Bomb Children: Life in the Former Battlefields of Laos

by Leah Zani

Half a century after the CIA's Secret War in Laos—the largest bombing campaign in history—explosive remnants of war continue to be part of people's everyday lives. In Bomb Children Leah Zani offers a perceptive analysis of the long-term, often subtle, and unintended effects of massive air warfare. Zani traces the sociocultural impact of cluster submunitions—known in Laos as “bomb children”—through stories of explosives clearance technicians and others living and working in these old air strike zones. Zani presents her ethnography alongside poetry written in the field, crafting a startlingly beautiful analysis of state terror, authoritarian revival, rapid development, and ecological contamination. In so doing, she proposes that postwar zones are their own cultural and area studies, offering new ways to understand the parallel relationship between ongoing war violence and postwar revival.

Genres: History, Anthropology

185 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 16, 2019

About the author

I am a public anthropologist and author. I write richly human stories about explosives, warfare, and the way we understand power.

I earned my Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Irvine, where I studied the effects of air warfare in Laos. I trained as a researcher with the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, in partnership with the Nobel Prize-winning Mines Advisory Group. I have presented my research in Laos to the United States Congress. I have written for Cultural Anthropology, Kenyon Review, Consequence, and SAPIENS, among others. I am the author of Strike Patterns, winner of the 2023 IPPY Gold Prize for Creative Nonfiction.

As a reader, my favorite books are intelligent, imaginative, and beautifully written. I read a lot of speculative fiction and nature writing. My favorite author is (of course) my fellow anthropologist, Ursula Le Guin.

Reviews

[FluffyNyctea]

In Laos, military wasting inhabits the time-travelling temporality of haunting: Problematic pasts leak out of containment, and seep into the present. The explosion of a bomb is the literal explosion of military wasting at a precise moment in everyday living; it is ghosts exploding with life. This is the ‘parallelism of military wasting and everyday living (pp. 102).’ This parallelism is experienced as the apprehension of explosions: To apprehend an explosion is to apprehend both the literal moment of explosion, the blast radius as a social field haunted by disability, and the curative ideal and materiality of Buddhist ontology.

I focus on the disabling and curative aspects of apprehension. To be disabled by an explosion is to stay in the centre of a blast radius that was already haunted by the possibility of disability before exact disabling incidents, and that continues to disable as survivors navigate a sociocultural environment that blunts the flourishing of their bodyminds. The young man employed by the uxo Survivor’s Centre remains in repeated injury as shards of shrapnel persist in his flesh, and as his social prospects languish in Buddhist ontology’s stigmatisation of impairments ‘as further karmic reverberations for bad actions in this or previous lives (pp. 120).’

The same ontology seeks to cure those disabled by explosions. This cure refers to ‘overcoming disability’s karmic handicap (pp. 127).’ More precisely, it is instantiated as Buddhist tone poems that operate on a spiritual and affective level, mandating bodyminds to apprehend through listening to (how about those permanently deafened survivors?) and resonating with (read: conforming to) flows of power (read: differential power relations).

By this point, Zani’s parallelism of military wasting and everyday living frustrates me so much – Zani says so little about the violence infiltrated deep in their theorisation of apprehension, almost as if they don’t have a problem with disabled people being stigmatised and forced to conform to the exact power relations that stigmatise them. Theorising within critical disability studies, a discipline mired in Euro-American universalism, Eli Clare's Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure (pp. 26) points to the violence of cure – ‘At the center of cure lies eradication.’ Put in Zani’s own Theravada Buddhist cosmology-informed words, ‘disabled people [are] understood to manifest dangerous and disorderly powers (pp. 121).’ Thus, they must be cured, eradicated, for peace to be restored.

One of the theorists Zani does engage with, Jasbir K. Puar, points to imperial processes that debilitate people in the Global South even if they don’t seem or identify as disabled, and questions the seemingly universal category of disability (The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability). Considering both Clare and Puar, I feel the need to offer the parallelism of disability gain (understanding disability not as a lack to be struggled with, but as a gain with joy and satisfaction) and disability cure (given that cure can refer to a desire to escape debilitating structural conditions, and not necessarily individual pathologisation/stigmatisation). Perhaps, Zani’s disabled interlocutors apprehend explosions precisely in the friction between cure and gain, in both demanding a future and living the present.