Indochina: Reign and Legacy

French Indochina map. 

This week I watched director Rithy Panh’s The Seawall and read selected passages from France and “Indochina” Cultural Representations as well as read France in Indochina Colonial Encounters. Both books gave a good overview of colonial domination in French Indochina (Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam) as a whole, and more specifically how French aesthetics and practices were implanted into the colonies as a form of power. I overall enjoyed France and “Indochina” Cultural Representations, a compilation of essays, and found scholar Penny Edwards’ piece about “Taj Angkor” to relate very muchto what I have already read, especially in Michael Di Giovine’s The Heritage-scape. France in Indochina Colonial Encounters was also a very thorough book about colonial visuality and media, but 1) did not translate French into English (sorry my right brain doesn’t have google translate built in?) and 2) I felt may have over exaggerated or was overly critical, a bit like Cambodia’s Curse: The Modern History of a Troubled Land.

Original cover of Duras' book.

The Seawall, or in French Un barrage contre le Pacifique, is based off of Marguerite Duras’ same-titled novel, one of the first to criticize colonialism in Southeast Asia, and Panh then molded the plot to fit the Cambodian context. Set in 1931, the film begins showing the immense estate belonging to “Madam” and her children, Joseph and Suzanne. Her husband, a civil servant, has either died or disappeared—it is not made clear. We first see madam in the rice fields, realizing that the crops for her and the villagers have been completely ruined because the salt water destroyed them.

Also at the beginning of the film, we find out that Joseph has purchased a horse, and that dies only after one week. Joseph pushes and pushes the horse to work, and finally, it collapses suffocating. According to Nicola Cooper, author of the essay “Disturbing the Colonial Order” in France and “Indochina” Cultural Representations, “the death of the family’s horse symbolizes at once the good intentions and the ideas of the European migrants to Indochina, and their failures.” As Duras’ novel originally states “Il essaya honnêtement de faire le travail qu’on lui demandait et qui était bien au-dessus de ses forces depuis longtemps, puis il creva,” or in English, “He tried honestly to the work that was asked of him and which had been beyond his capacities for a long time. And then he died” (Cooper in Robson & Kim 85, 93).  Madam is like the horse: she tries to “realize a hopeless project” (building a seawall, discussed later), and “succumbs to a seemingly inevitable outcome: madness and death,” just like the horse (Cooper in Robson & Kim 85).

The Seawall.

Madam’s main goal throughout the film is to gain the title to the plot of land she lives on, and to let the villagers use it as well. Part of this includes constructing the Seawall to ensure that the saltwater does not rush in and ruin the harvest in the future. She goes to the villagers and explains this request, and although is at first met with skepticism, the villagers oblige. She is very mutually orientated with the villagers and sees them as “equal” as the time period allows. Madam soon realizes that she was bribed into living on the faulty plot of land that she does, and writes to the French government that she is horrified by this and ashamed to be French—a theme that continues throughout the plot. Duras in her novel as well refers to French colonial corruption often (86). By the end of the film, the Cambodian people build a seawall, watch the rice become “pregnant” (in Balinese language, the term “pregnant” is also used as in both societies, rice has a soul), and in the end watch the seawall collapse.

A pepper plant outside of Kampot, Cambodia
Taken by yours truly in December 2009

The land entitlement certificate disputes get worse throughout the film when Mr. Khing, a Frenchman, tells the villagers around Madame’s bungalow that all of the plots that they have lived and worked on for their whole lives are now owned by and in control of the French government. This is because the Cambodian did not have a title for the land. As the French put it in the film: “Our office has let you farm this land.” The French want the Cambodians to stay on the land, and use demeaning rhetoric to make this look like a favor from the French. Why do the French want the Cambodians to stay? Because pepper plants (what they want to grow) are more valuable than gold, and people need to work on the pepper plantation. As Panh discusses critically in a Cinemonde interview (part of the DVD’s special features), the World Bank still does this today by forcing exports upon countries, such as palm oil, that farmers cannot actually use to feed their families. This makes the land, essentially, not theirs.

A pepper plantation outside of Kampot, Cambodia. Taken
by yours truly in December 2009

As Madam states, “This colony will never experience peace nor rest,” because not only have the French usurped the Cambodian’s livelihoods, but also have taken their dignity. She writes to the French that it is unfair to take the peasants’ land for pepper plants and that the peasants actually “know [their] methods inside and out.” She even writes to the French government to say that she has told the peasants that the government takes advantage of them with the fraudulent land certificates.

Indochina's "Piastres" money.

There are other mini plots throughout the film, for example, Joseph falling in love (lust is actually a better term) with a French girl who he follows to Saigon, and a “Chinaman,” or “Mr. Jo,” who falls in love with Suzanne, only to turnout to be complete scum and on the side of the French taking land. A main string throughout the film is that the family does not have any money, and must rely on selling a diamond ring that Mr. Jo gave Suzanne for money. Nonetheless, this diamond ring has a flaw and it is only by luck that the family can sell it to pay for their debts.

Postcard image circulated during
colonial exhibitions in France of a
"Cambodian Palace Pavillion." 

A French woman in Indochina’s role was to be a “moral tutor” of the “uncivilized” people (Cooper 101). Indeed, various advertisements and pamphlets instructed, “metropolitan French women in Indochina should improve conditions of the colony” (Cooper 102). (Another part was that by having the white men’s wives there, they would not stray with indigenous women and create an “unstable home life” (Cooper 102).) Not all women, however, did this. Madam exemplifies this role as a moral tutor, in a more equal and less “patriarchal feminist” way, because her profession was as a teacher (Cooper 101). Madam genuinely worries about the Cambodian people, and this worry eats at her and in part causes her bad health. We watch madam become disillusioned with the French colonial pursuit and wonder what the French are doing in Cambodia. The “charm and allure” of French Indochina subsided rapidly with “feelings of disappointment, failure, and impotence” (Cooper in Robson & Kim 81). It is also important to note that Indochina was never a settler colony, and that adverts had to convince French people to make the four-week boat journey to go (there was no air service until 1938) (Cooper 118). Very much unlike other French colonies such as Algeria, the French presence in Indochina never surpassed 42,000 (Cooper 118).   

Postcard from France's colonial exposition.

The French attempted to make their being in Cambodia as part of a humanitarian mission to cover up its economic motives (Cooper 33). This was meant to separate France from other European colonial powers that were more explicitly exploitative (Cooper 33). France showed off how much they helped Indochina through exhibits in France: general public works, constructing bridges, building rail / road networks, cultivating land for food, modernizing agriculture, and using raw materials (Cooper 79). This was all spun to be good. In other words: an ethical façade masked colonialism’s exploitive activity in Indochina. These “humanitarian” ideas then lead into what Cooper calls “media colonialism,” in which the main goal is not exploring unknown continents, but rather surveilling the already appropriated (Cooper 68). France, and most of Europe, was then fixed in an “authoritative gaze of dominating power” (Cooper 68).   

Street scene in Kampot, Cambodia. Taken by yours truly in
December 2009

Arc de Triomphe surrounded by fountains
and gardens in Vientiane, Laos. Taken
by yours truly in November 2009 

Cooper describes how colonial urbanism “asserts coercive force” and actually “reinforces cultural and economic superiority over the colonized” (Cooper 49). Urban architecture visually imposes the French’s dominance over Indochina. France used city-planning to reassert its identity and colonial ideal in Indochina (Cooper 49). Architecture was a form of dominance. “The visual impact of the cities…was a codified version of France’s doctrine colonial (Cooper 49). The political motives behind implanting this architectural style into Indochina were to infuse a French identity in the people (Cooper 52). Soon, in the 1930s, Indochina was heavily peppered with French colonial buildings, as well as scattered indigenous villages in the countryside (Cooper 52). These ideas tie into “media colonialism,” and how the architecture might be the visual surveillance giving the French power à la Foucault’s Panopticon (Cooper 68).

French language was not only meant to dominate the people (as the peasants were unable to communicate with the higher-ups, as The Seawall exemplifies), but also in Indochina’s case especially, to homogenize the people from Laotian, Cambodian, and Vietnamese backgrounds into one (Cooper 53). Education in Indochina sought to imbue more French nationalism into the people (Cooper 57). Indeed, the “leçons de morale” were meant to garner loyalty amongst the Indochinese colony and instruct them on what they owed to France (Cooper 57).

Kampot, Cambodia. Taken by
yours truly in December 2009

Angkor Wat poster.

As Rithy Panh explains in the Cinemonde interview, the French saw settling in Indochina as a civilizing mission. Digging underneath this common colonial excuse, Penny Edward’s describes in her essay “Taj Angkor: Enshrining l’Inde in le Cambodge” that although there was the “constant chorus of Cambodia’s need for French protection,” France actually “needed Cambodia to assert its own stakes in the global hegemony of cultural scholarship” (Edwards in Robson & Kim 23). Angkor Wat, for the French, was the “la perle de l'Extreme-Orient” or analogous to India as Britain’s “jewel in the crown.” It represented a great piece of cultural wealth that the French had and was a symbol for their colonial conquest. In fact, Angkor Wat was paraded throughout France in different exhibitions (exhibitions that showed France’s public works, discussed above). Today, Angkor Wat stands as a “locus of nostalgia for the lost empire” (Edwards in Robson & Kim 23). Indeed, Cooper analyzes French tourism trends and sees colonial rhetoric in multiple advertisements for Indochina, while there is a collective colonial amnesia in France about other former colonies, such as Algeria (Cooper 205). The colonial buildings today evoke a sense of “a time lost” for many people, namely French as Cooper argues. What makes Indochina so romantic and exotic? Is it that it was so far? Far enough to forget an exploitative colonial legacy through aesthetically pleasing and picturesque landscape? 

Works Cited:

Cooper, Nicola. “Disturbing the Colonial Order: Dystopia and Disillusionment in Indochina” in Robson, Kathryn and Jennifer Yee, eds. France and Indochina Cultural Representations. New York, New York: Lexington Books, 2005. Print.

Cooper, Nicola. France in Indochina Colonial Encounters. New York, New York: Berg Press, 2001. Print.

Edwards, Penny. “Taj Angkor: Enshrining l’Inde in le Cambodge” in Robson, Kathryn and Jennifer Yee, eds. France and Indochina Cultural Representations. New York, New York: Lexington Books, 2005. Print.

The Seawall. Dir. Rithy Panh. Catherine Dussart Productions, 2008. Film.