In the Shadow of the Banyan
SynopsisPlot
For seven-year-old Raami, the shattering end of childhood begins with the footsteps of her father returning home in the early dawn hours, bringing details of the civil war that has overwhelmed the streets of Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital. Soon the family’s world of carefully guarded royal privilege is swept up in the chaos of revolution and forced exodus. Over the next four years, as the Khmer Rouge attempts to strip the population of every shred of individual identity, Raami clings to the only remaining vestige of her childhood—the mythical legends and poems told to her by her father.
Story
About this book
In the Shadow of the Banyan is a novel by Vaddey Ratner, drawn from her own childhood experience in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge years. The story follows Raami, a seven-year-old girl from a family with royal connections in Phnom Penh. When civil war overtakes the capital, her father arrives home before dawn with news that their sheltered life is about to collapse. The family is soon forced from the city as the new regime begins dismantling every marker of individual identity, privilege, and personal history.
Over the four years that follow, Raami endures starvation, forced labor, and the loss of family members. In a system where personal memory itself can be treated as dangerous, she holds on to the myths, legends, and poems her father once shared with her. These stories become her way of preserving something internal when nearly everything external has been taken away.
The novel was named a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Ratner sets the book's point of view at the height of a child's perception, where terror and wonder can exist in close proximity, and where inherited stories carry a weight that official power tries to erase.
