On August 6, 1945 at 8:15 am the United States dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. One kilometer from ground zero, a hackberry tree in the gardens of the Hiroshima Army Hospital was seared by radiation from the blast and half of the tree vaporized. The tree was a favorite of patients at the hospital, who would sit under its sheltering branches as they recovered from the wounds of war and life. The Hackberry miraculously survived the vaporous hell and stood as a silent witness to the horror of Hiroshima until 1984, when it suffered a direct hit from a typhoon, produced a few leaves the following spring, and finally died in 1988.
It is February 2008. My friend, songwriter Susan Cowsill, and I are attending the final wrap party for a conference on Culture and Natural Disaster in Tokyo. “Screamed, Survived, Start Anew,” is the theme of the Japan P.E.N. club’s sponsored event, which has attracted writers and musicians from around the world. They have just spent five days presenting their work and discussing human responses to the fury of nature. Every participant at the conference has produced a body of work that speaks to the essence of humanity in the face of the unspeakable.
The memory is indelible. My hand is on my friend’s shoulder while I struggle to keep my knees from shaking as the remnants of the Hiroshima hackberry tree become an instrument, and the haunting notes of Amazing Grace fill the banquet room. It is a private concert, composed of an audience of two. We are both literally leaning into the tones— a sound that seems to suspend reality into a moment when all time and suffering and redemption are distilled into the purest strains of music one can imagine.
Famed Japanese musician Kurotaro Kurosaka had graciously responded to my request to please play the kokarina (flute) he carved from the hackberry that survived the A-Bomb. The sound is clear, beautiful, indescribable, but filled with power. It shreds the heart and cuts to the soul and to hear it is to never, ever, forget it. I am like a greedy lover and ask him to play it again—and he immediately obliges. Bowing, smiling, he puts the wood of the ancient hackberry to his lips again, his unruly shock of hair falling across eyes that are closed, absorbed in the beauty, the moment. Eyes filled with tears, because the release from the beauty, the power— was required.
The soul of Kurotaro consumed every room he entered, and certainly the concert hall, known as “Space Zero,” where the bulk of the P.E.N. presentations unfolded like beautiful, complicated origami. Kurotaro is an unassuming man, and his face will never grace the cover of a celebrity magazine, but that concept is born in American definitions of “culture” and “art” which are bastardizations of truth and beauty.
The International P.E.N. conference has reaffirmed an unexpressed feeling that Americans have been consumed by monotonous “art” that fills the galleries of uncounted seaside tourist traps, music stores, and honky-tonk strips that pollute the vast American coastline and interior lake country resorts. Art in the United States has been reduced to a concept of “Americana” that is self-serving at best and a monetary rip-off at worst. Throw some paint on a canvas, write sloppy music, find an agent or a well-heeled sponsor who thinks they can make a buck, and you are well on your way to American “celebrity” and “artistry.”
Kurotaro’s hackberry tree kokarina supported a literary presentation, “Stones of the Golden Women” at the P.E.N. forum and defined the essence of truth and beauty—the expression of which is the duty of the writer and artist. Fraud, shape shifting, celebrity narcissism, the quest for money, and deception—all have no place in art.
Novelist Khwaiyun Lukjan of Thailand narrated his description of the tsunami of December 26, 2004, when the Adaman Sea devoured the landscape of Thailand in Phang Nga Province on the island of Phuket. The tsunami surged numerous times as set after set of waves ebbed and flowed a distance of over two kilometers inland. Not a building, not a tree survived.
“When people meet with major catastrophe, we throw away the self-image that has been created to protect ourselves in our regular lives and lay bare the self essence residing in the deepest recesses of our hearts,” Lukjan narrated.
“There was only one thing on my mind at the time. To live. No matter what happened I had to overcome it without fail. To survive was the only thing I was thinking about.”
He described himself as “a small ant—drifting in a giant sea,” and from this perspective the story of the “Stones of the Golden Women” was born.
The title of the work describes a devastated Moken Village, Hin Nang Thong, and the quest of a man (Lin) to find the body of his wife and mother of his child, so that he may put her spirit to rest.
The Moken are known as the “people of the sea, or sea gypsies.” Their ancestors arrived in Thailand thousands of years ago from southeastern China, entering the ocean from Indochina. The Moken numbered only 3,000 in the American-dominated tourist areas of Thailand before the tsunami, and their history and culture was literally overrun and ignored. They were truly “an invisible people,” in the words of Lukjan.
The Stones of the Golden Women is a place name that describes a wide stretch of coastline where rocks and stones littered the beach and shellfish were once bountiful in the shallow coastal waters—shallow waters that by their very nature gave lift and power to the tsunami. Shellfish are an important food for the Moken, and Moken women inhabited the beach for this reason. No one standing there survived the 2004 tsunami.
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, 0 diaries, 24 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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