“Oceans, Radiations, and Monsters”
Oceans, Radiations, and Monsters
Rebecca H. Hogue
Pacific scholars have long called attention to the haunting of the Pacific by nuclearism—where three nuclear empires continued their centuries-long invasion of the region with fifty years of nuclear blasts. Although detonations have since ceased, the nuclear specter remains a monstrous presence with sporadic and unpredictable manifestations from radiation half-lives, millions of tons of nuclear waste, and ongoing militarism and colonial occupation. Teresia Teaiwa argued in her famous essay “bikinis and other s/pacific n/oceans” that “since the nuclear specter first appeared in the Pacific—Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 and Bikini in 1946—it has spread its poison at an alarming rate.”1 Epeli Hauʻofa, too, acknowledged the elusive, omnipresent nature of “nuclear specters” in the Pacific Ocean, remarking that “the problems [of nuclear proliferation], especially those of toxic waste disposal and destructive exploitation of ocean resources, remain to haunt us.”2 Yet the monstrosity of nuclearization is often obscured through projections into fictional characters, like Godzilla, that then threaten the Pacific Rim, rather than dealing with the real horror affecting the ocean and islands of the Pacific. In order to address the tensions, erasures, and networks of the “Trans-Pacific” and Oceania in this age of nuclear remainders and climate collapse, whether termed “radiation ecologies” (DeLoughrey), “irradiated transpacific” (Bahng), or “radioactive Pacific” (Huang)3—I consider the ways contemporary artists address how these nuclear specters reside in the Pacific Ocean itself—its menacing empires, environmental waste, and multispecies violences.
In this essay I examine contemporary Asian diasporic and Indigenous Oceanic representations of radiation aftermaths that witness the remainders of nuclear imperialisms in the Pacific by rhetorizing and embodying nuclearism’s horror and monstrosity. I demonstrate how, with a multimedia archive of film, poetry, and performance, ri-Ṃajeḷ, Kanaka ‘Ōiwi, Sāmoan, and Asian diasporic artists turn to the horror genre as a way to reconfigure transoceanic ties between Japan, the United States, and the Pacific Islands. The artists’ engagement with monstrosity and visual spectrality does not focus on the imagined terrors of the ocean, but instead addresses how multiple, overlapping histories of militarism incite ongoing ecological violence in the Pacific Ocean.
Inspired by Gojira and its spectacle of nuclear horror, Chinese American visual artist and ocean engineer Jane Chang Mi’s single-channel film ゴジラ/ɡɒdˈzɪlə/ (2020) simultaneously layers all thirty-two Toho Ltd kaiju films, but removes all humans and monsters, for ninety-six minutes of continuous explosions and environmental destruction. In her artist statement Mi declares, “this erasure [of humans and kaiju] mirrors the United States’ policies and actions as a settler and colonial nation” and demonstrates the ways imperial powers deflect responsibility for ecological harm.4 I then contrast the embodiment of monstrosity in ri-Ṃajeḷ (Indigenous Marshallese) poet and activist Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s video-poem “Monster” (2017), shot at the Genbaku Dome in Hiroshima. The video-poem explores the legacies of nuclear proliferation through the figure of the mejenkwaad, a Marshallese demon woman who comes from the ocean to consume islands and children. This essay lastly turns to a 2019 adaptation of Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s “Monster” poem entitled “She Who Dies to Live,” a multimedia spoken word performance featuring Jetn̄il-Kijiner, Kanaka ʻŌiwi artist Jocelyn Kapumealani Ng, and Sāmoan poet Terisa Siagatonu that examines the multigenerational impacts of nuclear imperialisms on women in the Pacific, specifically the history of radiation-induced molar pregnancies in the Marshall Islands.5
The Indigenous Oceanic artists in these texts in particular wrestle with the incongruence of the Pacific Ocean as constitutive of both Pacific Islands’ oceanic genealogical connections as well as its atomic age radioactive environmental disruptions. While Mi’s film highlights the “monstrosity” of nuclear imperialisms in the form of destruction, a key question Jetn̄il-Kijiner, Ng, and Siagatonu consider is how to process the internalized and embodied nonconsensual experiences of how to live when, as Ng’s character declares, “in your blood lives monsters” or “what happens,” as Jetn̄il-Kijiner states in her poem, “when the sun explodes inside of you.” The artists discuss monsters as part of larger conversations around nuclear justice, but connect monstrosity to both the pain and healing of women’s bodies through an acknowledgment of harm and redressing of severed relationships. This approach to monstrosity, I argue, echoes Unangax^ scholar Eve Tuck and artist C. Ree’s redemptive articulation of monsters as those who have “been wronged and seek justice” and “interrupt when injustice is nearly forgotten,”6 therefore highlighting the shared yet uneven experiences of Japanese and Pacific Islander hibakusha—nuclear survivors. Taken together, these artists’ human, nonhuman, and monstrous narratives of nuclear imperialisms transcend national, terrestrial, and aqueous boundaries to rework horror and monstrosity as a process of intimacy and relational entanglement.
Nuclear Imperialisms and Oceanic Monstrosity
The horrors of nuclear imperialisms move across, between, and among the Pacific archipelagos and the Pacific Ocean. In this geographic context, it is important to acknowledge the overlapping use of nuclear weapons across the region by not one but three empires—the United States, Britain, and France—who, in the period of 1946 to 1996 detonated more than three hundred weapons combined.7
Since these detonations in the Pacific began, narratives of nuclear horror often configured in the form of a monster, following a long tradition of viewing the ocean and its creatures as foreign, nefarious, or transmutable, and containing depths and sizes that are unscalable and incomprehensible. Vicious and menacing creatures such as Jaws, Cthulhu, or the radioactive octopus of It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955),8 or older tropes of the boundless unknown of the water, like Davy Jones’ Locker or Captain Ahab’s “horrors of the deep,”9 suggested that terror came from the uncanny or the abject.10 In the nuclear age, in the original Gojira (Godzilla) (1954), for example, Gojira is a prehistoric creature from the Jurassic period who has been forcibly thrust from his underwater home, both warning and showing the disruption of the American nuclear detonations in the Marshall Islands. This particular monster, both victim of nuclear forced migration and perpetrator of harm to the natural and built environment (as evidenced by its attack on Tokyo), has since served as a cautionary allegory for nuclear harm and scientific hubris. As a synecdochical referent to Japan’s nuclear history, Gojira (later Americanized to “Godzilla”) defies temporal constraint, emerging from the Jurassic, enlivened by the nuclear age, and reborn with each filmic interpretation.11 Gojira nevertheless, as Yu-Fang Cho argues, “erases the victims of nuclear weapons, nuclear waste, and the deadly radioactive fallout of human and non-human life forms on land and in the air and water.”12
But the ocean, as many Pacific Islands studies scholars have argued, should not just be seen as a source of horror as the speculative home of giant sea monsters, but instead should be recognized as a source of life and knowledge production.13 Given terrifying environmental devastations such as sea level rise, recent studies in environmental humanities have articulated a necessary “turn” to oceanic studies, be it “critical ocean studies,” “the New Thalassology,” “hydro-criticism,” or the “Blue Humanities” to enable reading practices across disciplines to examine pressing ecological concerns.14 In the context of the Pacific, the largest body of water on Earth, Māori (Te Āti Awa, Taranaki) scholar Alice Te Punga Somerville and CHamoru scholar Craig Santos Perez make clear that geographic and epistemological specificity is a necessary aspect of any reading of the ocean; we “have not needed a ‘turn to the sea’ because we were already there,” Te Punga Somerville reminds.15 By extension, this attention need not be to the ocean in the abstract; it must instead be to an ocean as it is: its culturally specific, layered histories, simultaneously containing the multitudes of species, navigations, and connections, as well as its pollutions and radiations. A “transoceanic reading methodology,” Santos Perez insists, includes an attention to the “ontologies, epistemologies, histories, politics, and culture related to the ocean.”16
The ocean is not inherently a source of horror, but of life; until, of course, we factor in what industrialized, nuclearized militarism has brought to it. Santos Perez concludes that “the oceans are changing … ʻHome,’ then, is not what it once was, and any romanticized ‘return’ to the home island and ocean must reckon with historical changes.”17 In the 2010s, for example, amid the Obama administration’s “Pacific Pivot,” Hollywood films such as Pacific Rim (2013) and Godzilla (2014) again allegorized such environmental changes with amphibious sea monsters emerging from depths of the Pacific Ocean to destroy the Pacific Rim.18 Erin Suzuki reminds us that such an emphasis on spectacular destructive beasts also speaks to “the absent presence of Indigenous Pacific histories and epistemologies within the construction of contemporary transpacific networks,” particularly because of the oversaturation of militarism in the region.19
In contrast to how Western representations of the ocean’s horrors ignore the embodied multispecies consequences of nuclear imperialisms, the artists featured in this essay instead engage the horror genre to rethink monstrosity.20 The early post–World War II Pacific Ocean monster films’ use of displaced animals as villains who attack Pacific Rim cities elides the damages of nuclearization on and in the ocean itself, obscuring the human agency behind nuclear detonations by transferring citizens’ fears onto the instinct of fictional nonhuman life-forms. In the texts I now turn to discussing, monstrosity aligns much more with Eve Tuck and C. Ree’s construction of monsters who both seek justice and remind of us of the injustices that have occurred. In the search for “justice,” the contemporary reenvisionings of horror and monstrosity in Oceania by Jane Chang Mi and Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner, Jocelyn Ng, and Teresa Siagatonu integrate a necessary bearing witness of the ocean’s historical changes. By reinvigorating tropes of monstrosity to discuss the nuclear remainders imposed on the Pacific Ocean and its people nearly eighty years after the detonations began, they engage with the extended temporality of nuclearization, offering a reminder that the injustice is ongoing and that justice is still being fought for. They point to what I see as an emergent “Oceanic monstrosity”: an acknowledgment of the ocean’s ecological genealogical histories, its harms, and its quests for healing.21
“We Are the Monsters and the Monsters Are Us”
ゴジラ/ɡɒdˈzɪlə/ (2020) is a 96-minute single-channel video that layers all 32 films simultaneously, but with all scenes involving monsters and humans removed. This erasure mirrors the United States’ policies and actions as a settler and colonial nation, leaving a wake of destruction in both the film and reality. We are the monsters and the monsters are us. [emphasis added]
—Jane Chang Mi22
Jane Chang Mi’sゴジラ/ɡɒdˈzɪlə/ presents Pacific Oceanic monstrosity through examining the multiple modalities of the nuclear industrial complex and its environmental aftermaths in the kaiju films of Japanese film production company Toho Ltd. The impact of American nuclearism was famously allegorized for both Japanese and foreign audiences by Toho Ltd.’s Gojira (1954) and its many remakes. The original Gojira was a horror film, and has often been read as a commentary on nuclear war, scientific hubris, modernity, and both pre– and post–World War II militarism in Japan.23 Subsequent films took a less overtly political approach of critiquing American nuclearism or the legacies of Japanese hibakusha, but Mi’s ゴジラ/ɡɒdˈzɪlə/ demonstrates that militaristic destruction remains a focal point of the kaiju films.24 Like the Godzilla film canon itself, Mi’s artist statement contextualizes her film within the history of the United States’ nuclear devastation on Japan and the Marshall Islands, arguing that the film’s purpose is to represent the horror inflicted by “the United States’ policies and actions as a settler and colonial nation”25 in the Pacific.
Figure 1. Promotional photo for the Marathon Screenings 2020 online screening of ゴジラ/ɡɒdˈzɪlə/ showing digital superimposition of multiple films.26
After World War II, in the 1950s, Japan and the Marshall Islands were united by the shared but differentiated trauma of the United States’ detonation of Castle Bravo, a fifteen megaton thermonuclear device, on Bikini Atoll.27 According to Barbara Rose Johnston and Holly M. Barker’s Rongelap Report, the Castle Bravo hydrogen bomb was designed to “produce and contain as much radioactive fallout in the immediate area as possible” and at the size of fifteen megatons, ultimately “unleashed as much explosive yield as one thousand Hiroshima-sized bombs” and double the calculated estimate.28 The power of this blast, purposefully exploded close to the ground, melted large quantities of coral and irradiated human and nonhuman life on and in the waters of the atolls of Rongerik, Rongelap, Utrik, and Ailinginae. The radiation expanded across hundreds of miles from the detonation site over the next several days. For the ri-Majel, the radioactive fallout led to direct multigenerational impacts on community health, whereas Castle Bravo’s fallout subjected the crew and their catch of Japanese fishing vessel Daigo Fukuryū Maru (Lucky Dragon Five) to acute radiation poisoning, re-evoking for Japan the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which had occurred just nine years prior.29
Mi’s film performs disruption—diegetically and formally; it is composed of disrupted films, disrupted nature, disrupted sound, disrupted life—all working to represent “the [US’s] wake of destruction.”30 Outside of the opening narration, the film has no written or spoken words, no characters, and no discernible plot, other than progressively integrating the thirty-two Toho Ltd. kaiju movies through digital superimposition by visually layering clips from the films. Its arresting opening sequence uses footage from Godzilla vs. Megalon (1973), featuring a quick zoom-in shot of the Aleutian Islands (Alaska) on a colorful map, followed by a jump cut and a rapid succession of explosions, flashes, crashes, bomb blasts, and sparks that are superimposed on one another and dissolve within seconds. With this opening narration, Mi frames the environmental disasters of the forthcoming images in a causal relationship with the detonation of nuclear weapons. The opening scene also highlights the breadth of American nuclearism by setting the film in the middle of the Pacific and specifically from the site of lesser-known American underwater nuclear detonations in the Aleutian Islands.31
While the film’s opening counters transpacific approaches and rhetorics that focus on the Pacific Rim, perhaps the most arresting tactic of disruption is Mi’s use of superimposition throughout the film, which begins just after the opening sequence. Digital superimpositions and dissolves have roots in multiple exposures, creating third shots that highlight the relationships between seemingly distinct objects or characters. In the case of Mi’s ゴジラ/ɡɒdˈzɪlə/, the ghostly dissolves denote the passage of time, and the superimposition also exposes the multiple, ongoing, and compounding effects of the nuclear complex throughout the Pacific Ocean. ゴジラ/ɡɒdˈzɪlə/ presents the following in short order: explosions and fire, a superimposed image of Mount Fuji, a power plant, smokestacks, fire balls within a 1.85:1 aspect ratio, and rain in 1.33:1 aspect ratio forming an outer frame on top of and below the central image. For the viewer, this layers multiple, distinct, and blurred environmental devastations. The film then dissolves to shots of the ocean superimposed on erupting volcanoes, eroding islands, and boulders falling into the sea. Quickly following, we see a helicopter, rocket ships, and military installations, along with solar flares, lightning, lava, electric storms, rocket launches, earth fissures, canyon explosions, lasers, crumbling infrastructure, and a clock that shows it is 2 a.m. This series of images occurs in just the first two minutes of the film—and it continues its constantly evolving superimposition until the film ends, ninety-four minutes later.
The barrage of destructive images and their corresponding sounds is a sensory assault; it is overwhelming and exhausting to watch. In her introduction to the film at the Los Angeles screening, Jane Chang Mi described the film as “96 minutes of horror.”32 This film visualizes and sonorizes what Jodi Byrd calls “the cacophonies of colonialism” as Mi’s film juxtaposes multiple simultaneous environmental impacts: militarism, industrial pollution, species extinction, and coastal erosion.33 Destruction and disruption are often part of ecological processes, but not at this speed, and not at this scale. The explosive onslaught engendered by the film’s nuclear detonations is a violent sensory experience of discordant arrhythmic sounds. Sound is an essential part of the horror genre—invisible, disruptive, possibly sinister presences that evade predictability. Mi’s cacophony intensifies the discord by sampling the sounds of violent actions—bomb explosions, missile launches, crumbling boulders, and collapsing infrastructure. ゴジラ/ɡɒdˈzɪlə/ thus immerses the viewer in militarism’s confluence in the Pacific Ocean—the United States’ militaristic avarice and geopolitical power dynamics, as well as its deleterious ecological multispecies effects.
What compounds the horror further is that the film does not show the actors instigating these violent disruptions in any human form. Instead, the film’s relentless barrage of explosions and images of rockets along with the lack of human agents ironically connects humans to their technologies. Mi’s film removes humans to such a distorted degree that it suggests humans are their weapons, and in particular Americans are the nuclear bombs they have detonated. Mi’s aforementioned artist statement definitively states, almost like an admission of guilt: “We are the monsters and the monsters are us.”34
But who is “we”? Mi’s audience statement suggests that it is the United States, but I argue that the flattened “we” does not account for the inequities in power that may lead to such structures and the various, specific histories of settler colonialism throughout the Pacific Ocean. Some humans, yes, may behave “monstrously” toward one another and the environment, while others may be complicit bystanders. But for those who were irradiated by nuclear proliferation in the Pacific, the monstrous is neither abstract nor erased—they are forced to embody it without their consent.
Giving Birth to Nightmares: Mejenkwaad and Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s “Monster”
Mi’s film is spectral—a series of haunting, blended half-images and sonic disruptions that highlights disembodiment to comment on the monstrosity of the United States refusing full responsibility of the destruction caused by its nuclear regime. Ri-Majel poet and activist Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s 2017 poem “Monster” contrastingly shifts the site of horror to bodies—specifically, the bodies of ri-Majel women in the aftermath of nuclear detonations in the Marshall Islands. In the poem, Jetn̄il-Kijiner reflects on the ri-Majel figure of the mejenkwaad, in part to meditate on her experience with postpartum depression and in part to think about the history of birth/mother trauma experienced by the ri-Majel.35 Mejenkwaad is often defined as a demon woman, who after being betrayed by other women in her community is rolled in a mat and drowned in the ocean by men, only to return ashore and eat children through new jaws in the back of her neck. In the poem, the speaker connects this legendary demon to the monstrous aftermaths of exposure to nuclear radiation to ri-Majel reproductive health, in which countless women experienced molar pregnancies or gave birth to children with congenital abnormalities.
Like Mi’s ゴジラ/ɡɒdˈzɪlə/, the poem, especially the 2017 video-poem version, considers the archipelagic connections of Japan and the Marshall Islands as locations of US militarism. While participating in the United Nations negotiations for a treaty banning nuclear weapons with the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), Jetn̄il-Kijiner recorded “Monster” at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial (Genbaku Dome) in Hiroshima, Japan. This was the only building left standing after the United States detonated “Little Boy” on the city in 1945. In her visit, she met with an unidentified Japanese hibakusha and recounts how the nuclear bomb survivor shared feelings of shame and how she had hid her experiences from her family, much like the women Jetn̄il-Kijiner writes about in her poem.
The poem begins:
Sometimes I wonder if Marshallese women are the chosen ones.
I wonder if someone selected us from a stack. Drew us out slow. Methodical. Then,
issued the order:
Give birth to nightmares. Show the world what happens. When the sun explodes inside
you.
How many stories of nuclear war are hidden in our bodies?36
Unlike ゴジラ/ɡɒdˈzɪlə/, which erases the subject in order to mirror the erasing effects of settler colonialism, “Monster” interrogates the direct genealogical confrontations nuclear proliferation begets. Jetn̄il-Kijiner argues that American nuclearism “order[ed]” the imposition of monstrosity on Marshallese women, because just as the poem turns to the flesh, it quickly subverts expectations of corporeal normality. Giving “birth to nightmares,” the poem interrogates monstrosity by contesting the human and asking what is recognizable as kin. She critiques narratives of secrecy that often characterize nuclear histories by replacing bureaucratic dissembling with the interior recesses of Marshallese women’s bodies. “How many stories of nuclear war are hidden in our bodies?” she asks. For Jetn̄il-Kijiner, stories of nuclear war are not hidden in a top-secret file—they are embodied. Nuclear war is not an abstraction, and certainly not speculation; the story of nuclear war is not just written about bodies, but in them.
The questions in Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s poem recollect the personal histories shared in Holly M. Barker’s ethnographic work on the linguistic implications of molar pregnancies in the Marshall Islands, also known as jelly babies. From Barker’s interviews of Marshallese women, she explains their choices to use words describing the natural environment to explain the health and (un)wellness of jelly babies: “The existence of the word kiraap (grape) in the language indicates that Marshallese assigned a nonhuman word to describe new phenomena in the post-testing era.”37 “In addition to the terms ‘jellyfish’ and ‘grape,’” she continues, “Marshallese use other nonhuman words from their environment or local realm of experiences to describe the less-than-human ‘monsters’ they give birth to, such as ‘turtle,’ ‘octopus,’ ‘devil,’ or ‘apple head’ babies.”38 As Barker explains, there are “no English loan words and no English equivalents for the types of birth these women experienced. Therefore, the Marshallese women searched nonhuman words in their environment to describe the nonhuman children they gave birth to, such as ‘coconut,’ ‘insides of a giant clam,’ or ‘marlin fish.’”39 In “Monster,” Jetn̄il-Kijiner brings up these stories of attempting to connect the unknown with the known as a way of making sense of these traumatic births: “Nerik gave birth to something resembling the eggs of a sea turtle and Flora gave birth to something like intestines.”40 And she ponders the horror-inducing scenario of not understanding what is happening to one’s own body. She asks “Were they driven / mad by these unholy things that came from their bodies? Were they sick with the feeling / of horror that perhaps there was something / wrong. With them.”41 Jetnil-Kijiner brings up how linguistic failure and rhetorical erasure compounded physical trauma for ri-Majel women as they struggled to name “these unholy things that came from their bodies,” and moreover were left wondering if they were the monsters who destroyed their babies, as they had no answers or admissions from those who detonated nuclear weapons in their islands.
After describing the traumatic births ri-Majel women experienced, Jetn̄il-Kijiner then introduces mejenkwaad. She writes, “In our legends lives a monster. Woman demons, unhinged jaws. Swallowing their own / babies. Driven mad. Turned flesh rotten. Blood through their eyes their teeth their nose.” “Mejenkwaad” as a concept contains a malevolent discursive history. Abo et al.’s Marshallese-English Dictionary defines it as “a witch who eats people; vampire.”42 A 1952 bwebwenato (story) told by ri-bwebwenato (storyteller) Raymond DeBrum featured in Jack Tobin’s Stories from the Marshall Islands explains, “Mejenkwaad means dead in childbirth. (Eaten up baby. The baby has been eaten by the mother.) They are always dangerous and will return to haunt people. They will cause people to become insane.”43 Furthermore, anthropologist Ingrid A. Ahlgren defines the mejenkwaad as “shape-shifting long-necked cannibalistic female (or occasionally male) ogres that prey on or possess women, particularly pregnant women.”44 One prominent example of a mejenkwaad figure is Lomkein, a woman described as a chieftess who had been betrayed by other chieftesses while she was expecting another child. According to ri-bwebwenato (storyteller) Jelibor Jam’s bwebwenato of Lomkein, she was prevented from delivery by magic for nearly six months, and then when she went to die, fell asleep and gave birth, only to arise, eat her child, and die after sunrise.45 These varied understandings of mejenkwaad render her monstrous in part because her violence toward children and their mothers seems without cause, and because her eating of children is not perceived as justifiable by the trauma she has endured.
Yet in Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s poem, she humanizes mejenkwaad by highlighting her isolation and emotional desolation as a mother. She represents her not as a demon, but someone worthy of empathy. Mejenkwaad is herself, a victim who also tends to the other victims of nuclearization. She looks upon the one who is “not so much a child but / too much a jellyfish,” as worthy of care and embrace despite appearing to be an in-between species, between life and death. The poem concludes with an image of mejenkwaad returning the jelly babies to her body as an act of mercy:
In legends lives a woman. Turned monster from loneliness. Turned monster from agony
and suns exploding in her chest. She gives birth to a child that is not so much a child but
too much a jellyfish. The child is struggling for breath. Struggling in pain. She wants to
bring the child peace. Bring her home. Her first home. Inside her body.
It is an embrace. It is only. An embrace. She kneels next to the body.
And inhales.46
In her blog, Jetn̄il-Kijiner explains her thought process behind the poem: “I asked myself, what if the mejenkwaad was not eating her child as a brutal act—but was instead attempting to return her child to her body—that in consuming her child, she was returning the child to her first home?”47 She explains that this was an act of “rehabilitation,” not one of cure or ability, but a care method of “humanizing,” in her words, and connecting with those who have been marginalized or made monstrous by the processes of nuclear imperialisms: “I realized that in trying to rehabilitate the mejenkwaad, in trying to envision this character as not just a demon, but as a tortured individual, to humanize her in a sense, I was actually trying to rehabilitate myself.”48 With empathy toward herself and the mejenkwaad, Jetn̄il-Kijiner “rehabilitates” the monster; in part through identifying with her as a way to acknowledge the connections between women that had been severed in the mejenkwaad’s subjection to betrayal, as well as through ri-Majel women’s traumatic experiences with infant mortality. Not only does Jetn̄il-Kijiner reinscribe the bonds between women and with feminine nonhumans throughout time, the poem also facilitates the capacity for kinship by reimagining and restoring possibilities for safety. By addressing and acknowledging the nonconsensual horrors of the Pacific, these women’s bodies are no longer sites of fear, but reestablishments of home, and of intimacy.
Monstrous Release: “She Who Dies to Live”
Inspired by Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s “Monster” poem, “She Who Dies to Live,” is a spoken word experience featuring Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner, queer Sāmoan spoken word artist Terisa Siagatonu, and Jocelyn Kapumealani Ng, a queer “multi-dimensional creative” of Kanaka ʻŌiwi, Chinese, Japanese, and Portuguese descent.49 It premiered at the ʻAe Kai Culture Lab in Honolulu in 2017 and was hosted by the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center under the theme of “Convergence.” It was performed for a second time at Australia’s Queensland Gallery of Art in March 2019, where it was recorded. The performance presents multispecies Pacific Ocean experiences, thinking through the politics of solidarity and collaboration, while also highlighting the uneven effects of imperialism and militarism in the region. The title, “She Who Dies to Live,” reflects the regenerative content of the performance, as well as the process by which the artists recreate it each time it is performed, thereby allowing them to form new connections with each another and their audiences.
Figure 2. Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner as Mejenkwaad and Jocelyn Kapumealani Ng as Kanaloa in“She Who Dies to Live,” performed in Queensland, Australia (2019).
“She Who Dies to Live” opens with a film consisting of multiple superimposed films, like Jane Chang Mi’s ゴジラ/ɡɒdˈzɪlə/, accompanied with the bellows of conch shells. The film includes images of the shores of Kahoʻolawe (specifically of the bombing site in Hawaiʻi), offshore military vessels, a lava lake, a quarry, sailing canoes, and ri-Majel (Marshallese) women rolling mats. These spectral images dissolve in and out of view, and then return to Kahoʻolawe. The film includes specific nuclear-related images from Operation Sailor Hat (1965) (a US military weapons test meant to simulate the force of a nuclear weapon while using TNT), and images of ri-Majel women prior to the forced removal from Bikini Atoll in 1946.
This opening movie, assembled by the Smithsonian Institution at the request of Jetn̄il-Kijiner, Ng, and Siagatonu, layers multiple stories of the Pacific—the volcanic birth of islands, oceanic lifeways and connections to land and between islands and peoples, and their desecration through militarism. It does not include any images of Sāmoa, according to Ng, in order to reflect the ways those in diaspora may be disconnected from accessing their histories.50 By presenting Pacific connection and disruption, it simultaneously foreshadows the changing intimacies and conflicts between the performances of the three central characters: Jetn̄il-Kijiner as the ri-Majel demon from her “Monster” poem, Mejenkwaad; Ng as the Kanaka ʻŌiwi god Kanaloa; and Siagatonu as a new god, “The God of Diaspora.”
After the introductory four-minute film, Jetn̄il-Kijiner as Mejenkwaad is center stage, alone, in semidarkness. Painted with a white face and a black jaw and neck, Mejenkwaad looks caught between life and death, in the process of being choked or drowning. She kneels with her head bowed and her body bound by rope. Her makeup, inspired by “butō, coral bleaching, love and power,” is similar to that of a May 2018 collaboration between Ng and Jetn̄il-Kijiner, which was accompanied by an untitled poem about the resilience of coral amid global warming, for which Jetn̄il-Kijiner has been a prominent advocate.51 The makeup also highlights a transpacific connection to Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s 2017 performance of her poem “Monster” in Hiroshima. Butō (or Butoh), in which dancers wear blackened teeth and white body paint, is a dance tradition inspired by the scorched volcanic soil in Japan in the post Hiroshima and Nagasaki eras.52 The costuming and makeup performs anxieties of decay and death while also recognizing the possibilities for regeneration.
As Mejenkwaad kneels, bound, the audience hears a prophecy performed offstage with a deep voice manipulator that warns of the corporeal effects of nuclear imperialisms:
In 300 years, your descendants
will turn into a mushroom clouding
a foreigners’ memory of paradise.
…
My daughters you are staring down
The barrel of 300 years of greed wrapped in shrapnel
Shoved down throats in our bodies of islands.
In 300 years, invocation will be irony
These foreigners who crush your people,
our ancestors, your future to ash,
will tailor your misery into adornment.
Name their destruction after praise [Bravo].
Name their desire after an island turned crater [Runit].53
The opening prophecy corporealizes Pacific Islands, “our bodies of islands,” and connects them to the bodies of Pacific women by pointing out their mutual desolation from American nuclearism and militarism. Pacific futures become “ash” like the radioactive fallout of Bravo and Runit Island detonations. Kanaloa, which is an alternate name for Kahoʻolawe and is the Kanaka ʻŌiwi akua (god or elemental form) associated with the ocean, land distance voyaging, and healing, enters stage left.54 Usually rendered male, this Kanaloa, played by Ng, is female. Whereas Mejenkwaad embodies nuclearism’s effect on women, Kanaloa’s costume suggests the multispecies impact of climate change and militarism by incorporating multiple life-forms from the ocean into her costume and makeup. She wears a crown of coral and shells and ropes around her torso, and has gills on her face.
The deep voiceover interjects, “You stand trial. Mark the chest. Call the men. Find us a witness.” The opening of the play suggests the coming performance will operate as a trial, a search for justice, and that witnessing will be a key element of this journey toward justice. Kanaloa and the God of Diaspora operate as foils for Mejenkwaad, even a jury of her peers; they try to understand her actions of swallowing islands and children, and aim to find her place among these possible worlds of the ocean and diaspora. They both offer judgments of Mejenkwaad’s actions, sometimes condemnations, and then at times empathy, but ultimately seek to reconnect her to ocean kinship in part by witnessing to the ways she has experienced disconnection. As they “try” Mejenkwaad, Kanaloa and the God of Diaspora contextualize Mejenkwaad’s experience for the audience, drawing them in as witnesses and participators in the trial and asking them to consider their own roles in Mejenkwaad’s plight.
The first witnessing the audience must do is watch Mejenkwaad struggle with birth and experience the impact of nuclearism’s generational impacts. As the scene shifts out of the prophecy and into the present, Mejenkwaad and Kanaloa writhe back and forth, rocking into a position of a person giving birth. Mejenkwaad, with her face to the ceiling and her neck exposed, solemnly recites the lines from Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s poem “Monster”: “Nerik gives birth to something resembling a sea turtle. And Flora gives birth to something like the intestines.” Kanaloa shifts her torso forward, taking her turn to echo the lines in Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s poem and clasps the ropes around her chest: “Give birth to nightmares! Show them what happens when the sun explodes inside of you.” In this trial, justice cannot take place without a witness, nor without establishing the harm that has been done. Justice for this “monster” begins by revealing “what happens when the sun explodes inside of you.” Shouting, Kanaloa reveals what happens: “In your blood lives monsters!”
As a representative of the ocean (and often called “Ocean” by Mejenkwaad), Kanaloa reminds Mejenkwaad of the ocean’s power and as a place of genealogical home and safety when others have harmed her.55 Mejenkwaad argues, “They tried to drown me but forgot I am made of salt.” This recognition of salt also recalls Teresia Teaiwa’s famous lines “We sweat and cry saltwater so we know the ocean is really in our blood,” tying body to birthplace and to genealogical connection.56 The ocean, along with her own community, drowned Mejenkwaad, but the ocean also brought her back to life by giving her powers to return children’s bodies to their first homes. Kanaloa and Mejenkwaad foil each other here as “first homes.” Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s construction of Mejenkwaad in “Monster” presented her eating of children as a merciful return to their first home of the watery womb, and the ocean is the genealogical first home of Pacific peoples. Mejenkwaad and Kanaloa, then, are connectors, not dividers.
At the end of the first act, a film plays the following: an overexposed superimposition of an octopus (a symbol of Kanaloa), molten lava, footage of a White doctor inspecting a ri-Majel patient in Project 4.1, the top-secret study of the effects of radiation on human beings performed in the Marshall Islands after Castle Bravo. The lava dissolves on top of the injuries of the patient; the octopus remains in the background throughout; the film concludes with a sea anemone. These superimposed images recall the multispecies relationships alluded to in the “Monster” poem, energizing oceanic intimacies across time and space, harm, healing, and restoration. The return to the ancestral and contemporary knowledge of the ocean regenerates the growing intimacies between Mejenkwaad and Kanaloa.
Mejenkwaad retells her story of grief and separation, pleading with Kanaloa for answers—for a return to relation. She first demonstrates the ways she has been abandoned by her community: “I only remember that I was cursed by women who I thought were my own, by men who could have been my sons. Those who cursed me monster and let me watch my child die alone.”57 She then repeats the refrain to the audience, “Nerik will give birth to something that looked like the eggs of a sea turtle. And Flora will give birth to something like the intestines,” grounding her in this oceanic interspecies kinship. She pauses and turns to Kanaloa, “Do you know of this pain, Ocean? Do you know of this rage? Does it taste the way a child tastes—this feeling of wholeness? Do you know of this ache, Ocean? It screams inside of me and I become numb. I become weightless. I become animal.”58 Kanaloa responds to Mejenkwaad’s questions by unraveling the bindings around her chest, lifting them over her head and then caressing her by the shoulder: “Daughter, you smell of fear, of a half-bitten eulogy, gagged and fighting. I am here because you named me. Child of mine. I helped birth your islands, your atolls, cradled you in my blue. Survival is not gentle. Let us show them a new world of true hunger, of mourning, of loss.”59
In this interaction, Mejenkwaad and Ocean see one another, monster to monster, each seeking understanding and justice. The ocean for Mejenkwaad is not an object. She is not something to be studied, or sampled, or extracted from; the ocean has emotions, stories, histories, and knowledge that Mejenkwaad recognizes by sharing her own vulnerabilities and questions. Yet Kanaloa’s parental assurances do not bring comfort in the way of tender care; they instead offer truth—a return acknowledgment of what Mejenkwaad has endured. Kanaloa remembers Mejenkwaad—as an ancestor would—throughout her lifespan, cradling her in her time of need, but reminding her that although there is indeed much to mourn in the Pacific, she need not yet mourn herself. This dialogue settles Mejenkwaad in the multiplicity of the ocean, as a site of progeneration and of grief, of safety and of loss.
In the final scene, Mejenkwaad delivers a monologue over the loudspeaker, resolved to live in the duplicity between worlds of disconnection and diaspora. She begins, in her final soliloquy, “Here is what I know: In 100 years, I will carry two worlds in my gut. One in the journey beyond the unknown and the other in the return home. Home. In 100 years, I will retreat from the stage of the living. I will find a home beneath the reef where I will cultivate a garden of skulls. I will tend to my rage.” These “two worlds” accept both belonging and anger, and “rehabilitate,” in Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s terms, the emotional connections and processes between. In her final lines, and the last moments of the performance, she reconnects her body and birth, and frees herself of the pressures of categorization and the control of restraint: “I will bring with me the salt and the blood that bore me. I release myself from any unchosen bindings. And I emerge. Whole.” This is oceanic monstrosity—the embrace of embodied harm, history, and healing within the Pacific Ocean itself.
Conclusion: Oceanic Ties
In a reflection on the 2019 performance of “She Who Dies to Live,” its dramaturg, Lyz Soto, wrote about the show on her Instagram account: “When binding becomes consent becomes bonding: What happens when women tie to each other in love and support?”60 The pieces discussed above interrogate how militarization and nuclear imperialisms disrupted the bonds between island and ocean, people and environment, mother and child, women and women. They take up the horror genre not to create a symbolic monster, but instead to engage with the justice-seeking oceanic monstrosity already among us, shifting the site of horror from the unknown to the familiar. Jane Mi’s film highlights the transpacific impacts of nuclearization to connect sites across the Pacific and uses visual and sonic disruptive hauntings to reawaken her audience to witness nuclearism’s causes by experiencing its effects. ゴジラ/ɡɒdˈzɪlə/ redirects monstrosity away from an abstracted monster like kaiju or Godzilla and instead to the multispecies devastations across land and sea. Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s “Monster” and Jetn̄il-Kijiner, Ng, and Siagatonu’s “She Who Dies to Live” move into the exploration of bonding or the restoration of oceanic relations despite these disruptions and monstrous differences.
In “Monster,” Jetn̄il-Kijiner reformulates the mejenkwaad into a figure of both terror and empathy, like the mother ocean. By sharing her own unsettlement and disrupted connection to ideals of maternal affection and capability, Jetn̄il-Kijiner aligns herself with the lost mother, the mejenkwaad, paralleling her with the ocean—a “monster” who eats its children. Yet she refigures this return to the watery womb as an act of maternal love, thus restoring the mejenkwaad to herself and her community. Mejenkwaad is brought back into connection with other women rather than being merely a creature who takes from them while also rehoming genealogical relations beyond the human. “She Who Dies to Live” represents the reconnection of Pacific Island histories through bonds between female figures, transpacific flows, the ocean, and multispecies kin. These are connections reinvigorated through acknowledging the terrors and griefs of the Pacific rather than being bound by fear. Bonding over binding, choose these artists. By confronting unchosen bonds and diminishing them through consensual intimacies, they recreate stronger connections in oceanic ties than the constraints of imperialisms. In relations with gods and monsters new, old, and ongoing, both human and nonhuman, these artists suggest resting deeply in the horrors of loss while reveling in the regenerative possibilities within and between ocean currents and ocean bodies.
Rebecca H. Hogue is a lecturer on history and literature and studies of women, gender, and sexuality at Harvard University.
Acknowledgments
My sincere thanks and gratitude to Neda Atanasoski, Aimee Bahng, Leanne Day, Lee Emrich, Hiʻilei Hobart, Heidi Hong, Hsuan Hsu, Jinah Kim, Anaïs Maurer, Jane Chang Mi, Jocelyn Kapumealani Ng, Aanchal Saraf, Nitasha Sharma, and the anonymous peer reviewers for their generous feedback and collegial support.
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Notes
Teaiwa, “bikinis and other s/pacific n/oceans,” 101.
Hauʻofa, We Are the Ocean, 49.
See DeLoughrey, “Radiation Ecologies and the Wars of Light”; Bahng, “Salt Fish Futures: The Irradiated Transpacific and the Financialization of the Human Genome Project” in Migrant Futures; and Huang, “Radiation Ecologies in Gerald Vizenor’s Hiroshima Bugi.”
“Jane Chang Mi,” Marathon Screenings, https://marathonscreenings.com/Jane-Chang-Mi.
These modes demonstrate the plurality of nuclear exposures, resonating with Maurer’s and my articulation of “nuclear imperialisms” as the “systemic mode of oppression in current or former sites of empire through any use of the nuclear complex” which emphasize the “simultaneous and overlapping modes of nuclear oppression that involve multiple empires, technologies, and ideological framings that exist and extend beyond geographic, temporal, and national boundaries and borders.” See Maurer and Hogue, “Introduction,” 43.
Tuck and Ree, “A Glossary of Haunting,” 649.
After the United States’ use of atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in World War II, the US military continued weapon detonations on the lands of the Mescalero Apache peoples in the New Mexico desert in 1945 with the Trinity detonation as part of the Manhattan Project. In 1946, Operation Crossroads moved its site to the Pacific and sought to test the effects of nuclear weapons on warships; subsequent detonations took place at Kalama (Johnston Atoll) and the Aleutian Islands (Alaska). British nuclear detonations began in 1952 with Operation Hurricane in the Monte Bello Islands in Western Australia and concluded in 1958 with Operation Grapple in Kiritimati (Christmas Island) in Kiribati. France’s nuclear program began its nuclear detonations in Algeria from 1960 to 1966; when Algeria gained independence, the detonation site was moved to Moruroa Atoll in the Tuamotu Archipelago in French-occupied Polynesia where the French detonated 50 atmospheric and 210 subterranean (underwater) weapons.
The cephalopod in It Came From Beneath the Sea is made radioactive from hydrogen bomb detonations; the radioactivity scares away its natural food sources, causing it to attack vessels in the Pacific Ocean and finally San Francisco.
Melville, Moby Dick, 503.
Murray and Heumann, Monstrous Nature, xii. These may be rendered horrors because they exist outside of human influence, or, rather, are those we as human beings may have created, yet still cannot control. For example, as Murray and Heumann argue in their anthology Monstrous Nature, monsters often represent humanity’s anxieties, fears, and regrets: “Horror films such as Godzilla provide a space in which to explore the complexities of a monstrous nature that humanity both creates and embodies” (Murray and Heumann, Monstrous Nature, xii).
“The monster commands,” as Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues in Monster Theory, “‘Remember me’: restore my fragmented body, piece me back together, allow the past its eternal return. The monster haunts; it does not simply bring past and present together, but destroys the boundary that demanded their twinned foreclosure.” See Cohen, “Preface,” ix–x.
Cho, “Remembering Lucky Dragon, Re-membering Bikini,” 124.
For example, see Santos Perez in “ʻThe Ocean in Us’” and Ingersall, Waves of Knowing.
See DeLoughrey, “Toward a Critical Ocean Studies for the Anthropocene”; Horden and Purcell, “The Mediterranean and ‘the New Thalassology’”; Winkiel, “Hydro-Criticism”; Campbell and Paye, “World Literature and the Blue Humanities.”
Te Punga Somerville, “Where Oceans Come From,” 28.
Santos Perez, “ʻThe Ocean in Us.’”
Santos Perez, “ʻThe Ocean in Us.’”
See Suzuki, “Beasts from the Deep.”
Suzuki, “Beasts from the Deep,” 13.
What Lee Gambin later calls “natural-” or “ecological horror,” otherwise called “ecohorror,” considers the human relationship with the nonhuman environment through the possibilities of nature’s revenge for humanity’s ills (Gambin, Massacred by Mother Nature). “Ecohorror,” as Stephen Rust and Carter Soles argue, “assumes that environmental disruption is haunting humanity’s relationship to the nonhuman world” (Rust and Soles, “Ecohorror Special Cluster”). Moreover, these ecohorrors recognize the ecological harm that is not speculative, but already here and ongoing; they recognize, as Bernice Murphy suggests, the “absolutely catastrophic ecological disaster looms not in the distant future, but is in fact already unfolding” (Murphy, The Rural Gothic in American Popular Culture). Such narratives address the monstrous natures our own destructive behaviors have created against our home planet. Where ecohorror identifies the causal relationships between human malice against ecological vulnerability and subsequent pursuits of justice, what Seán Harrington calls “Oceanic horror” focuses on the possibilities, speculations, and unknowns of the ocean through its force, its depths, and its creatures.
“Monster,” etymologically, means to warn, advise, or show (Oxford English Dictionary Online, “monster”). “Oceanic” here refers to the ocean, but specifically to the region of “Oceania,” which Epeli Hauʻofa argues “denotes a sea of islands with their inhabitants.” See Hauʻofa, “Our Sea of Islands” in We Are the Ocean, 32.
“Jane Chang Mi,” Marathon Screenings, https://marathonscreenings.com/Jane-Chang-Mi.
Igarashi, Bodies of Memory, 116; and Allison, Millenial Monsters, n.p.
Jones, “Japan Removed.”
“Jane Chang Mi,” Marathon Screenings, https://marathonscreenings.com/Jane-Chang-Mi.
In October 2020, the full 96-minute version of ゴジラ/ɡɒdˈzɪlə/ was available for viewing online for a limited time. The Marathon Screenings online event on October 4, 2020 played a 15-minute excerpt.
Japan also occupied the Marshall Islands from 1914 to 1944. See Dvorak, Coral and Concrete.
Johnston and Barker, Consequential Damages of Nuclear War, 19.
Johnston and Barker, Consequential Damages of Nuclear War, 17.
Johnston and Barker, Consequential Damages of Nuclear War, 17.
After the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963, which banned atmospheric tests, in 1965, 1969, and 1971, the United States detonated underground nuclear weapons at Amchitka Island in the Aleutian chain; the Cannikin test (1971) was the largest underground weapon ever detonated by the United States, just two years before Godzilla v. Megalon, which has villains that pointedly live underground and are angry at their world being threatened by nuclear bombs.
“Jane Chang Mi,” Marathon Screenings, https://marathonscreenings.com/Jane-Chang-Mi.
Byrd, The Transit of Empire, xxvii.
“Jane Chang Mi,” Marathon Screenings, https://marathonscreenings.com/Jane-Chang-Mi.
Jetn̄il-Kijiner, “New Year, New Monsters, New Poems.”
Jetn̄il-Kijiner, “New Year, New Monsters, New Poems.”
Barker, Bravo for the Marshallese, 109.
Barker, Bravo for the Marshallese, 110.
Barker, Bravo for the Marshallese, 111.
Jetn̄il-Kijiner, “New Year, New Monsters, New Poems.”
Jetn̄il-Kijiner, “New Year, New Monsters, New Poems.”
Abo, Bender, Capelle, and DeBrum, Marshallese-English Dictionary, 203.
These stories were collected by anthropologist Jack A. Tobin from 1950 to 1957, 1967 to 1974, and 1975 in his role as district anthropologist and community development advisor. See Tobin, Stories from the Marshall Islands, xi, 196.
Ahlgren, “The Meaning of mo,” 73.
Tobin, Stories from the Marshall Islands, 197.
Jetn̄il-Kijiner, “New Year, New Monsters, New Poems.” Teresia Teaiwa’s oft-cited remark was first published as the epigraph to Epeli Hau’ofa’s “The Ocean in Us,” in We are the Ocean: Selected Works (University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2008), 41.
Jetn̄il-Kijiner, “New Year, New Monsters, New Poems.” This theme is also present in “Davao Pilgrimage” by Sakiyama Asao in this special issue.
Jetn̄il-Kijiner, “New Year, New Monsters, New Poems.”
Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, “Performance: She Who Dies to Live.”
Jocelyn Kapumealani Ng, personal correspondence, November 18, 2020.
Hogue, “Iep Jaltok”; Ng, “I offer you pieces of my body to eat”:
I offer you pieces of my body
to eat
eat
Suck the bone marrow dry
Drain the sun from my skin
I fall apart at the seams
the seams
Dead we died together
All that’s left
grotesque versions of our former selves
You expect me to bow to this?
This?
I shed my skin
become my own God
anoint myself
Survivor
Broinowski, “The Atomic Gaze and Ankoku Butoh in Post-War Japan,” 99.
QAGOMA, “Performance / She Who Dies to Live.”
In Candace Fujikane’s Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future, she cites kumu hula (hula master) Pualani Kanakaʻole Kanahele, who translates “akua” as “elemental forms.” Fujikane, Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future, 3.
Ironically, however, an important distinction between these characters that goes unaddressed in the performance is the history of discrimination against Micronesians in Hawaiʻi in the postatomic detonation era under the Compact of Free Association. See “Lessons from Hawaiʻi” in Jetn̄il-Kijiner, Iep Jaltok.
QAGOMA, “Performance / She Who Dies to Live,” 4:00.
QAGOMA, “Performance / She Who Dies to Live,” 10:40.
QAGOMA, “Performance / She Who Dies to Live,” 11:00.
QAGOMA, “Performance / She Who Dies to Live,” 11:45.
Soto, “Daily Life.”
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