The Atomic Weight of Missing Stories
I admire The Atomic Weight of Love for its ambitious portrayal of feminism, militarism, and sexual awakening, not to mention the intelligence of crows. The main character Meridien inspires me with her intellect and curiosity: she defies commands on how to be a woman issued from her physicist husband; she’s forced to give up graduate studies in biology to follow him to Los Alamos, but her friendships with women help her find her voice.
The eighty-something Meri looks back on her life starting with a disclaimer on page two: “This is not the story of the creation of the atomic bomb…someone else has told their stories…this is my story, the story of a woman who accompanied the bomb’s birth and tried to fly in its aftermath.”
But since Meri “accompanied the bomb’s birth,” that very “aftermath” of destroyed lives begs to be heard beyond her own story. It’s clear the Los Alamos of 1946 to the 1970s is culturally stifling, but the bombs made there exploded on people overseas, and though Meri found the anti-Vietnam War hippies distasteful, she could have questioned militarist norms coexisting with the patriarchal ones. I appreciated for example, Meri’s exasperation with a variety of Los Alamos wives, from the anti-feminist, anti-intellectuals to the elitist ones with PhDs they set aside for their husbands’ careers, only to scoff at Meri’s lack of a graduate degree. But as riveting and important as the novel’s portrait of gender politics is, the American killing of innocent civilians in Japan and in Vietnam is glossed over or displaced onto the suffering of American characters.
Here is how Meri describes the atomic bombing of Hiroshima: “the entire world changed in a single day”; “I couldn’t fathom it. Nothing was immediately known about what had happened in Hiroshima, although we knew there were over 300,000 people living there…that it was a manufacturing center for the tools of war. I could not imagine what must have happened to the city, its inhabitants….Later, we learned that in an instant, birds in the sky over Hiroshima ignited in midair” (76).
At this point in the book Meri is young and enthralled with her future husband Alden’s intellect, so when I read this part I told myself she would grow into some kind of awareness of individual stories beyond the dispiriting abstraction of “300,000 people..the city, its inhabitants”. The oblique reference to bird deaths along with other terms like “incomprehensible” and “surreal” deflect real engagement with the American military’s destruction of civilian lives.
Meri struggles personally with her stunted future in Los Alamos, and this is all the more reason the narrative should address the ruination by American bombs of people across the Pacific. Its attempts to do so are brief and tentative, such as Meri’s “Hiroshima and My Lai” essay she writes for a class: “the comparative ‘guilt’, the way American society reacted to the two events…” Her friend Emma and her lover Clay praise her for the attempt, however shaky and stilted. Her physicist husband reacts defensively, and Vietnam veteran Clay tells Meri her essay “left out the dehumanizing part of it all. You can’t think your enemy has feelings, a family…that a gook mother loves her gook baby as much as your mother loved you…” Clay’s “gook” remarks are the only mention of a patriarchal system’s slaughter of people of color, but they appear as a mere side effect to the central narrative of how middle class American women’s dreams are diminished.
Here are the accounts of Japanese lives Meri could have encountered in newspapers, television and radio:
- A 1946 New Yorker article on six survivors of Hiroshima by John Hersey, or his book version Hiroshima published the same year that sold over a million copies worldwide within six months;
- Letters from readers of Hersey’s New Yorker article, “almost all in admiration for the work, who wrote of their shame and horror that ordinary people, just like them — secretaries and mothers, doctors and priests — had endured such terror”;
- A 1952 series of photographs from the bombings and its victims that appeared in Life magazine (Meri only sees “before and after” photos in an August 1945 issue);
- Twenty-five Hiroshima women who stirred national attention when they arrived in the United States to undergo reconstructive surgery: “The State Department objected, fearing that the surgeries could constitute an admission of American guilt, but 138 operations were performed over 18 months at Mount Sinai Hospital with mixed results; one of the women died of cardiac arrest”;
- Kiyoshi Tanimoto, the Methodist minister who arranged the surgeries for the “Hiroshima maidens” and appeared on a (cringe-worthy) May 1955 episode of This is Your Life (“America’s most talked-about program!”) to meet Captain Robert Lewis, the co-pilot of the Enola Gay. “An ashen-faced Tanimoto shook hands with Lewis, who appeared overcome with emotion. (It was later reported that Lewis, upon hearing that he would be appearing with victims of the bombings, was so distraught that he headed straight for a bar.)”
- Any number of “a new wave of literature and film in the United States on the bombings” that followed the widely publicized surgeries of the Hiroshima women, including Betty Jean Lifton’s 1970 documentary A Thousand Cranes; and her husband, physician Robert Jay Lifton’s Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima in 1967. “As Robert Lifton later explained, ‘We require Hiroshima and its images to give substance to our own terrors… They have kept alive our imagination of holocaust and, perhaps, helped to keep us alive as well.’ ”
Meri watches David Brinkley on the television reporting on the Vietnam War (“Were we winning or losing today?” she thinks). She listens to the radio while doing housework. She stirs discussion at her women’s group about a TV broadcast of feminists celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the 19th Amendment’s passage. She’s a biologist, so she is capable of interest in the effects of the bombs, atomic or otherwise, on human bodies. She touches the shrapnel scars on her lover Clay’s bare back, and she comforts her husband Alden after a bazooka stolen from Los Alamos property kills a child and maims others; but the Meri who narrates these episodes decades later never thinks about people beyond her narrow existence. The novel absolves American aggression against civilians by showing Clay’s post traumatic stress and speaking only of Japan’s “tools of war” and brutal military campaigns, like the scene where a Hispanic neighbor of Meri’s who survived the Bataan Death March tells her “the atomic weapons created by Alden and his fellow scientists had saved his life” (298).
Expressions of American shame and guilt over the wartime killing of civilians does not negate Japanese or Vietnamese or any regime’s shame and guilt for their own crimes. Denial of American guilt perpetuates a “history written by the victors” mentality, instead of a search for lessons that teach us to peacefully demand security for all. Our art needs to work harder to show us how we can reach for new stories about love — the kind that don’t require the rock-bottom clean slate offered by bombs.
