbers have declined markedly since the halcyon days of the mid-decade, while Daw Suu’s hero status has been tarnished by her seeming indifference to the persecution of the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority and the detention of local journalists. Behind the scenes, meanwhile, the nation’s generals remain clearly in charge, their control on the strings of power as tight as ever. 

It is this Burma, the country that rose and then fell from grace, that Savage Dreamland documents. And in Eimer it has found the perfect chronicler. Former foreign correspondent with the Daily Telegraph (China desk) and for the South China Morning Post (Southeast Asia) Eimer clearly has the reporting chops to bring the story of modern Burma into the light. 

To accomplish this task Eimer takes us on a ‘journey’, one that draws on history, culture and the post-WWII politics of Burma, mingled with interviews, conservations and ‘vignettes of observation’ draw from those who he meets and the places he visits through his travels. The resulting view of Burma is a thousand miles away from the post-card image of saffron clad monks and twilight-lit temples. Instead the nation emerges as a disjointed country; a land at war, where minorities, nominal leaders and generals battle with the notions of what the future should be, bracketed by the aspirations of powerful neighbours, with the whole menagerie periodically stirred by forces originating from imperial wrongs. 

Eimer also has an eye for detail and when he shares some of these with the reader his dispassionate reporter persona falls away—an account of watching Yangon natives using ropes and hitches to hoist food items to their top-floor balconies is one such example. Although quickly—too quickly perhaps—Eimer returns to the role of ‘objective observer’, his emotions and feelings placed on hold. The impression left is of a man meandering through a museum, telling us what he sees but revealing little of what it means to him. 

It is also a challenge, sometimes, to follow Eimer’s physical path across Burma. In part this is because the ‘journeys’ that feature in the book unfolded across several years of travel and reporting. But still, as a reader you long for some unity of theme or idea around which his movements can coalesce, rather than the patchwork feel that arises across the chapters of A Savage Dreamland.

Dessert

But none of this takes away from what is a compelling, informed and superbly written account of modern Burma. The result: A Savage Wonderland is—for now at least—the ‘go to’ book for those wishing to understand this most complex and divided of nations.

After Dinner Mints

Some factoids from A Savage Wonderland

• A third of Burma’s 55 million people belong to 30 or more ethnicities, the greater number in open conflict with the Burma’s national army (the Tatmadew).
• These conflicts represent the longest running civil wars in modern history. 
• In the 1950s Burma was home to a flourishing movie industry that reached as far as California, with the Burmese actress Win Win Than starring alongside Gregory Peck in the Hollywood production of The Purple Plain. 

David Eimer’s A Savage Wonderland is available at all Monument Book stores.