Abstract
Representations of the devastation of nuclear annihilation are undoubtedly confrontational, yet crucial to understanding the ongoing trauma and impact of atomic warfare. In examining how survivors “translate into words an extraordinarily painful landscape” (Tōge 1952), this paper explores the abject imagery utilized by hibakusha poets in order to express the violent horrors of the A-bomb. It focuses on how explicitly grotesque images function to give shape to events regarded as ineffable, and to make potently real the experiences of those whose identities were defined by shame and revulsion. Drawing upon Kristevan notions of abjection, and the poetry of hibakusha such as Kurihara Sadako, Tōge Sankichi, Kawamura Sachiko, and Shōda Shinoe, it contends that by seeking to graphically confront that which is ineffable, hibakusha poets are able to contest the liminal spaces to which their bodies and experiences have been relegated; indeed, by “reopening the grave” (Gotō, qtd. in Treat 1995, 29), survivor poets refuse silence, and give form and shape to trauma.
Works Cited
Atherton, Cassandra. “‘Give Back the Peace that will Never End’: Hibakusha Poets as Public Intellectuals.” The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus 23.3 (2015), 8 June 2015, apjjf.org/Cassandra-Atherton/4328.html. Accessed 10 Feb. 2018.Search in Google Scholar
Bharucha, Nilufer. “The Bhibhitsa Rasa in Anglophone Indian Cultural Discourse: The Repugnant and Distasteful at the Level of Gender, Race and Caste.” Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery. Eds. Veena Das et al. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2001. 69–88.Search in Google Scholar
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1999.Search in Google Scholar
Davis, Walter A. Deracination: Historicity, Hiroshima, and the Tragic Imperative. New York: State U of New York P, 2001.Search in Google Scholar
Diehl, Chad. And the River Flowed as a Raft of Corpses: The Poetry of Yamaguchi Tsutomu. New York: Excogitating Over Coffee Publishing, 2010.Search in Google Scholar
Diehl, Chad. “Lambs of God, Ravens of Death, Rafts of Corpses: Three Visions of Trauma in Nagasaki Survivor Poetry.” Japanese Studies 37.1 (2017): 117–38.10.1080/10371397.2017.1311763Search in Google Scholar
Dougherty, Edward A. “Memories of the future: the poetry of Sadako Kurihara and Hiromu Morishita.” War, Literature & The Arts 21.1 (2011), wlajournal.com/wlaarchive/23_1-2/dougherty.pdf. Accessed 10 Feb. 2018. Search in Google Scholar
Foster, Hal. “Obscene, Abject, Traumatic.” October 78 (1996): 107–24.10.2307/778908Search in Google Scholar
Ham, Paul. Hiroshima Nagasaki: The Real Story of the Atomic Bombings and their Aftermath. London: Transworld Publishers, 2012.Search in Google Scholar
Kawamura Sachiko. “Sky of Hiroshima.” 1952. www.hiro-tsuitokinenkan.go.jp/taikenki/Esora.html. Accessed 10 Feb. 2018.Search in Google Scholar
Kodama Tatsuharu. The Lunch Box. Hiroshima: Chart Institute, 1995.Search in Google Scholar
Kutzbach, Konstanze, and Monika Mueller, eds. “Introduction.” The Abject of Desire: The Aestheticization of the Unaesthetic in Contemporary Literature and Culture. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007. 7–17.10.1163/9789401204897Search in Google Scholar
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.Search in Google Scholar
Kurihara Sadako. Black Eggs: Poems. Trans. Richard H. Minear. Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1994.10.3998/mpub.18511Search in Google Scholar
Lifton, Robert Jay. The Protean Self: Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation. Chicago: U of Chicago P.Search in Google Scholar
Mayer, Sylvia. “American Environmentalism and Encounters with the Abject.” The Abject of Desire: The Aestheticization of the Unaesthetic in Contemporary Literature and Culture. Eds. Konstanze Kutzbach and Monika Mueller. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997. 221–34.Search in Google Scholar
Mulhall, Maya. “Approaching Abject Language.” Southerly 73.2 (2013): 169–80.Search in Google Scholar
Robinett, Jane. “The Narrative Shape of Traumatic Experience.” Literature and Medicine 26.2 (2007): 290–311.10.1353/lm.0.0003Search in Google Scholar
Rutherford, Jennifer. Zombies. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2013.10.4324/9780203101841Search in Google Scholar
Todeschini, Maya. “The Bomb’s Womb? Women and the Atom Bomb.” Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering, and Recovery. Eds. Veena Das et al. Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 2001. 102–56.10.1525/9780520924857-005Search in Google Scholar
Tōge Sankichi. Poems of the Atomic Bomb. 1952. Trans. Karen Thornber. ceas.uchicago.edu/sites/ceas.uchicago.edu/files/uploads/Sibley/Genbaku%20shishu.pdf. Accessed 10 Feb. 2018.Search in Google Scholar
Treat, John Whittier. Writing Ground Zero. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.Search in Google Scholar
Vance-Watkins, Lequita, and Aratani Mariko, eds. White Flash, Black Rain: Women of Japan Relive the Bomb. Trans. Lequita Vance-Watkins and Aratani Mariko. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 1995.Search in Google Scholar
Wiesel, Elie. “Art and the Holocaust: Trivialising Memory.” New York Times, 11 June 1989, www.nytimes.com/1989/06/11/movies/art-and-the-holocaust-trivializing-memory.html?pagewanted=all. Accessed 20 April 2017.Search in Google Scholar
Young, Iris Marion. Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1990.Search in Google Scholar
© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston