“Reopening the grave”: reading trauma and abjection in hibakusha poetry

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.