Home SOS. Katherine Brickell
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Название: Home SOS

Автор: Katherine Brickell

Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited

Жанр: География

Серия:

isbn: 9781118898420

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СКАЧАТЬ of issues amassing, and the quotidian internalisation of this harm, is etched into the crisis ordinary. To escape it, suicide is one route Orm contemplated. The only thing deterring her suicide was concern for her children’s well‐being. Orm had lost both her parents when she was a child during the Khmer Rouge regime and after being forcibly displaced to Battambang Province lived with her grandmother before she was also killed. Moved regularly across the country, Orm variously laboured on rice fields, broke up termite mounds, and built irrigation channels, all under the regime’s orders. She did not wish her daughters to be orphaned as she had. In her first marriage, she explained that her husband’s parents did not accept her because she was an orphan. Often, she said, looking down, ‘they didn’t allow me to sleep inside with my husband, closing the door on me’ and forcing her to sleep outside. Orm’s desire for home and acceptance had once again been stymied.

      For Orm, the ensuing crisis was not only an event but felt like ‘an enduring condition of life’ (Roitman 2013, p. 2) that she could not escape however hard she tried. This is in large part because of the normative ideals and constraints to which she felt held as a Cambodian woman who should be happily married and living in a stable conjugal home. In Cambodia these seemed available only to certain populations she was stigmatised by, and excluded from, on moral and financial grounds. That crisis ‘entails reference to a norm’ (Roitman 2013, p. 4) was especially pertinent to Orm’s gendered story of the crisis ordinary.

      Given this complex legal picture of marital dissolution, a profile form was again used to collect data on marital status, age, household structure pre‐ and post‐breakdown(s) (including intermediary arrangements), and engagement in paid work (again with notes to any changes). The women ranged in age between 24 and 48 years old. Whilst the project predominantly focused on Krobei Riel, I also spent time attempting (largely in vain) to relocate the 19 women who had experienced marital breakdown identified in my doctoral research in the Slorkram commune. I did, however, manage to successfully recontact and re‐interview Orm with the help of a photograph I had kept from seven years prior.

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