Prompt 5

A Force of Things

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Prompt 5, #1

With her book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Jane Bennett outlines a dynamic materiality that exists alongside as well as within human bodies as a lens to question how our understanding of political events shift “if we gave the force of things more due” (viii). Adapting Bruno Latour’s term “actants,” Bennett describes the apparent agency of non-human materials as she resists the notion that these non-human materials are lifeless and mechanistic. That is to say, traditional definitions of matter as passive, inactive, lifeless materials obscure the roles of such materials in the unfolding of disastrous and quotidian events. Bennett’s use of actant to describe materials and humans within the complex interrelationships and trajectories, enable our analysis of what is capable of producing effects in the world and contributing to – and even altering – a course of events. From this lens, objects have efficacy, a vibrant materialism which breaks down binaries (life/matter; human/nonhuman) to trace the force of things.

Reading Lockbaum’s richly layered unfolding of the Fukushima Daiichi earthquake and subsequent tsunamis alongside Bennet’s vibrant materialism surfaces the myriad actants and growing agency of the networks and relationships of things and humans into assemblages. Bennett’s notion of ‘thing-power,’ or the strange ability of inanimate things to animate, act, produce subtle and dramatic affects, help trace the various actors – from shifting tectonic plates and shifts in landmass caused by the March 11, 2011 earthquake to sensors, fuel rods, steam, concrete, and procedures within the nuclear power plant. Actants caught up within, and contributing to, the Fukushima disaster ranged from geology to human-created policies and procedures to technologies such as sensors and cameras, infrastructure, and debris. Since the vast and myriad actants within the unfolding events are never acting in isolation, each dependent on the connections and interactions of other bodies and forces. Leveraging Spinoza’s notion of affective bodies with Deleuze and Guattari’s assemblages, Bennet offers a way to ‘see’ the March 11 disaster as both an ad hoc grouping of disparate elements and the relationships and dependencies of such groupings.

Lockbaum writes, “nature was throwing technology a curveball” (4). Bennett argues that nature should be unpacked into the large and small actants and assemblages – nature is the ‘forested stretch of the coast south of Sendia” which has a long history of tsunami, the ancient Pacific Plate, a build-up of geological pressure as the Pacific Plate is forced under the North American Plate, energy waves of earthquakes primary (P) and secondary (S), ocean waves, salt water – just to name a few (3-5). Similarly, technology unfolds into human and nonhuman actants: sensors, cameras, sea walls, nuclear power plant (which itself includes actants of fuel rods, emergency policies, shut down procedures, monitoring hardware and human practices), telephone calls, internet, cell phone videos, and more.

Marking the the time actants converge to cause an event, Lockbaum telescopes between the individual actants and the larger contexts and consequences. Marking 2:49 pm with swaying chandeliers in the Diet Building in Tokyo, Lockbaum moves between Tokyo and Fukushima, between the initial pressure released in the earthquake to legislators advised to duck under desks, from helicopter footage to ancient myth (1-3). Much like the way we often engage the vast garbage patches in our oceans, lists of things involved help make such complex, entangled events knowable. Lockbaum’s use of time anchors his list and helps hold space for giant catfish to meet plate tectonics. Bennett’s vibrant materiality shift lists into relationships, active assemblages through which the force of things are better understood, noting how they form together and break apart, how some assemblages exist for particular times and places then dissipate.

Reading Lockbaum with Bennett help analyze the Fukushima Daiichi disaster – holding together the massive mix of geology, salt water, computer programs, profit motives, energy policies, legislative energies, and more. Understanding the force of things better details how the disaster unfolded, with an accounting of the human actors and motivators contributing to the disaster, the geological forces at work, and the awful serendipity of convergences. The agencies of the assemblages are distributed, a continuum that holds multiple actants from a salt molecule to the Japanese Diet. Lockbaum and Bennett show a distributive agency, which resists a subject as the root cause.  Rather both detail the swarm of vitalities connecting and dissolving within the unfolding moments of time.

 

 

 

 

Prompt 5

Little Emissaries

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Prompt 5, #3

Yoko Tawada’s The Emissary (2018) can be seen as far-fetched for the contemporary reader. There are many instances within the work that are all, but inconceivable. For instance, the borders of Japan are closed to the outside world, its inhabitants are forbidden to travel abroad, and the internet ceased to exist at the start of the work. These are two things are almost inconceivable to contemporary readers, seeing as many consider globalization always present, even without willingness to participate in it. Even though some do not have access to the internet, few can consider living without access to the internet after exposure to it. Although these are only two examples, among many, that seem far-fetched for contemporary readers, there are many striking similarities between this work and Hitomi Kamanaka’s film Little Voices from Fukushima (2015). This is not to say that what is depicted in the film is the same as what is depicted in The Emissary, however Tawada’s depiction makes one wonder if the living circumstances described could be the future for the figures in Little Voices from Fukushima. Both works encompass notions of kin, care and catastrophe (although the catastrophe is never directly acknowledged in The Emissary like in the film). Both works encompass these notions because they take place in post catastrophe environments, again the catastrophe in The Emissary is assumed because of lack of direct acknowledgement, however with things like radiation, although rarely addressed, indicate that the setting is some sort of post catastrophe environment. Besides their settings both works focus on kin caring for their youngest kin as well. Two areas where there is striking similarity between the works are the anxiety/guilt of the elder kin caretakers and the food preparation for the youngest kin.

Examples of anxiety and guilt can be found throughout both works as caretakers come to terms with the effects that their decisions and events, even those that are out of there control, start to impact their children. In Little Voices from Fukushima most of the guilt and anxiety comes from caretakers not being able to move outside of the contaminated area/returning to the contaminated area.  This anxiety and guilt isbfound within the “Haha Rangers,” a group of mothers dedicated to improving the circumstances that their children are living in. Ruri Sasaki, one of the central figures of the film and the Haha Rangers, states within the first few minutes of meeting her and her family “while we were evacuated, I felt bad about the people who stayed on…I felt tremendous guilt. And I feel guilty towards my kids by staying here” (6:25). Statements similar to this one by Ruri Sasaki occur throughout the film and are made by her or her fellow Rangers. Although there are multiple caretaker figures in The Emissary, there is only one caretaker figure that is consistently followed throughout the work, Yoshiro. Like Ruri and the Haha Rangers, Yoshiro constantly worries about the health of Mumei, his great-grandson, for whom he is the primary caretaker. Although Yoshiro does not have the same guilt as some of the Haha Rangers, since he was not given the opportunity to bring Mumei into a safer environment, he still fears his great-grandsons future like the Haha Rangers do for their own children. “Though he tried not to think the worst about Mumei’s future, he often found himself sick with worry, with high tides of misery sweeping over him day and night” (Tawada 18). Also like the Haha Rangers, his fear and anxiety is practically a constant fixture of the work and can be seen throughout.

One aspect that causes fear and anxiety throughout both works is food and eating. Although the struggles associated with food and eating vary slightly between the works.  The Haha Rangers from Little Voices from Fukushima struggle to give their children food and drink that is not (heavily) contaminated. Yoshiro in The Emissary struggles with this as well, but he has an added worry because he needs to find food that didn’t cause negative symptoms like trouble breathing (kiwi), paralysis of the tongue (lemon juice), heartburn (spinach) and dizziness (shiitake mushrooms) (Tawada 45). Where Ruri needs to measure the cesium level in the milk that her children consume, Yoshiro must prepare Mumei’s food in a specific manner because even things like drinking juice can last 15 minutes, which was no easy task for Mumei (Tawada 33). Besides the added steps in food preparation, both figures, Ruri and Yoshiro, struggle to food that was suitable for their charges. Fortunately, for Ruri farmers whose crops are not contaminated send their excess crops to her village for the families to eat. However, this is not so simple for Yoshiro and other caregivers because things like fruit, never get sent to their area (near Tokyo) and as a result they must search “with bloodshot eyes for fruit for their great-grandchildren…wander[ing] like ghosts from market to market” (Tawada 45).

These are only two of many similarities between the two works. Where Little Voices from Fukushima calls viewers’ attention to the current situation, as of 2015, inside of the contaminated area The Emissary, taking place generations after a catastrophe, presents an eerily plausible future for people like the Sasaki family and the Haha Rangers. In Tawada’s work, things done to improve their children’s health like recuperation trips to non-contaminated areas, and importing food from non-contaminated, are virtually impossible due to travel restrictions and the shipping/trade of goods. Therefore, it causes the reader to consider what can be done now in order to prevent aspects of this presented future from happening.

 

Sources:

Little Voices from Fukushima. Directed by Hitomi Kamanaka, BunBun Films, 7 March 2015

Yoko Tawada. The Emissary. New Directions Paperbook, 2018.

 

Prompt 5

The Emissary: An Aesthetic Leap Towards Queer Ecology

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I believe that The Emissary is a tale about nature, moreover, about the ways in which humans map the intricate and everchanging narratives of nature —especially when those changes are the perilous consequences of “scientific progress”. The universe built by Yoko Tawada conjures up a psychological ecosystem weaved through biological structures, i.e. the way her characters (human and non-human) inhabit and comprehend both their inner and outer world is deeply determined by an altered-state-of-nature, possibly unchained by a nuclear disaster. Fauna and Flora are depicted under a strange but aesthetically enchanting light; they seem to thrive and grow in absurd and unpredictable patterns, creating new forms of life which, in turn, need new forms of comprehensive cataloguing for humans to digest them —both literally and metaphorically. Thus, new and strange ecological ponderings take place in this fictional universe, such as “are oversized dandelions chrysanthemums?”, as well as new political movements, such as “The [oversized] Dandelion support association”.

This new mutated neon-ecology[1] also carries with it a new mutated ecology of the mind which, unknowingly, strives to deconstruct, blend, and organize old and novel epistemologies, for how can we word-the-world when familiarity has vanish from daily experiences? Gregory Bateson, in his book Mind and Nature (1979), describes sixteen presuppositions that aim to guide both our understanding of science and of everyday life, and, interestingly, the second presupposition is called “the map is not the territory, or the name is not the thing named”, which mainly suggests that “when we think of coconuts or pigs, there are no coconuts or pigs in the brain” (30), or, in other words, that “in all thought or perception or communication about perception, there is a transformation, a coding, between the report and the thing reported” (31).

In this sense, our understanding and interaction with reality is never instant or direct, on the contrary, it’s always mediated by maps and names that determine our ways of knowing and, therefore, are subject to constant change. Now, in a very fascinating manner, Yoko Tawada’s novel does precisely this: it abruptly shifts the maps that govern both our abstract and concrete methods for navigating reality. A fictional urgency, one might say, that comes from an environment that has been violently transformed by technology and progress —defiled by a foolish desire for a fast-paced narrative and for easily-obtainable stuff. Yoshiro’s grandson, Tomo, is the best reflection of this modern form of “progress”: “Any machine that made big things happen with just the push of a button or two he loved, while he showed no interest in building blocks, Legos, or swings, either, which generally he gave up on after two or three bends of the knee” (76)[2]. Hence, The Emissary presents a postapocalyptic neon-world which seems to be the product of a thoughtless and greedy “push of a button”.

However, what has been transfigured through Yoko’s fictional lens? I would argue that almost all that guides our naturalized narratives of progress, linearity, and binarity, i.e.:

– Language
– Time
– Space
– Sex/Gender

All of these categories become fluid and uncertain after The Emissary’s unnamed (nuclear?) disaster. In the very beginning of the book, Yoshiro thinks that time didn’t “spread gradually, ring after ring, nor was it lined up neatly in a row; could it just be a disorderly pile, like the inside of a drawer no one ever bothers to straighten?” (6). Well, yes. The passing of time is a disorderly pile; however, it looked organized due to the fictional maps we created in order to feel safe-and-warm. After the disaster the neatly organized maps break: old people become energetic and immortal while the children get feeble and sick; men go through menopause and sometimes their reproductive organs swing from male to female; language slowly vanishes as it loses its foreign and oldest words; technology is set aside and thus tranquility and slowness become ubiquitous; and, in terms of space, Japan turns into a flat-land isolated from the globe.

Contamination, at last, pervades every form of familiar life where not even the permanence of species remains untouched —Mumei, for example, is basically a human-bird that deeply desires to be an octopus. Yet, the most fascinating detail of the novel (I believe) lies in the topsy-turvy understanding of lineage and family, for there are no more mom-dad-offspring assemblages/hierarchies. Yoko’s world deconstructs this tidy map, granting to the timeless great-grandfathers the power to skip generations (i.e. time) and become the spinsters of a new neon-ecology. In her essay Spinster Ecology, Sarah Ensor writes that “the spinster, not saving the planet for her own children, engages in a more impersonal mode of stewardship —one whose investment is neither linear nor directly object-based but instead, as Sedgwick suggests, somehow more ‘varied, contingent, recalcitrant [and] reforming’” (416).

And, indeed, the relationship that we see portrayed in the novel by Yoshiro and Mumei is determined by queerness (a queerness that travels through air, worms, and psychic states), and thus openly questions the epistemologies and cultural constructs of the present. It offers, at last, an alternative form of understanding futurity, where Tokyo can be revitalized, as Donna Haraway would say, by “making kin, not babies” (103). Even Yoshiro’s wife has stopped being a mother to a single child; she has become a sort of spinster-octopus with many arms that tend many children: “My real family, she thought, are those people I just happened to meet in that coffee shop. My descendants are the independent children in my institution” (88). Thereby, all the characters in Yoko’s novel reach a point of utter fluidity, challenging the norms that a fictional-Japan tries to impose with a desperate aim of normalization —an effort to make invisible the aftereffects of a (nuclear)disaster.

Finally, and because nature mutates and rebels in such a grandiose way (mostly by feminizing itself), The Emissary creates a tangential (i.e. a spinster) epistemology that gets weaved through a new form of narrative, or, as Bateson would argue, through new names and new maps. When Mumei says “the map is my portrait” (70), or when he thinks “if you cut the globe in a different way, when you open it up, you’ll get a different map of the world” (24), he seems to be acknowledging the purpose of the novel, which is to create through strange words, neologisms, and literary arrangements, a different map of the earth, where the future and its unfolding is understood non-linearly, that is, more like a disorderly (but interconnected) pile of stuff. As John Treat states about the “most creatively ambitious hibakusha writers”, Yoko Tawada also insists in filling the “unspeakable spaces with new words or even new language… We read, in other words, at the edge of our epistemological, aesthetic, and even emotional borders, always ready for the unfamiliar as well as the familiar” (30).

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[1] I somehow picture every-thing to be of neon-colors when it comes to a postnuclear disaster universe.
[2] This lack of thoughtfulness and pleasurable curiosity are traits that are also present in novels such as Christa Wolf’s Accident.
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Works Cited:

__Bateson, Gregory. Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity. E. P. Dutton, 1979.
__Ensor, Sarah. “Spinster Ecology”. Duke University Press, 2012.
__Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.
__Treat, John Whittier. Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb. University of Chicago Press, 1995.
__Yoko Tawada. The Emissary. New Directions Paperbook, 2018.

Illustration by Edward Gorey.

Prompt 4

Nuclear Cosmopolitanism

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I’m interested in Bronsky’s novel for how it can be read against what Sheri-Marie Harrison calls the neoliberal novel of migrancy.  Harrison writes that the novel of migrancy, while traditionally being an account of the entanglement between identity and place, takes on different exigence when contemporary stories “formally position migrant subjects as analogues of capital” (203). 

Two central imperatives that Harrison identifies in the classic immigrant novel are national assimilation, which suggests that a sense of rootedness (to place or nation) is the key to individual identity and cosmopolitanism (the movement between nations that instantiates that journey) which exists as its opposite number. In the classic immigrant novel, these two imperatives are joined. They operate together to inform the changes that identity undergoes as individuals move about within global structures.

Harrison’s intervention lies in her suggestion that the neoliberal novel of migrancy “breaks down the classic immigrant novel’s standard trajectory from ethnic identity to national cosmopolitanism, replaying this simple, linear trajectory with a free-floating transnational cosmopolitanism more akin to that of capital itself than that of the assimilated citizen” (203). However, rather than suggesting a full on critique of cosmopolitanism in its similarities to the flow of capital across borders, she argues that by allying the notion of human capital with the literal flow of bodies within cosmopolitanism, these stories highlight “a contradictory tension between cosmopolitanism’s endorsement of unallied global mobility and the rootedness of national assimilation” because the nation itself is no longer a fixed goal. The journey to a new nation in the novel, instead of standing for itself operates as mirror for “neoliberal capital’s paradoxical reliance on the nation as an economic mechanism that can facilitate competitive conditions for the free flow of capital and increasing globalized wealth (203-4).

Why I find Bronsky’s novel relevant to this discussion is in how it repudiates cosmopolitanism itself in how it privileges singular, isolated space as being central to identity in a world post-nuclear disaster.  Baba Dunja and the other returnee’s to Tschernowo operate outside of the generally recognized flow of capital in their isolated village.  As Bronsky describes it, it exists outside of the flow of a lot of things, a kind of silent oasis amongst the radiation. 

What I would never trade for running water and a telephone in Tschernowo is the matter of time. Here there is no time. There are no deadlines and no appointments. In essence, our daily routine is a sort of game. We are reenacting what people normally do. Nobody expects anything of us. We don’t have to get up in the morning or go to bed at night. For all anyone cares, we could do it the other way around. We imitate daily life the same way children do with dolls, or when they’re playing store. (Bronsky 95).

Tschernowo, despite its wastelandish makeup, is the perfect place to stage this discussion of identity and emplacement because it is a place that has no exploitable value under capitalism. Tschernowo and other locations within exclusion zones–or what Baba Dunja calls “death zones” trouble notions of the specific value of certain places within a neoliberal framework. While at the same time, the uneasy, blurred boundary prompts readers to consider larger questions of the impact of nuclear disaster because, as Baba Dunja notes, the notion that the death zones “[stop] at the borders people draw on maps” is facile (43). 

We’ve talked a lot about the importance of intentional community in class as well as the power found in emplaced thinking. Considering Bronsky’s novel as a means of re-reading migrancy under neoliberal capitalism allows us to probe what it means to return to, rather than escape from, disaster as a means of empowerment and solidarity. Baba Dunja’s Last Love models an emplaced knowledge that is based on both individual and communal identities. Individual in that Baba Dunja prioritizes self-reliance and personal responsibility. Communal in that she conceives of the above identities as thriving best within a place that prioritizes rhythm of life extensive with nature.  The characters’ return frames a different kind of cosmopolitanism–one predicated not on the flow of capital, but on a resistance to that flow for the sake of putting down deeper roots. 

One final point I’d like to add is in how Baba Dunja complicates neoliberal capital’s imperative to personal responsibility. While I do not believe that Tschernowo is a libertarian dream-land, as I noted above, the village exists in a space that has no value in economic terms, and all of the activity done there, by old bodies with no intention of increasing human-capital, sits outside the system laughing.

Also, as a side note, here’s this interesting essay I stumbled upon while Googling about place and identity in literature. I can’t really speak about it here, but it’s something I’m hoping to read over the break, and since it seems related to the work we’re doing in class, I wanted to share it here.

  1. “The Neoliberal Novel of Migrancy.” Neoliberalism and Contemporary Literary Culture. Edited by Mitchum Huehls and Rachel Greenwald Smith, Johns Hopkins, 2017. pp. 203-219.
Prompt 2

Praising by faint Damnation

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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.

Prompt 3

Doing the Garden—Digging the Weeds

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Reading this week’s texts was indeed hard. Writing about them seems like an even harder (if not ludicrous) task. For, as John Treat states, what prerogative do we-(foreign)-readers have in talking about such outlandish events? In the midst of irresolution —as to when and where to start writing, or if to write at all— I figured that perhaps the strange and pervasive after-effects that Ōta’s and Hayashi’s stories left in my brain’s very tight and tidy web-of-ruminations, provide a productive example of the ways in which literature (fiction or otherwise) can shift how we-readers interact with unfamiliar realities, ushering us into what we might have formerly thought of as unfathomable.

For a hypochondriac such as myself, City of Corpses and Two Grave Markers defied my expectations in a very peculiar way. They certainly presented gruesome and highly disturbing imageries of Hiroshima’s and Nagasaki’s human and non-human landscapes after the atomic-bombs were dropped; however, whilst reading, the kind of imaginative leaps that I experienced were different from those induced by non-nuclear narratives. The latter usually touch the image-based and intellectual wirings of the brain, while the former touched a kernel that triggered a lasting and physical discomfort that had to do with an irrational sense of contamination. The gap between reader and writer, between 1945 and 2019, between Japan and America, was suddenly bridged by a piece of literary fancy that weaved itself not through language, but through bodily uproar, ultimately causing the reader to develop an eerie awareness of her own organic bits, i.e. red corpuscles, hair follicles, thyroid glands.

I would call this experience a defamiliarizing one, for it not only causes dread from gore, but it twists the sense of the real and the imaginary by blurring and problematizing the line that severs the human from the non-human, and the natural from the unnatural. Freud, in the very beginning of his essay Das Unheimliche (1919), states that “the ‘uncanny’ is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar” (1), but which has suddenly lost its recognizable and comforting quality, such as when “something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality” (14). Following this line of thought, we could say that nuclear-bomb literature recreates a scenario that obliges the reader to transgress its own network of certainties, thus breaking the spell of normality, custom, habit, and language —language! our rational organizer par excellence, as both Christa Wolf and John Treat recognize.

It is interesting to notice that language and other rational (technological) forms of organizing reality are the very tools that help efface humans’ reliable patterns of existence —technology carries within itself an unsolvable paradox, for it breeds both familiarity and unfamiliarity; it embodies, in the midst of disaster, what Freud called das unheimliche. There are two very striking images that help create this dreaded feeling in Ōta’s and Hayashi’s stories. The first is when Ōta’s protagonist sees her mother in the cemetery: “the fence had been blown away, so I could see the whole cemetery. Mother was coming and going between cemetery and house” (184). The second is when Hayashi’s Wakako sees people drinking water from the river: “there was a kind of intimacy about this scene of river and people, as if the running water were a giant centipede and the people its legs” (36). In both scenes there is an estrangement from reality caused by a disruption of predictable patterns; progress itself (science) has obliterated the distinctive traits of a controlled/civilized environment: the dead are no longer segregated from the living by a fence, they are now thrust upon each other in a space of ambiguity where the human body (and other bodies as well, such as plants and insects) is no longer sacred, but a defiled conjunction of matter. The scene of the giant centipede, on the other hand, shows a novel and uncanny form of harmony that prevents the eye from distinguishing one organism (i.e. the river) from the other (i.e. humans), thus creating an image of mutated animation in which, again, the sense of humanity as separated from the realm of the non-human or inorganic is violently reversed.

This, I believe, resonates with Jane Bennett’s idea of Thing and Object, for every scattered piece of soil and every human cell alters its literal and figurative meaning under the synesthetic light of the atomic-bomb, signaling the moment in which the “Object becomes the Other, when the sardine can look back, when the mute idol speaks, when the subject experiences the object as uncanny” (2). Hiroshima’s and Nagasaki’s scenery post-nuclear-reaction is one in which ordinary things —breakfast, stairs, trees, eyes, noses, words, roots, graves— look back at their human “protagonists”, embodying a form of life that can only be achieved through death and decay, not unlike what Wakako projects when she returns to her parents: “You’re beautiful, Waka-san. Like a wax doll… If this beauty was something she had brought home from N City, didn’t it signify death?” (29). There is an almost untraceable presence, as Freud would say, that ought to be absent: death is the unwanted and intrusive guest in the (seemingly) living body of a child.

These are not tales in which the beautiful/bright/strong/fascinating protagonists thrive and conquer the depths of cruelty; on the contrary, they are the theaters-of-truth in which (due to a link missing between common understanding and facts) nothing can be forecast[1]. This, I believe, is what profoundly shakes the reader’s imagination, for we simply cannot “bear being the victims of chance” (Wolf 79). As a result of this, our own bodies begin to look and feel different under the radioactive light of uncertainty, projecting that vulnerable glow we thought only existed in the nonhuman.

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[1] As Treat states: “It is the conspicuous lack of conventional malice and vengeance that, in part, distinguishes the start of the nuclear age. It is an age not enjoined by emotions of epics, the stuff of storytelling from the beginning of our literacy, but rather one effectively voided of them” (17).

Image: From Japanese Manga Hadashi no Gen (1973 – 1974).

Prompt 3

Truth and Fact

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Prompt 3 #3

After reading John Treat’s Writing Ground Zero one can immediately begin to see the differences between truth and fact. Although Treat makes it extremely clear that the challenge of depicting truth and fact is not only a problem that is particular to atomic-bomb literature, it has long been a concern of modern writing (34) it is certainly interesting to consider truth and fact in atomic bomb literature. While making his main points about truth and fact on page 34, Treat references some atomic-bomb authors who have grappled with these themes in their works. Specifically, Treat references Toyoshima Yoshio and Ōta Yōko, author of City of Corpses in Hiroshima Three Witnesses, and their struggles to depict fact and truth in their works. Treat highlights Yōko’s attempt to address this problem in her preface to the second edition, which Yōko added during the books republishing in 1950. Yōko indicated in the preface that even though she experienced the bomb first hand, that she had “done some research” (147) and we see that research throughout the work in various forms (i.e. statistics, quotes from newspaper clippings, etc.).  Although this is effective and certainly represents a mixture of fact and truth, Hayashi Kyōko’s Two Grave Markers in The Atomic Bomb: Voices from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, another piece of atomic-bomb literature, addresses fact and truth, in a different, but more effective manner than Yōko. Two Grave Markers is more effective since it explicitly makes the reader more attune to question whether fact or truth is being shared with them.

Instead of using the author’s introduction in order to make readers aware of areas of fact (research) and truth (first person accounts/hearsay stories) like in Yōko’s work, Kyōko employs the third person to tell Wakako’s survivor story of the atomic bombing of “city N.” Unlike Yōko Kyōko weaves seemingly unnecessary comments/side-bars into Wakako’s story to make the reader aware of truth and fact. The best example of this comes on pages 33 and 34. “I heard that a missionary school student tried to help a nun who was crushed under the church. When she ran toward the building, the nun chided the girl and said, Don’t come, it’s all right, run away quickly. The nun’s robe caught fire…and the girl ran away crying, they say” Later, Wakako mumbles to herself “that story is a fake.” This statement is followed with the claim that the “story was an embellished fabrication, not the truth” (34).

Wakko’s initial reaction and the following commentary serves as justification to why the missionary student story was a fabrication. “Those who lived had just barely managed to save their lives. Who would have deliberately run back to help others? There could not possibly have been time to worry about the others. The girl student who fled home probably fabricated the story when recounting her experiences to her parents, the image of the nun she had forsaken haunting her eyes. It must be that she wanted to believe in her own good will. The made-up story moved Obatachan, brought tears to Tsune’s eyes, and would do the same to many other well meaning people. As the days pass, the lie will penetrate the girl’s body and she herself will begin to believe it. For the first time, then, she will be liberated from the nun” (34).

It is obvious that anecdote about the missionary school student and the following quote are relatable to Wakako’s own experience and her difficulties with coming to terms with what not only the general events that occurred, but also the events that occurred between Wakako and her friend Yoko in “N city” on August 9th. However, this challenging of the anecdote serves as a clear example for the reader to question not only elements of the story and actions of Wakako, but all literature that encompasses first person and like first person accounts. Of course challenging elements of a text is something that all good readers do, but it is something that is often lacking when reading literature like City of Corpses and Two Grave Markers. The fact that Two Grave Markers gives an in depth example of challenging the authenticity of a story serves as a reminder to the reader that they should always be wary of personal accounts. Since some humans are the only things that survive atomic atrocities, they are a necessary aspect of knowing and understanding atomic atrocities. Therefore Hayashi Kyōko’s Two Grave Markers and its missionary school student anecdote plays an important role in reading similar literature for sifting through elements of fact and truth.

Sources:

“Introduction and Chapter 1.” Writing Ground Zero: Japanese Literature and the Atomic Bomb, by John Whittier Treat, The University of Chicago Press, 1995, pp. 1–45.

Minear, Richard H. Hiroshima: Three Witnesses. Princeton Univ. Press, 1990.

Selden, Kyoko Iriye, and Mark Selden. The Atomic Bomb: Voices from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. M.E. Sharpe, 1989.

 

Prompt 3

Truth and Memory

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An argument unfolds. It is the last panel of a robust and vibrant conference hosted by the African American History, Culture, and Digital Humanities (AADHum) project – what are the ethics of using linked-open data to aggregate dispersed and fragmented records of the Atlantic Slave Trade? In the minds of some, the lives and experiences of people who were entrapped within the horrifying system of slavery are honored by trying to piece together the fragments; to others, it is yet another dehumanizing act of violence rendering people into data, particularly as the original records detail the capture and commodification – including the sale, and relocation – of people who had few means to tell their own stories, to preserve their own records. When writing about slavery, Saidiya Hartman invokes the notion of ‘critical fabulation’ – or the method of blending archival records, scholarship, critical theory, and fictional narrative to map the limits of what is possible to know about the experiences of enslaved people. For Hartman, critical fabulation intervenes in the silences and gaps of the archival record and makes the ‘afterlife of slavery’ including the skewed health, economic, and social opportunities, incarceration rates, and violences against black people visible, knowable in the present.

While vastly different experiences, the challenges of retelling the experiences of enslaved people echo the tensions of grappling with the memory, imagination, and literatures of the atomic bomb. Does one attempt to aggregate and describe all the available pieces of information or do we sit with the fragments, silences, and gaps? Hartman’s framing of critical fabulation is another way of  leveraging the work of literature. This lever helps us grapple with ourselves, to wrap arms/minds around moments to large to understand in one sitting, to write into being possible pasts and futures. To reach for Toyoshima Yoshio’s urge that truth does not always equal fact, Ōta Yōko’s City of Corpses and Hayashi Kyōko Two Grave Markers responses to the atomic bombs weave memory and speculation as truthful engagements with the facts and statics.

Hayashi Kyōko’s Two Grave Markers struggles to remember – within moments after the atomic bomb destroys Nagasaki and days later, months later. Memory – the narrator’s and Wakako’s – is uncertain, seeking to understand not only what happened but the emotional responses that unfold. The absences and gaps are visible, though unspoken. Ōta Yōko’s City of Corpses also struggles to recall the atomic bombing of Hiroshima clearly. Ōta responds to – and through – the statistics and medical reports all the while returning to her personal memory, her observations, and the experiences of those nearby. While truth may not map directly to fact, the grappling with memory and emotions – fear, guilt, horror, relief – write into being a genuine narrative.

Hartman worries over the notion of critical fabulation – can a critical narrative imagine the emotional and mental landscapes of an individual girl trapped on a slave ship? If so, do we do her an injustice by imagining her experience or does such an imaginative journey bring us closer to understanding? Hartman asks how do we thread a careful path that neither offers up the horrors of slavery as a fetishizing spectacle nor obscures or erases the complex lives caught up within it. Within Ōta Yōko’s City of Corpses and Hayashi Kyōko Two Grave Markers similar tensions exist, both resisting a spectacular recounting of accumulated trauma while centering the tangled emotional and mental response of specific and truthful experience.

Saidiya Hartman; Venus in Two Acts. Small Axe 1 June 2008; 12 (2): 1–14. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/-12-2-1

Prompt 2

Analysis of Sara Ensor’s and Donna Haraway’s thinking about biological reproductivity in the context of the ecological crisis

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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.

Prompt 2

Anti-Natal Futures

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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)

Theorizing Environmental Humanities for the Post-Fukushima Age