MindSpinner

Do you remember this photograph? It arrested me when I saw it in the news in April of 1998, and I downloaded it to my hard drive. I’ve showed it to students in journalism classes since and asked, “What is this? What story does this photograph tell?”

After closely scrutinizing it, somebody usually comes up with the observation that the box looks as if it might be a casket, and this might be the funeral of person who died in poverty. This image of the funeral pyre of Pol Pot spoke to me eloquently, in manner of Greek tragedy, of a pathetic end to a powerful, cruel life. It said everything there is to say about downfall and disgrace.

Except it didn’t. I googled other photographs. I know that this is macabre, but there’s a thread here that must be followed. I wanted to see more of this funeral, to know how this life ended. Here’s Pol Pot dead on his bare mattress. Those are flowers behind his head, the same flowers, apparently, that top the wooden casket on the pyre, with the chair. Did you see the flowers on the casket? I didn’t make them out until today. Someone put the flowers there.

The bare mattress. The dead man. The fan. The flowers.

The first picture looks as if almost no one was there at Pol Pot’s funeral, just a few men to throw whatever would burn onto the pyre. But there were others there. Certainly there was the photographer. It was his wife, pictured below, who found him dead. Her face, at the funeral, is as inscrutable as Mona Lisa’s. Is this grief? Is there a hint of relief hovering at the corners of her mouth? Did she love him, or did duty bind her to stay? Does she wonder here what will happen next? Was it she who brought the flowers? I know I don’t know.

His daughter stands beside her mother. A little girl half grown up lost a father when Pol Pot died.

Each photograph adds something more, but I can’t tell exactly what. I can only tell how these images suggest to me something of lives - that they can’t be neatly understood, succinctly labeled, and sealed away forever as if there are no more questions to be asked of them or of ourselves.

(Note: The first three pictures may be found at http://www.ishipress.com/pot-pyre.htm. The last appears in a PBS story about Pol Pot’s daughter Malai, in 2002.)