Silencing, as addressed in Laura
Hein and Mark Selden’s Living with the
Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts in the Nuclear Age, was one
concept in this weeks reading that interested me. I went online in search for
Hibakusha literature and stumbled upon a United Nations Office for Disarmament
Affairs website in which they held a poetry for peace contest. “Throughout
the month-long competition, 741 poems were submitted, some echoing the pain of
the victims, others calling for nuclear disarmament and almost all crying out
for peace. On the UN Peace Day Facebook page,
the contest evolved into a dialogue among those visiting the site with a common
goal that peace is the only option”(http://www.un.org/disarmament/special/poetryforpeace/).
Many of the poems from the September 2011 competition were submitted by non-Hibakusha
poets but many of the poems vividly depict images that were dictated to them
via living Hibakusha. Helle van Aardeberg, the winner of the poetry
competition, wrote the following poem:
Explosion Affected Reflection
Blasted into a wasteland,
behind an old torn photo
Father silently weeps
for what were once his people
their voices and love forsaken
while Mother has grown old
torn in recollection with grief
her children’s young kisses
still innocent upon her cheek;
memorizing, unborn babies
hear exploding bombs
as yet she stares, despondent,
out the broken window,
in remembrance for peace.
This haunting poem not only
emphasizes the loss of hope within a post atomic bomb world but also conveys a
sense of uncertainty for the future. The most disturbing line in the poem is
“memorizing, unborn babies / hear exploding bombs / as yet she stares,
despondent”. What makes this line so
unsettling is the fact that, for many generations to come, children will have
to live in a world unknowing when, where, and if another bomb will drop around
them.
Hein
and Selden go into great detail in the chapter about how many photographs,
movies and articles surrounding the aftermath of Hiroshima were kept out of the
public eye in the U.S for many years following the disaster. “The first
close-up photo of survivors in one of the “big three” newspapers appeared on
August 6, 1965, the twentieth anniversary
of the bombing, in a section in the Asahi
captioned ‘Hiroshima Is Praying’”(Hein and Selden 26). It is very
interesting how, once again, censorship played a big role in negating information
from the public as a way to maintain national support. The fact that this UN
poetry competition took place not only somewhat symbolizes the recognition of the
destruction of an atomic bomb but still also negates any direct referencing to
U.S involvement all together.
Here is the UN Office for Disarmament
Affairs website link so you can check out some more poems that were submitted http://www.un.org/disarmament/special/poetryforpeace/
When reading this poem, the same exact line struck out to me as well. However, I interpreted it a little differently. I read it as if a mother and father had lost their children in the bombing. it states the mom is "torn with recollection with grief her children's young kisses still innocent," as if to say she remembers their kisses all too well. The next line states "memorizing, unborn babies hear exploding bombs." Although I love your interpretation, when I first read it, I thought of this as her remembering her kids, partly because there is a semicolon in the latter line. Nonetheless, I analyzed it as the mother thinking of her children as unborn kids because they never got to grow up. They were forced to hear the bomb, in which their lives were taken, destroying the family photo that the father weeps over.
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