Opinion: Bombed-out Verse

The atomic bomb’s immediate and horrific effects on bodies and identities crafted a whole new citizenship category: bomb ‘victims’

By Pramod K Nayar

John Hersey’s best-selling Hiroshima (1946) tells the story of the bombing through six eyewitness accounts. George Weller’s First into Nagasaki was originally drafted as despatches, four weeks after the bombing, and eventually appeared as a single volume in 2016.

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Today, Japanese survivor accounts, histories and commentaries make up a massive nuclear archive around the world, even as the most appropriate form in which to speak of the bomb which destroys all forms, remains the subject of debate. So, how did poets respond to the horror?

Poetry in Atomic Age

Several Euro-American poets responded to the bomb: Allen Ginsberg, Edith Sitwell, William Stafford, Mark Sanders, Gary Snyder (whose ‘Atomic Dawn’ is a manifesto of anti-nuke activism), Adrienne Rich, Denise Levertov, Richard Wilbur, among others, and explored different dimensions of the atomic era.

Mary Jo Salter in ‘Chernobyl’ speaks of an illusion of safety we live under.

Safe and innocent, the rain

fell all night as we slept,
and the story at last was dead –

all traces of it swept
under the earth’s green bed.

 The toxin is inside the water and the soil, even if the story around Chernobyl is over and forgotten. This theme of the persistent toxins appears in Sujata Bhatt’s ‘Wine from Bordeaux’. In the poem, the man who buys two thousand bottles of the wine, will only buy those from ‘before Chernobyl’:

He doesn’t like
to ingest anything harvested

in Europe after 1985.

 But, as the poem emphasises, ‘Chernobyl’ is not just a distant location, because all Europe is irradiated irreversibly.

Denise Levertov in ‘Watching “Dark Circle”’ criticises the use of animals in ‘simulations’ of atomic bombings, where, for the pigs:

It is
Not a simulation.

Levertov notes that the pigs used for nuke testing are ‘real’, as is their agony. The ‘simulation of hell’ is ‘hell itself’. She then poses a rhetorical question: What can redeem them?

Edith Sitwell’s ‘Dirge of the New Sunrise’ speaks of the ‘phantom sun’ and the scene of devastation:

no eyes grieved —

For none were left for tears:

They were blinded as the years

The radiation is invisible and murderous: ‘the ray from that heat came soundless, shook the sky’. Sitwell concludes:

squeezed the stems

Of all that grows on the earth till they were dry.

The eyes that saw, the lips that kissed, are gone

Or black as thunder lie and grin at the murdered Sun.

The Hindi poet SH Vatsyayan ‘Agyeya’ in ‘Hiroshima’ describes the day of the explosion:

On this day, the sun
Appeared — no, not slowly over the horizon

But right in the city square . . .

The word ‘appeared’ is a misnomer for there is no gradual dawn: the sun explodes, instantaneous and immediate. The world does not transition into daybreak: it is burnt into it. The sun which is not quite the sun is seen also in Maori poet Hone Tuwhare’s ‘No Ordinary Sun’.

But what of the poets from the victim-population?

Pika-don Poetry

The ‘pika-don’ term evolved to describe the bright flash (pika) and booming sound (don) that marked the bombs.

The larger point being made by poets on the bomb is that primordial forces — the power of the atom — have been harnessed in the cause of destruction. Nature has been unleashed in the deviant interests of some humans.

Sunlight induces shadows as a natural consequence. But in Toge Sankichi’s ‘The Shadow’, he writes of the famous case of the man who was vaporised by the bomb and whose shadow was burnt into the concrete (the photograph of this scene is a part of the archive now): ‘this shadow/etched in tragic memory’.  Sankichi speaks of a ‘new Hiroshima’ in which the bomb’s hypocentre is now a tourist attraction labelled ‘Historic A-Bomb Site’.  Nanao Sakaki in ‘Memorandum’ speaks of searching for a missing friend in Hiroshima one year after the bombing:

As a substitute for him
I found a shadow man.
The atomic ray instantly
disintegrated his whole body,
All — but shadow alive on concrete steps.

The philosopher Akira Mizuta Lippit notes the comparative radiance — of the natural sun and the bomb’s sun: “At Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two views of invisibility — absolute visibility and total transparency — unfolded under the brilliant force of the atomic blasts. Instantly penetrated by the massive force of radiation, the hibakusha were seared into the environment with the photographic certainty of having been there. In the aftermath of the bombings, the remaining bodies absorbed and were absorbed by the invisible radiation. These bodies vanished slowly until there was nothing left but their negatives.”

Just as the sun is no ordinary sun, the shadows are no ordinary shadows: they are afterlives of those vaporised by the bomb.

Survivor Bodies

The bomb’s immediate and horrific effects on bodies and identities crafted a whole new citizenship category: bomb ‘victims’. The making of a bomb-subjectivity and identity becomes an important theme in numerous Japanese poets. In Shinkichi Takahashi’s ‘Explosion’ the speaker describes how, after the bomb, s/he breathes in poisoned air and ponders on the future life:

A billion years
And I’ll be shrunk to half,

Takahashi’s lines capture the slow deaths of the radiation victims but also signal the extended tragedy that even science recognises: the half-life of radioactive material exceeds by astronomical amounts, the lifespan of humans. Later in the poem, Takahashi speaks of the ‘pollution’ in the marrow of those exposed to the bomb. The invisible toxin defines the person, the human, who survived. The enemy is not out there, but in the very marrow.

There is also the guilt of survival in some poets. The speakers are witnesses, seeking the appropriate language in which to convey what they have witnessed — for it is not enough to see, and the witness must communicate what s/he has seen.

In Tōge Sankichi’s ‘August 6’, the speaker walks past the numerous dead, and believes their eyes issue a ‘soul-rending appeal’. In ‘Eyes’, the speaker feels appealing eyes on him:

Eyes fastened to my back, fixed on my shoulder, my arm.

Why do they look at me like this?

The speaker realises why:

Erect, clothed, brow intact and nose undamaged,

I walk on —  a human being

But is the speaker really ‘undamaged’, that is the moot question. In another poem, ‘At the Makeshift Aid Station’, the speaker sees severely burned girls, who no longer have eyes or lips to cry with, and comments, ‘how far transformed from the human they are’.

In a poignant description of the mass dead, the poem asks:

You are simply thinking, thinking
of those who until this morning

were your fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters

(would any of them know you now?)

The survivors cannot identify the dead, the dead can no longer claim their relatives. The bomb destroys kinship and there are only the burnt victims.

Although poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric, as the critic Theodor Adorno said, the atomic bomb poets imply that sometimes there is only the poetry of barbarism, of the dark times following the exploding sun.

‘Gone’, wrote Sitwell, ‘is the heart of man’.