Cambodian Grrrl: Self-Publising in Phnom Penh by Anne Elizabeth Moore

Cambodian Grrrl: Self-Publising in Phnom Penh Reviews

• 
  Tatyana Kagamas

  The most charming parts of the book come in Anne Elizabeth Moore's interactions with the vibrant Cambodian teenagers she is collaborating with. Moore's portrayal of the girls' excitement, interests, challenges and daily lives is fascinating, exciting, empathetic and often quite funny.
  
  I do, however, find certain parts of the book problematic. The beginning and middle sections are largely composed of Moore's impressions of Cambodian culture and how the country's history impacts its present. These sections tend to posit her simultaneously as an uninformed visitor who is unable to obtain information about Cambodian language and culture, and as an expert passing judgement on exactly how the painful Khmer Rouge regime should be understood and examined in contemporary Cambodian culture. Both perspectives place her in the context of the book and her work as an outsider who is either too uninformed to participate in Cambodia culture, or who exists solely to pass judgement on how history should be integrated and perceived by a generation of Cambodians who did not directly experience it.
  
  One of the main themes of the book is in fact the tension between Moore's own fascination with the brutality of the Khmer Rouge regime and contemporary Cambodian culture's reluctance to address this history. I personally find her obsession with this period disconcerting and her insistence that the lack of dialogue about it is inherently bad as a serious flaw and an example of cultural imperialism and insensitivity.
  
  Obviously her work in Cambodia is important, as evidenced by the excitement and empowerment that the girls feel when creating and disseminating zines. I do however find that certain inconsistencies in her highly defined political stance and her work in and writing on Cambodian go unaddressed for the sake of a black and white argument in her favor.
• 
  Kimberly

  I was excited to read this book because I thought it would be more from the point of view of the actual Cambodian girls...wrong. I've been to Cambodia so already knew the history. It just wasn't the oral history type book I thought it would be, but I enjoyed it all the same.
• 
  Veronica

  It looks cute, but it packs a punch.
  ------------------------------------
  Disclaimer: I consider Anne Elizabeth Moore a friend and partner in crime. So my gloating about how awesome this book is should be taken with an industrial sized grain of salt. Or maybe not, because it is true.
  
  The full title of the book is Cambodian Grrrl: Self Publishing in Phnom Penh. But this book is neither about Cambodia nor self-publishing. Rather it is about love.
  
  Sure, Anne heads out to Cambodia and meets up with a gaggle of giggly Cambodian grrrls who live in the only dormitory for females in the country. Sure she teaches them how to make zines and express their thoughts and feelings. But the main theme is love. And me telling you that does not ruin the book. In fact it may make it even more awesome for you.
  
  The most poignant part of the book is how powerful it is to teach young women to value their voice. Anne does it over and over, sometimes not even aware of the women she is teaching until a zine finds itself onto her bunk, as if some underground rebel newspaper. And in many ways, it is.
  
  Anne writes in the same manner as she speaks. Direct and simple yet complex. She doesn't waste time with a lot of big academic speak, instead she paints complex thought exercises with every day words. I think this is why I love her so. There's no way you can miss when she throws down the gauntlet like when asks you to consider why those of us in the USA would be up in arms over Cambodians never being educated about the Khmer Rouge, but we barely bat an eye on the invisibleness of the plight of American Indians.
  
  Somehow Anne is able to discuss issues of democracy, freedom of speech, the global garment market, slave labor, rape, mass murder and a litany of other tough subjects and leave me smiling. That left me with hope that all we really do need is love. And a sharpie.
• 
  E. V. Gross

  I wanted more of the girls' voices to come through in this book. I mostly felt that it was bogged down by the author's perspective, which was what I was worried about when I first picked up this book and read the title/description. I expected Cambodian Grrrl to be a collection of self-published zines but really it was a story about the author's relationship with Cambodia, Cambodian history and the girls that she met/helped. It's an okay story, but not completely what it claims to be, or rather, what the title/description might suggest.
• 
  Rick Silva

  Author Anne Elizabeth Moore recounts her time living in a girls college dormitory in Phnom Penh, where she taught a class on zine-making. The connections between zines and Southeast Asia were an immediate hook for me, as both are among my areas of interest.
  
  The author packs a lot of insights into a relatively thin volume. From feminism to punk culture to consumerism, to the culture of haggling to government corruption to the legacy of the Pol Pot regime, Moore gives a rapid-fire exchange of views from herself, her students, and some of her co-workers at the school.
  
  The book is a good primer on life in Phnom Penh and on some of the challenges facing Cambodia today. It covers enough of the history of the Pol Pot period to get some understanding of how the horrors of those years continue to influence modern Cambodia. The book is also packed with quirky details and little bits of insights into culture and language.
  
  I would have like to have seem some samples of the actual zines, and the book left me wanting to hear more from the powerful voices of the Cambodian grrrls that made such an impression on the author.
• 
  Brendan

  This is a fantastic little book filled with some big ideas. Entirely informative about a country and culture most people aren't exposed to, in addition to waving the flag for self-publishing and expression. About as punk as it gets.
• 
  Malcolm

  This fabulous small book operates at several levels and packs a punch for doing so: it is a travelogue of an unsettling kind, a text of feminist practice, an example of cultural politics in action, a justification of a punk sensibility-of-subversion and a tale of the politics of national amnesia. In it, Anne Elizabeth Moore (and here I have to confess to a bit of fandom – Punk Planet, which she edited and that I stumbled upon from time to time on travels away from my small South Pacific homeland, was one of those things that had a real impact, and for the life of me I can’t now find any of the old copies…that’s what being peripatetic does) heads off to Phnom Penh to teach zine production to Cambodian students. Not all the exciting, we might think – but let’s step back a bit.
  
  First, she’s living in the first dormitory for women students in the country, opened in 2007 (as far as I can work out her narrative).
  
  Second, Cambodian women are, by all the rules of the local cultural norms, expected to be silent, compliant and seem to fulfil most of the occidental stereotypes of the submissive Asian woman.
  
  Third, the young women she is working with are, in many case, first generation University students from rural areas.
  
  Fourth, Cambodia has a huge historical hole, the period they don’t discuss when it was Kampuchea and run by the Khmer Rouge (KR) and during which over 2 million people died in a little over three years in the 1970s.
  
  Fifth, in 2011 World Bank figures rank Cambodia’s Gross Domestic Product as 123 out of 193 countries rated, with a per capita GDP for the period 2005-11 that saw it ranked 141st out of 181 countries assessed.
  
  Sixth, according to the UN, Cambodia ranks 99 out of 145 countries on the Gender Inequality Index (GII) in the Human Development Report 2011.
  
  So, heading off to Cambodia to encourage young women to find their own voices should really encourage us to do an awful lot more than shrug a so what; it seems an essentially subversive thing to be doing.
  
  Moore has a light touch and a disarming conversational style which allows her to balance pen portraits of the young women she works with alongside distressing tales of the KR years, unsettled reflections on the use by the tourist industry of the KR years alongside the reflection that you have to work with what you’ve got and stories of locals who want to set aside/tear down the memorials and put it behind them. There is a sense here of a country in part still traumatised by the events of the later half of the 1970s, where the period on to be moved beyond, not remembered. One of the most unsettling things is how little the women she works with know of the period, even though some were born during it – but then it is not taught in schools and some key players in the Cambodian state have close KR links.
  
  It is quite hard to tell, however, exactly why Moore seems to pay so much attention to the period – whether it is her key way in, whether it is based on an assumption that for many readers that is all we know about the place, or whether (and I suspect this to be the case) she is trying to work out the role of this historical hole in the country’s psyche. I detect, running below the surface of this first of four short titles about her Cambodian experience (the second, New Girl Law, was published earlier this year), a deep seated concern about a return to the old ways and security of ‘tradition’ as not in these young women’s best interests. Alongside that, however, is a sense of alarm and perplexity for this group of 32 intelligent young women to succeed in a context where they are developing a feminist consciousness and commitment to social justice they will need to confront the KR years.
  
  Amid all of this, however, the central political aspect of the book comes from her allusion to and discussion of the Sandinista’s literacy campaigns in Nicaragua during the 1970s and 1980s – where she points explicitly to literacy as the ability to both read (and therefore find out and believe) and write anything.
  
  Most heartening is that throughout the book there is a gradual sense these 32 young women finding their voices through an underground network of zines, of independent distribution, and in the final pages of going out to spread the word-of-zine. I’m looking forward very much to the next three volumes (New Girl Law is in the to-read pile now, but alas some other things must take precedent for work and well overdue reviewing reasons). We deserve to be humbled by these young women, and to sing Moore’s praises as a cultural activist of the kind we could do with many more of.
• 
  Tobi

  What happens when punk rock feminism travels across international borders?
  
  

  Cambodian Grrrl: Self-Publishing in Phnom Penh tells the story of
  Anne Elizabeth Moore's trip to Cambodia to teach zine making to teenage girls. I saw Anne read at the Olympia Timberland Library before I read Cambodian Grrrl. I remember feeling like the audience for the book was white, privileged Americans and wondered if her reading would have differed had the crowd at the library been more diverse. Reading the book, I questioned how the teenage girls in the book would represent their own experience of the zine-making workshop. Most of all, I wanted to read the zines the girls had created. My favorite part of the book was the epilogue where Moore includes writing by the girls about zine-making.

  
  
  

  I came away from the story feeling like zine making as self-publishing is a cultural practice that travels across international borders well because it encourages each person to represent themselves on their own terms. I guess this could be seen as a form of individualism, in that it focuses on art/media/culture as self-expression, but I don't think there is anything necessarily inherent about self-publishing that requires zines be personal. I was drawn to Moore's political writing most of all. I ended up doing some research on Cambodian history, specifically the
  Killing Fields, which Moore discusses in the book. The oral history of the Khmer Rouge was powerful.

  
  
  

  Moore's recent iteration
  Independent Youth-Driven Cultural Production in Cambodia (IYDCPC) seems to show the project evolving beyond the per-zine:
  
  

  "(IYDCPC) is an international institute based in Phnom Penh that encourages multidisciplinary creative responses to issues related to popular culture, with a particular focus on media, advertising, marketing, youth, gender, democracy, human rights, and globalization in Southeast Asia"

  
  
  I look forward to seeing what happens next and hope to read Cambodian grrrl zines someday.
• 
  Cinnamon

  I have one major complaint with this book. I managed to read this book while eating dinner one night and breakfast the next day. Which means: this book was TOO SHORT! I think Anne would disagree with me, but I really would have liked for it to be at least twice as long. I wanted to read all of the students' zines, not just a sample. I want to know what they think about zines now. I want to know how many people they shared Anne's training with. I want to know how they giggle so much. I want to know if their families read their zines and what they thought of them. I want, sigh, I want to sit down and have a cup of tea and a brownie and just listen to them all talk. About anything. Anything at all.
  
  I'd read this book described as a travel book. And while I'm not sure that I know enough about Phnom Penh to travel there just from reading this book. I can say that reading this book makes me want to travel there.
• 
  Jake Gest

  What can I say about this book? It wasn't a subject matter I would normally pick up. A friend had suggested it, not because she had read it, but because she was familiar with the author and knew that I have enjoyed some zine publications by other authors in the past. I was surprised that my total lack of knowledge on Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge did not detract from my enjoyment of the book. I don't feel like I learned a lot about those things from reading this, but it didn't seem to be the author's intent to inform. It was more of a glimpse, or taste of a very specific part of Cambodian people through the eyes of a westerner, and all that entails. I enjoyed Moore's interactions and dialogue with the girls. The power of this work is the author's willingness to include herself and her opinions within the text. Her transparency of being subjective and involved holds more weight than a feigned objectivity that might have been presented.
• 
  Zoe Zolbrod

  A charming, heart-felt, light and heavy little book. Highly recommend to anyone interested in travel, South East Asia, the intersection of American cultural imperialism and celebration of self-expression.
• 
  Victoria Law

  Tore through it in one night. A really engaging read and a good eye opener for those with very little knowledge about Cambodia.
• 
  James Payne

  Very enjoyable / made me want to make a zine.