This social media troll’s antics reminded me to some extent of Monju-kun.
Category Archives: Prompt 2
Dark Season 2 Announcement!
Praising by faint Damnation
In a reading from last week, John Treat helped present us with the unique challenge of approaching, reading and writing ‘atomic’ literature. A text attempts to effectively or even adequately communicate what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and “at the same time it must help us comprehend what it means to be living today in a nuclear age” (19). Dueling purposes clash where a writer attempts to describe a moment when everything changed but cannot put to words what exactly did change. Such a conflict demands writing that modifies or subverts traditional forms to push the reader (and writer, survivor) towards an understanding of what happened. The reader is tasked then with recognizing the inherent failure of language to fully capture such a meaning, and “the cooperation atomic-bomb writers ask of us is a kind of ethical restraint, a sort of respectful restraint from naively ‘understanding what we read” (33). The closest we as readers can come to ‘understanding’ or ‘knowing’ what happened is in recognition of the fact that any attempt to describe an atrocity is inherently incomplete, that we can only truly understand that we cannot understand.
Cue Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl, a collection of oral testimonies from various survivors of the Chernobyl disaster in the modern-day Ukraine. In it, interviewees seek to account for their experiences in the days and years following the explosion of the reactor core at the Chernobyl power plant. A pattern emerges in the inability to communicate the experience. “I’m not a writer. I won’t be able to describe it. My mind is not capable of understanding it” (34). Another survivor recounts “I don’t say anything. No one can speak to me in a way I can answer. In my own language. No one can understand where I’ve come from. And I can’t tell anyone” (82). The disaster has produced a barrier in communication between the people who were there to witness it and those who were not. Accounts from other survivors attempt to approximate this feeling that of experiencing war and death (68), but even that comparison resists reification.
For her part, Alexievich seems to understand this aspect of the stories behind Chernobyl, and she runs with it. Form in Voices from Chernobyl is often hard to grasp, and the focus of the work often seems chaotic and haphazard. One testimony may follow the resettlement of villages after the explosion, then the next will remember a childhood of fighting German soldiers in the second world war. Names are provided but are rarely attached to quotes. New sections begin without page breaks, jarring the reader. Stories are brief and often have no preface or epilogue. The result is like walking through an unlit room crowded with people, each trying and failing to tell their story. Such an organization (or lack thereof) contributes to the reader’s sense that they do not fully grasp what has happened, even after reading dozens of pages of eyewitness accounts. The reading experience reflects the experience of the survivor. What better way to convey something incomprehensible than by making your medium itself somewhat incomprehensible.
All this incomprehensibility is compounded by the invisible nature of the radiation that these survivors are exposed to. Alexievich juxtaposes the intangibility of experience with the invisible radiation our survivors were exposed to. A testimony from Lena M. recounts her family’s flight from Chechnya and the eventual incredulity of her neighbors when she resettles near Chernobyl. “They say ‘Would you bring your kids to a place where there was cholera or the plague?’ But that’s the plague and that’s cholera. This fear that they have here in Chernobyl. I don’t know about it. It’s not part of my memory” (64). Like the readers of the testimonies that came before, Lena cannot fully grasp a horror that she has not witnessed firsthand. To her, the slow and quiet violence of radiation cannot compare to the immediacy of the danger where she once lived. Up to this point, the reader has seen every reason for residents to get out of Dodge and get out fast. Now we are confronted with a person with a compelling argument for staying, and we are jarred with the cognitive dissonance of it. Alexievich thus undermines our last assumption of what can be the right choice when faced with evacuating or resettling the exclusion zone around Chernobyl. The reader finishes this text with no clear answers and definitely no understanding of this cataclysm, but rather with a better understanding of the questions they must ask in order to approach literature on Chernobyl. To assume otherwise is to do an injustice to those who experienced this event.
Alexievich, Svetlana. Voices from Chernobyl. DALKEY ARCHIVE Press (IL), 2005.
Treat, John Whittier. “Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb.” AbeBooks, University of Chicago Press, 1 Jan. 1995, www.abebooks.com/9780226811772/Writing-Ground-Zero-Japanese-Literature-0226811778/plp.
Analysis of Sara Ensor’s and Donna Haraway’s thinking about biological reproductivity in the context of the ecological crisis
Ensor quotes Lee Edelman in her essay about Spinster Ecology as arguing “’that politics is predicated on a reproductive futurism embodied by the figure of the child, a fact that “preserv[es] … the absolute privilege of heteronormativity‘and leaves the queer structurally outside the bounds of both politics and social belonging”. I have to agree that a lot of our politics are centered around the nuclear family, but the nuclear family is, as research has shown, the best environment for raising children. I am quoting Jane Anderson in her article “The impact of family structure on the health of children: Effects of divorce”: “Nearly three decades of research evaluating the impact of family structure on the health and well-being of children demonstrates that children living with their married, biological parents consistently have better physical, emotional, and academic well-being.” There is plenty of other research out there that ought to not be ignored. I am not an expert in this area, but we should allow the extensive research to influence the politics concerning families and child rearing and support and protect the kind of environments that have proven to be the most optimal for children to flourish in. It is in the best interest of a society to make sure children have the best environment to grow up in. This does not mean that everyone needs to have children, but we do need some children to carry out the tasks necessary for a society to function in the future. Anything else is unrealistic and would eventually leave us with a average age older than 70…and then what? According to Ensor, “much recent queer theory insistently resist[s] futurity, marked….by heteronormative imperatives.” In order to develop a queer ecocriticism she suggests not to make it heteronormative, which in my understanding would deemphasize the nucleus family. However, this contradicts the research mentioned above that urges society to protect the nucleus family. It does not mean that other groups of society who are not part of this nuclear family structure are not part of the society or somehow “structurally outside the bound of both politics and social belonging”. Just because you are not part of a group in society that has the important role of guaranteeing that children have the best environment to grow up in and you might feel excluded does not mean that that group has to be deemphasized. The nucleus family has to be protected, because any couple who raises children is more vulnerable to the problems and pressures of live and also the ecological problems than a single adult or a childless couple. Wars and nuclear accidents have proven this. Having said that, a society has to give all of its groups an equal space to live and thrive, but at the same time has to protect the most vulnerable and children are definitely on the top of that list. This is exactly the message the mothers in the film “little voices from Fukushima” were sending. They were asking that society protects the most vulnerable and provides a safe environment for them to thrive in. This movie shows that it is much easier for a single person to pick up move out of a contaminated area than an entire family. Therefore, the government should especially assist families to be able to move away from danger. I agree with Ensor that it is very important to listen to all of the groups of society regarding any critical thinking or possible solutions towards our ecological crisis. The more angle we can provide on this problem the better. The angle that the queer population could bring to the table is definitely important. Their emphasis is more on the now than on the future for the sake of future generations and it could provide more urgency which is needed. As Haraway emphasis: “Nobody lives everywhere; everybody lives somewhere. Nothing is connected to everything; everything is connected to something” (p 31). She talks about tentacular thinking which invites all kinds of thinking angles from different groups and people and emphasis the necessity of such dialogue to continue our species and others on this planet. She also, just like Ensor stresses the important of seeing time not as Chronos, with a past, present and future, but as Kainos. “Kainos means now, a time of beginnings, a time for ongoing, for freshness. Nothing in Kainos must mean conventional pasts, presents, or futures” (page 2).
As far as the primacy of biological reproduction is concerned, Haraway has a slogan she promotes: “So, make kin, not babies! It matters how kin generate kin. (pg 103)” She argues that it is more important to take care of and connect with the people and other living beings that are already on this planet (which is making kin) than to make new ones or we will end up with 11 Billion by the year 2100 (pg 4). She argues for birth control methods although it is not clear to me whether she is for top-down birth control or for just promoting birth control everywhere in the world.
Anti-Natal Futures
As a queer person with no interest in raising children, I feel a personal stake in Sarah Ensor’s conception of avuncular futurity—an ecological perspective grounded in “nonreproductive (and indirectly invested) figures” (410). Ensor’s “spinster stands in a kind of slanted or oblique relationship to the linear, vertical paradigms of transmission that govern familiar notions of futurity” (416). As the strange aunt of the future, the spinster reminds us of contingencies, paths not taken, alternate relations, networks of non-linear being. Reading Ensor, I felt invited to imagine myself as the future’s confirmed bachelor uncle. And yet I wonder now if that is quite right. The spinster is, after all, specifically female and exclusively so in Ensor’s paper.
The spinster, we might say, is legible as a kind of social outsider precisely insofar as she has been abstracted from time. She becomes a spinster only once it has been determined that she likely has no marriageable future; when that happens, however, she also comes to have no past—or at least no past in which a future, or the desire for one, ever existed. (We need think here only of the oddly virginal resonances of the phrase old maid, which erases the spinster’s lived past in favor of a kind of ahistorical, perpetual innocence. (414)
It is the gendered social expiration date that in part enables the spinster’s out-of-time perspective and role. There is no male correlate to “old maid.” (Interesting that there is too no aunt correlate to avuncular.) Indeed, the winking “confirmed bachelor” suggests not a misfortune that befalls but a choice, a willful headlong orientation toward the (childless) future. Wikipedia offers a little serendipity here. “Confirmed Bachelor” redirects to an article called “He never married,” which is described as “a code phrase used by obituary writers in the United Kingdom as a euphemism for the deceased having been homosexual.” With “he never married,” often the last words of an obituary, the subject is identified as queer at the same time that he is written out of the present and the future. These are final words that relegate queerness to a past that is dead and disconnected. My point with this response is not to discredit or even really critique Ensor’s spinster futurity. Rather, I wonder what other kinds of queer futurity we might find that, like Ensor’s, reject or remediate the antisocial turn in queer scholarship. Further I think highlighting gender makes clear the feminist potential in Ensor’s work for opening modes of female futurity that do not depend on reproductive capacity. Spinster futurity, in resisting “do it for the children” kinds of environmental discourse with its oblique perspective, also opens up space to think about complex, slow, or cumulative environmental happenings outside of a neat chain of causality. In this way it seems almost the perfect match for orienting ourselves with respect to Rob Nixon’s conception of slow violence, perhaps unsurprising given both authors’ indebtedness to Rachel Carson.
In Staying with the Trouble Donna Haraway offers another reorientation toward the environmental future. Her troubled and troubling conception of the Chthulucene is similarly aligned with resistance to simple cause and effect environmentalism. Haraway’s exigence more than anything seems to be a profound awareness of limits—the limits of our ways of thinking, the limits of our narratives, the limits of our power as individuals and as a species. Haraway’s sympoietic tentacular chthonic Gaia is so impossibly complex that thinking only about one actor, element, or problem is laughably inadequate. She implicitly questions what the goal of environmentalism should be. It cannot end, she seems suggest; the chthonic ones laugh in the face of discrete goals. Her sense of a world that becomes-with is intimately connected to the Chthulucene: “an ongoing temporality that resists figuration and dating and demands myriad names” (51). I sense that it is no accident that her Chthulucene resists easy definition; in the time of the Chthulucene, present, future, and past seem to lose relevance to a billion different distributed and interdependent nows. Haraway’s embrace of “kin” over kids, a benign anti-natalism, is grounded in this profound sense of interconnectedness of time and effects as much as it is in a sense of “response-ability” for overpopulation. In her introduction, Haraway articulates her resistance to the conception of a discrete future that leads to faith in technofixes or a sense of our efforts being “too late.” That latter futurity has a real danger of paralyzing activism. Haraway has done something remarkable in being able to overcome that panic without losing a sense of the urgency for action.
As in Ensor, I sense a potential in Haraway’s reorientation of the future to be able to better understand and represent slow violence. Indeed, slow violence seems positively tentacular. Taken together, Ensor and Haraway persuasively make a case for an alternative futurity being almost a pre-requisite for negotiating a less destructive relationship with the environment and, as Haraway suggests, moving us out of the Capitalocene (or perhaps the Neo-Liberalocene).
(“Future is so Queer” by Eltpics is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0)
Violence, fast and slow
Often we think of environmental devastation as a matter of place—but in what ways does it echo through and against the human experience of time?
__
In “Spinster Ecology,” Sarah Ensor argues for a queer ecocritical futurity—that is, an approach to the future that neither (a) rejects future generations altogether nor (b) focuses on heteronormative time, marked by the nuclear family, linear inheritance, and biological reproduction. She lays out the ways that ecocriticism might be informed by queer temporalities (see also Pryor).
The spinster embodies one such temporality. She “has no marriageable future” and so “comes to have no past” (Ensor 414). She is a figure made asexual, with no infancy, no puberty, no old age, and no death. For those around her, looking on, she appears to be stuck in time, or standing outside of it. Outside of the linear time society runs by and which we have deeply internalized.
This holds true, at least in a similar way, for victims of environmental catastrophe. Following the Chernobyl disaster, those with homes near the power plant, living in modern-day Ukraine, Belarus, or Russia, had to ask themselves, will time go on? will we move (on)? Many of course had no choice. They continued their daily lives, harvesting vegetables from radioactive fields, as one woman remembers “with horror” (Emmett and Nye 110).
Others have no choice in that they can’t go on as before. They wait for someone to acknowledge their suffering, to take responsibility for it and make it right. They stand beside time, hoping it will resume, even as the lives of family, friends, and loved ones carry on without them. There is no resolution, no denouement. They are stuck in one moment of time: the post-disaster.
Nuclear disaster cuts life in two, into the time before and the time after. As with other traumas, you can’t unknow what you’ve learned, or unexperience what’s happened to you.
In “What if a murderer appeared at your bedroom door?,” an episode of the podcast This Is Actually Happening, a young woman explains what it’s like to barely escape death. A neighbor targeted her house without reason, crept into her bedroom, stabbed her in the chest with a knife, killed her mother, and wounded her aunt and grandmother as well.
The world was no longer a safe place. She describes living in constant fear and anxiety, always wondering if the unthinkable might happen (again). She couldn’t return home, couldn’t hold a job, couldn’t afford to move, often couldn’t move her body at all. Any comfort in the present, fondness for the past, or hopes for the future faded into impossibility. Her experience of time was irrevocably altered.
__
Rachel Carson warns of the unpredictable effects brought on by environmental toxins, which may well be underway but whose movement from cause to effect, or from original injury to secondary symptoms, remain uncharted. She writes:
we are already in the future—not simply because today marks one of yesterday’s possible futures, but also because the future is here well before it makes itself legible to us as such. (Ensor 418–19)
Today stands as one of yesterday’s possible futures, but in the case of nuclear disaster, this means playing a game of chance and facing the unimaginable. The future arrives silently, microsievert by microsievert, until a composite of medical conditions emerges.
Little Voices from Fukushima (Kamanaka) shares this lived experience. Besides daily exposure to radiation and these stubborn, sometimes maddeningly vague medical conditions, many residents near the Fukushima Daiichi power plant run the risk of developing a serious—or, if not detected and treated, fatal—case of thyroid cancer.
The clock is ticking faster, but no one takes notice unless it stops altogether. When it comes to environmental catastrophes, only deaths are counted; only deaths count. Anything less cannot be quantified, and so is better left ignored. This is slow violence, a violence all the more insidious for biding time and keeping out of sight, a violence “typically not viewed as violence at all” (Nixon 2).
Not only will the children in Little Voices from Fukushima never know the simple pleasure of playing in bare feet in their own backyard. They also come to see their parents as fallible and emotionally complex much too soon, a perspective they otherwise might not have taken on until late adolescence. They have to attend frequent medical check-ups, a burden most stave off until old age. The time of innocence is lost.
__
Victims of environmental disaster, like the spinster of Sarah Orne Jewett’s imagination, live among “futures that will never come to pass” (Ensor 420). They experience the present as a future that has “failed to become” (424).
Examples from nuclear waste are literal. One woman in the documentary Little Voices from Fukushima expresses her reluctance to bring another child into the world, given the quality of life for her and her community in the zone of exclusion. Veterans and local civilians exposed to depleted uranium in ammunition bear children with birth defects or become infertile. Futures poisoned still in gestation; futures abandoned before they could even know the present.
An episode of This American Life, “One Last Thing Before I Go,” elaborates on this state of being caught up in futures that will never become. As Ira Glass explains, the tsunami and earthquake of March 2011, which also caused the Fukushima nuclear disaster, killed 19,000 people in Japan. 2,500 are still missing.
One man, Itaru Sasaki, built an old-fashioned telephone booth in his garden. He needed a place to grieve the disappearance of his cousin. The phone doesn’t work, but he would go there to talk anyway. The phone booth has since gained some renown in Otsuchi and the surrounding area as a means of speaking to those who have died or gone missing.
What is so moving about excerpts from the phone booth is their everydayness. As they speak to loved ones, who were never supposed to leave or be lost, people find “understated” ways of saying I love you, or I miss you. A young girl tells her father, “I started tennis in junior high school. I’m not in the top eight.” Her lived present is marked by the future denied to her: a future in which he is still alive, standing witness even to small failures.
One wife says, “I feel like you’re still alive. […] We had so many things we wanted to do together.”
A husband promises, “I’ll come again, OK? […] I’ll be back.”
Like so many others, they wait out the present in a haze of nostalgia for what might have been, catching only glimpses of a trajectory imagined but never realized.
Time scales from the human perspective
Question 3. How does environmental devastation, and nuclear disaster in particular, challenge received human time scales?
Time scale is an arrangement of events used to measure the relative or absolute duration of a period of time. There are several different time scales that are used to describe different events and phenomena. We use geological time scale to describe the history of the earth, often in millions or billions of years. However, historic or human time scale is the one to describe the events of humans; it is usually described in days, months, years, decades, and/or centuries. This is very short compared to other time scales, seeming almost insignificant. To humans a year is a long time and a decade is even longer; humans can barely fathom what an entire century entails, without looking to their parents or grandparents.
Technology has changed or received notion of time scales, with innovations of transportation, construction, and distribution of information, travel and construction is done at a much faster rate. Thus environmental disasters that could disrupt the channels of transportation, construction and information could alter our current notions of human time scale. This is the precariousness of modernity and futurity. Assuming technology will always be there to make our lives easier creates precariousness that we do not even consider. Environmental disasters are always going to exist and affect the lives of humans and this creates a pervasive sense of precariousness. These effects compound and our modernist reliance on technology results in an even more precarious life.
The dangers of environmental devastation of ordinary fossil fuels are starting to be understood rather than ignored. Greenhouse gases, melting of the polar ice caps, acidification of the oceans are all things that are finally being discussed on a transnational scale. Their effects on the world challenge our notion of time because of how slowly they change the earth, over decades and centuries. Since humans cannot see this happen in their daily lives it is often dismissed as a problem for others, so scholars came up with the term “slow violence” to describe things that affect our lives but are not seen or felt in our everyday lives. Rob Nixon describes slow violence as, “gradual, out of sight, delayed destruction across space and time.”
Nuclear technology is a source of energy for many developed nations in the world. It is powerful, efficient and uses less natural resources than the technology of fossil fuels. It often seems like the source of energy of modernity, futurity, and neoliberalism. Unfortunately this technology has dangers that are not as obvious as smog, greenhouse gases, and the bleaching of coral reefs. The dangers of nuclear technology come from the radioactive materials used in the creating of the energy and the waste that is left over afterwards. One form of the technology is used for making bombs of devastating destruction. Besides the obvious devastation of the bomb itself, there is another dangerous form of violence that is left long after the bomb has detonated. Rob Nixon describes this “slow violence” by talking about the Marshall Islands after 67 nuclear bomb “tests” between 1948 and 1958: “In 1956 the Atomic Energy Commission declared the Marshall Islands ‘by far the most contaminated place in the world’, a condition that compromise independence in the long term.” This is a perfect example of how nuclear disasters, such as constant nuclear bomb “tests” can challenge our notions of human time scales. By simply testing our technology in a foreign country, we set back another nation’s entire independence for decades.
Cesium-137, the result of the fission between uranium and plutonium, has a half-life of about 30 years and is very common in nuclear technology. It has been released into the air from the accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima. Cesium-137 also spreads quickly in nature because of its high water solubility. Before nuclear technology Cesium-137 was not present on earth in significant quantities for around 1.7 billion years, again challenging our notion of human time scale. We know from Little Voices From Fukushima of how it would take over 40 years to clean Japan of Cesium-137. In Precarious Japan Anne Allison describes how the events of 3/11 in Fukushima reintroduced the stigma of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, terms like genpatsu nanmin (nuclear-refugee) and hibakusha (atomic bomb survivors). Showing how nuclear devastations can span decades, generations, and even centuries further challenges our notion of human time scale.
The convenience of technology and the precariousness it creates, especially from nuclear technology, fundamentally challenges our notion of a human time scale. While technology enhances development of moving, building, and learning more efficiently over the course of decades and centuries, environmental devastation can take all of that away in a few minutes or hours and leave us with repercussions that last years, decades or even longer.
Jordan Foster