Erasing the face of God – a guest blog by Danny Taggart
The Madzines Team recently visited Hiroshima to learn with others about the complexities of peace. Danny Taggart, a fellow participant, reflects on lessons he learned from the programme, and from the zine-making workshop we facilitated there.
The writer Ben Lerner, in his novel 10:04, wrote about the moment he realised he wanted to be a poet. It was on the evening of 28th January 1986, when he was seven years old. The NASA Challenger space shuttle had exploded shortly after take-off that morning, killing all seven crew members, including the first teacher in space, Christa McAuliffe. That night, in an address to a grieving nation, Ronald Reagan delivered what has been considered one of the greatest presidential speeches of the 20th century. Written by his female speechwriter, Peggy Noonan, it finished with a line from the poem High Flight:
“We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for the journey and waved goodbye and ‘slipped the surly bonds of earth’ to ‘touch the face of god.’”
I was reminded of this speech, and Lerner’s childhood response to it, when I was visiting the Hiroshima Peace Museum, as part of a study tour of Hiroshima, entitled The Complexities of Peace. The museum hosts hundreds of artefacts rescued from the Atomic Bomb test site after the explosion devastated the city, destroying the majority of the city’s buildings, and killing between 70,000 and 140,000 of its citizens.
One of the artefacts on display is a disfigured statue of the Buddha, found near one of the shrines and temples destroyed in the bombing. The statue resembles many of the injured humans whose photographs adorn the walls of the museum, a recognisable human form but missing features that cause confusion followed by a dawning sense of horror as you appreciate the damage done to their bodies. The face of the Buddha had been almost completely melted away in the 7,700 degree Celsius heat caused by the Atomic bomb’s fireball. The American military had dropped a bomb from the heavens with enough destructive power to erase the face of God on the earth. Quite the irony given Reagan’s use of divine imagery in relation to the NASA Challenger space mission four decades later and his own warmongering in the heavens as US President with the disastrous Star Wars program.
One link between the generative intentions of the NASA space missions and the destructiveness of the Manhattan Project’s Atomic Bomb program is that they were both hugely expensive research and development scientific projects, funded by American tax payers, and designed to demonstrate the United States’ global technological dominance. They also were both key technological drivers in the Cold War, pitting the USSR against the US in nuclear arms and space races.
In her 1958 book The Human Condition, the German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt warns of the technological dominance of science overriding the capacity of humans to come together, make sense of the world around them using ordinary language, and to share stories. In words that presage the divine imagery later used by Reagan, Arendt says of science and technology;
“We have begun to populate the space surrounding the earth with man-made stars, creating…in the form of satellites, new heavenly bodies.”
The technological work of science contrasts with social storytelling, which occurs in what Arendt describes as the “already existing web of human relationships”, and can enable the translation of private experience into public meaning by way of stories. While scientific technological development and storytelling are not mutually exclusive, there is a risk that the dominance of the former could obscure the need for the latter. In an atomised, capitalistic age where we can fly to the moon if we have enough money and destroy the earth with nuclear weapons, it is easy to forget the importance of the stories that connect us to one another.
The contrast between technology and storytelling was in evidence when I attended my first zine workshop later the same week of my museum visit in Hiroshima. Facilitated by the Madzines research team, the workshop brought together Hiroshima peace activists and students, along with our small visiting study group of UK based mental health academics, practitioners and activists. Also in attendance was the daughter of a 93-year-old Hibakusha, a survivor of the Atomic Bomb, who had dedicated part of her life to telling her story of the bomb and its aftermath to honour her lost loved ones, memorialise the atrocity, and spread a message of the importance of peace around the world. She is one of many adult children who act as family legacy successors, continuing the work of storytelling about the A-Bomb as the original Hibakusha pass on.
Like Arendt’s experience of the Holocaust, the Hibakusha had seen the very worst of technologically driven human conduct and recognised that the telling and retelling stories in social spaces are important tasks in the prevention of violence.
While the medium of zines can differ from the spoken testimony favoured by the Hibakusha we met (although zines can also be shared in dialogue), there were some striking parallels. One of the key things for me was how both zines and Hibakusha stories can have an impact through helping us to make connections to areas of our own lives. This does not mean reducing the experiences of other people to something we can measure against our suffering. It does mean teasing out the threads of common humanity that can connect to the strangeness of far away and long-ago events
In a Hibakusha testimony we heard how girls often disguised the fact they had survived the A Bomb because they feared being seen as contaminated and not fit to be mothers. This reminded me of listening to mothers who have their babies taken into care in the UK, often because of their own childhood experiences of violence, and the stigma and shame they describe at not feeling themselves to be good enough to be a mother. These vastly different experiences in different times and places nonetheless are connected by acts of violence perpetrated by men leaving women feeling inadequate to give life and care to children. It is through critiques of gender-based violence that disparate experiences such as these can be linked.
Likewise, it was the individuality and particularity of the stories the zines told that enabled other people to connect with them. Despite language barriers and translation challenges, when we shared our zines a common form of expression became possible, and we started to feel connections between our diverse stories. While it may be naïve to think that social storytelling through verbal testimony or zines as a form of physical testimony can prevent violence, it was difficult not to be struck by the quiet dignity of a smartly dressed, quietly spoken Hibakusha as she repeated a story of horror and loss she may have told hundreds of times and yet which changed my perspective in ways I am still coming to terms with.
The ordinariness of a zine, like that of a spoken story, means it is accessible to us all and requires no technological might. That, along with its ability to render us different on receiving them, might be worth celebrating and honouring, even if they cannot always change the world in all the ways we might like.
Danny Taggart is a clinical psychologist and researcher at the University of Essex. His work focuses on public inquiries, the impacts of child sexual abuse, and family justice processes. This was Danny’s first Zine making experience and he needed a lot of help to fold the paper properly.