Lin’s wife, Sonporn, whose name means “wishes come true,” left their home on the morning of December 26, 2004 to gather shellfish at the place of the Stones of the Golden Women and never returned. Lin was reduced to bitterness and alcoholism and his relationship with Sonporn’s father was destroyed—“violent waves still battering their respective hearts.”
Finally, Lin tells the narrator that his wife appeared to him in a dream.
“I went to Khao Lak and got lost, and now I can’t find my way home,” she said.
Lin says, “She was looking for me to help her. I want to look for my wife. I want to find her body. I want to bring home her bones.”
During the recitation of this story, the pure tones of the A-bomb hackberry tree filled the auditorium at Space Zero. So did the heart and soul of the musician and flute-carver Kurotaro as the narrator continued.
The narrator described how the pain of loss seared Lin’s heart as surely as radiation seared the hackberry tree. Lin lost his emotions as well as his will to live. Lin became like the shellfish clinging to the shores and stones at Stones of the Golden Women. The shellfish were dislodged and upturned during the tsunami and left to die and burn under the South Seas sun—irradiated and demolished.
I came to believe that we are all Moka. The word means “human beings.”
How many of us have stood ancient and strong in spirit through incredible challenges, only to be felled by an unexpected typhoon of physical or emotional assaults or betrayal? The challenge comes when we pick ourselves up and whittle away to find the core of our existence, shape it, reform our lives and go on to make beautiful music that originates in our core--the soul. Sometimes we can accomplish this on our own, sometimes it takes an angel or two to salvage what is left of us after we experience our personal disasters, and sometimes love is all we need and love is forever elusive.
The expression of that struggle and triumph is the true stuff of art. And true art is also elusive. Beware the individual who calls himself/herself an “artist.” At the P.E.N. conference, all contributors were known simply as “participants.”
There were six Americans at the P.E.N. conference in Tokyo. “Music” and “art” conferences are a billion dollar business in America and attract hundreds of thousands of participants. What have we Americans contributed that is of any real value, when we are defined in the rest of the world by celebrity culture? It is an audacity, irony, and affront to the human spirit that some “art” in the United States is known as “Americana;” especially when one considers that the American A-bomb almost destroyed the essence of the hackberry tree that now fills auditoriums with the strains of Amazing Grace.
Georgianne Nienaber is a writer, author, and investigative journalist. She lives in the world. Her articles have appeared in The Huffington Post, SCOOP New Zealand, Glide Magazine, Rwanda's New Times, India's TerraGreen, COA News, ZNET, OpEdNews, The Journal of the International Primate Protection League, Friends of the Congo, Africa Front, The United Nations Publication, A Civil Society Observer, and Zimbabwe's The Daily Mirror. Her fiction exposé of insurance fraud in the horse industry, Horse Sense, was re-released in early 2006. Gorilla Dreams: The Legacy of Dian Fossey was also released in 2006. Nienaber spent much of 2007 doing research in South Africa, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. She was in DRC as a MONUC-accredited journalist, and recently spent six weeks in Southern Louisiana investigating hurricane reconstruction. She is currently developing a documentary on the Gulf of Mexico DEAD ZONE.
Fascinating juxtaposition of the tsunami in 2005 with the A-Bomb strike.
I just read about how Michelle Obama was criticized because she recently said that she was proud of her country for the first time. Cindy McCain responded that she's always been proud of her country.
No American who's been through the Nagasaki Peace Museum or gone to the Peace Park in Hiroshima could be proud of their country for what we did to those places and people. The City of Hiroshima has been very active in advocating peace, even calling on U.S. Presidents to exercise restraint and avoid militarization.
I read on needlenose that politics is about identity, not issues. Pro-peace candidate is disrespected as a weak liberal by pro-war candidate. Candidates win by trying to overdo their opponents' "macho-ness." Until we can understand what war is about and confront what we've done in the past, we are moored in old ways of thinking that lead to counterproductive and horrific outcomes.
by
JohnPeebles (7 articles, 10 quicklinks, 2 diaries, 34 comments)
on Sunday, March 2, 2008 at 11:20:28 PM
I have three notebooks full of stories from this conference.
There was much to learn. In fact, writer Hisashi Inoue gave a powerful presentation ("Little Boy, Big Typhoon") about another typhoon that hit Hiroshima barely a month after the A-Bomb. The bomb exploded 580 meters above the Shima Hospital, unleashing several million dgrees centigrade of energy, a 300,000 degree centigrade fireball, and of course the radiation. 90,000 people died instantly, 56,147 houses were burnt down, and 200,000 plus people lived as "atomic bomb victims" for the remainder of their shortened lives.
On September 17 a typhoon hit Hiroshima hard, "violent wind and rain pounding the misery of this world brought out by people."
"Little Boy was the codename for the atomic bomb, but it was originally jargon for that part of the male anatomy..HIS THING," Inoue said.
Inoue also gave a scathing indictment of the lack of response to hurricane Katrina in his closing remarks. He cited the depopulation of New Orleans as a "conspiracy," which prompted the five of us with ties to New Orleans to applaud..it was an unexpected gesture from a literary giant of the Far East. What I came to appreciate is that the rest of the world seems to be much more angry about what happened before, during and after Katrina than most Americans.
I can also say that I was not very proud to be an American and sit through several presentations on the A-bomb. It was humbling and humiliating.
by
Georgianne Nienaber (145 articles, 46 quicklinks, 13 diaries, 337 comments)
on Monday, March 3, 2008 at 12:29:29 AM
3 comments
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