Hibakusha poems: expressing the inexpressible

 

I was aware of hibakusha -survivors of atomic bombing by US on Japan in 1945, watched documentaries and videos of this horrific atrocity and read extensively, recently (thanks to technology) I have done virtual visits to Hiroshima peace memorial and park around it. I read that night lighting of the surviving dome in eerie green and orange inside conveys appropriate emotions of dread and horror. I wasn’t aware of hibakusha poems -poems by survivors, and so today evening I was reading. These experiences are too traumatic, and it takes extraordinary human fortitude to even begin articulating what one likes to forget as a nightmare and move away with any semblance of life. This is what trauma does it leaves unfathomable silence. I was reading how trauma get carried epigenetically to next generation. The brutality is not confined to memories of individual or society but traces through the genes, through bodies, into future generations. There are many communities around the world reeling in indescribable trauma carrying the dread of past in their everyday life expressed in small details which they aren’t even aware. Indeed, much of humanity is continuing trauma of surviving the past as hunter gatherers, the reason why most humans are effortlessly innovative and independent while carrying empathy and generosity. What makes some societies exceptionally cruel or tolerant to cruelty cannot really be brushed under the euphemism of relativism. We live in globalized world hence the narrations and sensitivities (indeed sensibilities) of 20^th century has limited significance, essentially anachronistic nuisance in most case nurtured by sinister forces for control. Truth needs to be spoken clearly with logic and evidence. Some regions of world are exceptionally violent and unsettled, apart from controlling systems that nurture these, effective outlets of traumas of communities is an issue that cannot be negated.

Hibakusha poems broke the silence through stillness of haiku and tanka while they detached into meditative universality of pain. Soon, as the life start to flow and vigor returned, they became aware of the responsibility of unique experience. This unique voice that has witnessed the horrors of atomic bombs vaporizing happy thriving lives into nothing in an instant and are now forced to witness the ignominy of forgetfulness of humanity -of some arrogant humans, as they dabble in nuclear bombs with horrifying carelessness incapacitated to understand the devastating consequences. Hibakusha free verse poems are visceral in its simplicity and overwhelming in its impact. Truth is always in sincere, and trauma carries the urgency of earnest description. Language is stripped bared to its basic necessity so as to keep the experience palpable and immediate. You feel as if you are there as a witness as each line grip you into immense suffering. This urgency of trauma maybe the reason why many survivors live longer (i have seen these with holocaust survivors too) probably the prolonged life as a persistent reminder to a witness to human stupidity, to temper their tall claims.      

Wittgenstein (the philosophical moorings of AI is undeniably in approximation of meaning, bravo Wittgenstein!) was onto something about limits of language (“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”) but it is ingenuity of humans to cross the confines of logic and describe the indescribable.

This copied from https://www.pbs.org/newshour/features/hiroshima-poems/

Let Us Be Midwives! An untold story of the atomic bombing

by Sadako Kurihara, translated by Richard Minear

Night in the basement of a concrete structure now in ruins.
Victims of the atomic bomb jammed the room;
It was dark—not even a single candle.
The smell of fresh blood, the stench of death,
The closeness of sweaty people, the moans.
From out of all that, lo and behold, a voice:
"The baby’s coming!"
In that hellish basement,
At that very moment, a young woman had gone into labour.
In the dark, without a single match, what to do?
People forgot their own pains, worried about her.
And then: "I'm a midwife. I’ll help with the birth."
The speaker, seriously injured herself, had been moaning only moments before.
And so new life was born in the dark of that pit of hell.
And so the midwife died before dawn, still bathed in blood.
Let us be midwives!
Let us be midwives!
Even if we lay down our own lives to do so.

Sadako Kurihara (1913 – 2005) was a poet, writer and peace activist who survived the Hiroshima bombing.