Sihanoukville, January 9, 2020
The work site announces itself by the trucks hauling broken rock, by the quarries like bites in the crust, by the cylinders of the cement works and the parked cement mixers, by the dust that tarnishes the sketch of the frameworks in the distance.
City that is not a city but its upheaval of earth, its return, the overturning of the ground that exposes its matters. Steel reinforcements, stacks of bricks, sacks of cement, pyramids of rubble. Ground dug, wounded, beaten earth, loosened then hardened, beaten again; plastic waste that comes back up, surfaces then sinks again, rolls and drowns in the spoil.
Ruptured roadway, endless works, culvert gullies, furrows of rubble – to be crossed. Luckily I’m riding a tracker, old backfiring Honda DR223, small chassis but big wheels with wide knobs. I force my way through the work-site city, the mushroom city, across the earthy obstacles, the trucks that knock, the scooters that thread through. And the unfinished constructions: dozens, hundreds of skeletons of concrete and steel wrapped in scaffolding or in browned nets, standing under idle cranes, waiting to be given a face and a flesh. Here and there, reserved places, as if isolated, finished or nearly, casino or Adidas boutique, smooth façades and high gates – all besieged by chaos, by noise and by dust.
What is emerging from the trembling earth: a casino city, a Las Vegas of the East built by and for the Chinese. Everywhere it’s their characters that adorn the buildings and the little shops. Even the workers are Chinese: Cambodia gave only the land – didn’t give it, had it taken, like a carpet pulled from under its feet, despoiled by the leaders who had charge of it, sold by the square metre to millionaires come from the north.
In the brunante, I ride on the great boulevard of orange dust. The plays of light begin to dance on the façades of the casinos. In front of the work sites, workers, men and women, and their children shower with a scoop. In the unfinished buildings, one perceives glimmers and Chinese music. Workers live there, eat there, sleep there, in the rib cage of the skeletons. Others inhabit sheet metal shacks thrown down at the edge of the sites. In the little streets, life organizes itself, life all the same, the washing and the eating, the drinking, the bedding down. In the ditches, they burn the garbage, the plastics, in little ritual fires. The brothels wait for the first clients of the evening – happy ending massage parlours or white façades without signs, women in miniskirts sitting out front on pink chairs.
I return to the hotel in the darkness by a road under construction – a bed of gravel –, across vague spaces, waiting lots, badly lit zones. The truck rolling in front of me raises a sandstorm. I see nothing anymore but the dust, the headlights that leap at my eyes, a few fires far over there, mirages of casinos.
Our world has no edge, but if it had a core, if it had to be condensed, it would be called perhaps Sihanoukville. For the violence and the unfinishedness. For the expansion and for the heating. For the grip on the ground by the tooled frenzy of man.
These stillborn buildings, this city already burned, ruin before being, ruin in advance – the end of the world, moving forward.
Yes, this text I am writing, this journey into what rumbles, I should perhaps call it Sihanoukville. It is our Description of the World. Our appalling splendour. Our catastrophized marvel. Our formidable present.