The Stones of the Golden Women: A-Bombs, a Tsunami and a Hackberry Tree Define Art at P.E.N.
By Georgianne Nienaber
original content at
OEN 
On August 6, 1945 at 8:15 am the United States dropped the first
atomic bomb on Hiroshima. One kilometer from ground zero, a hackberry
tree in the gardens of the Hiroshima Army Hospital was seared by
radiation from the blast and half of the tree vaporized. The tree was a
favorite of patients at the hospital, who would sit under its
sheltering branches as they recovered from the wounds of war and life.
The Hackberry miraculously survived the vaporous hell and stood as a
silent witness to the horror of Hiroshima until 1984, when it suffered
a direct hit from a typhoon, produced a few leaves the following
spring, and finally died in 1988.
It is February 2008. My
friend, Susan, and I are attending the final wrap party for a
conference on Culture and Natural Disaster in Tokyo. “Screamed,
Survived, Start Anew,” is the theme of the Japan P.E.N. club’s
sponsored event, which has attracted writers and musicians from around
the world. They have just spent five days presenting their work and
discussing human responses to the fury of nature. Every participant at
the conference has produced a body of work that speaks to the essence
of humanity in the face of the unspeakable.
The memory is
indelible. My hand is on my friend’s shoulder while I struggle to keep
my knees from shaking as the remnants of the Hiroshima hackberry tree
become an instrument, and the haunting notes of Amazing Grace fill the
banquet room. It is a private concert, composed of an audience of two.
We are both literally leaning into the tones— a sound that seems to
suspend reality into a moment when all time and suffering and
redemption are distilled into the purest strains of music one can
imagine.
Famed Japanese musician Kurotaro Kurosaka had
graciously responded to my request to please play the kokarina (flute)
he carved from the hackberry that survived the A-Bomb. The sound is
clear, beautiful, indescribable, but filled with power. It shreds the
heart and cuts to the soul and to hear it is to never, ever, forget it.
I am like a greedy lover and ask him to play it again—and he
immediately obliges. Bowing, smiling, he puts the wood of the ancient
hackberry to his lips again, his unruly shock of hair falling across
eyes that are closed, absorbed in the beauty, the moment. Eyes filled
with tears, because the release from the beauty, the power— was
required.
Listen here.
The
soul of Kurotaro consumed every room he entered, and certainly the
concert hall, known as “Space Zero,” where the bulk of the P.E.N.
presentations unfolded like beautiful, complicated origami. Kurotaro is
an unassuming man, and his face will never grace the cover of a
celebrity magazine, but that concept is born in American definitions of
“culture” and “art” which are bastardizations of truth and beauty.
The
International P.E.N. conference has reaffirmed an unexpressed feeling
that Americans have been consumed by monotonous “art” that fills the
galleries of uncounted seaside tourist traps, music stores, and
honky-tonk strips that pollute the vast American coastline and interior
lake country resorts. Art in the United States has been reduced to a
concept of “Americana” that is self-serving at best and a monetary
rip-off at worst. Throw some paint on a canvas, write sloppy music,
find an agent or a well-heeled sponsor who thinks they can make a buck,
and you are well on your way to American “celebrity” and “artistry.”
Kurotaro’s
hackberry tree kokarina supported a literary presentation, “Stones of
the Golden Women” at the P.E.N. forum and defined the essence of truth
and beauty—the expression of which is the duty of the writer and
artist. Fraud, shape shifting, celebrity narcissism, the quest for
money, and deception—all have no place in art.
Novelist Khwaiyun
Lukjan of Thailand narrated his description of the tsunami of December
26, 2004, when the Adaman Sea devoured the landscape of Thailand in
Phang Nga Province on the island of Phuket. The tsunami surged numerous
times as set after set of waves ebbed and flowed a distance of over two
kilometers inland. Not a building, not a tree survived.
“When
people meet with major catastrophe, we throw away the self-image that
has been created to protect ourselves in our regular lives and lay bare
the self essence residing in the deepest recesses of our hearts,”
Lukjan narrated.
“There was only one thing on my mind at the
time. To live. No matter what happened I had to overcome it without
fail. To survive was the only thing I was thinking about.”
He
described himself as “a small ant—drifting in a giant sea,” and from
this perspective the story of the “Stones of the Golden Women” was born.
The
title of the work describes a devastated Moken Village, Hin Nang Thong,
and the quest of a man (Lin) to find the body of his wife and mother of
his child, so that he may put her spirit to rest.
The Moken are
known as the “people of the sea, or sea gypsies.” Their ancestors
arrived in Thailand thousands of years ago from southeastern China,
entering the ocean from Indochina. The Moken numbered only 3,000 in the
American-dominated tourist areas of Thailand before the tsunami, and
their history and culture was literally overrun and ignored. They were
truly “an invisible people,” in the words of Lukjan.
The Stones
of the Golden Women is a place name that describes a wide stretch of
coastline where rocks and stones littered the beach and shellfish were
once bountiful in the shallow coastal waters—shallow waters that by
their very nature gave lift and power to the tsunami. Shellfish are an
important food for the Moken, and Moken women inhabited the beach for
this reason. No one standing there survived the 2004 tsunami.
Lin’s
wife, Sonporn, whose name means “wishes come true,” left their home on
the morning of December 26, 2004 to gather shellfish at the place of
the Stones of the Golden Women and never returned. Lin was reduced to
bitterness and alcoholism and his relationship with Sonporn’s father
was destroyed—“violent waves still battering their respective hearts.”
Finally, Lin tells the narrator that his wife appeared to him in a dream.
“I went to Khao Lak and got lost, and now I can’t find my way home,” she said.
Lin
says, “She was looking for me to help her. I want to look for my wife.
I want to find her body. I want to bring home her bones.”
During
the recitation of this story, the pure tones of the A-bomb hackberry
tree filled the auditorium at Space Zero. So did the heart and soul of
the musician and flute-carver Kurotaro as the narrator continued.
The
narrator described how the pain of loss seared Lin’s heart as surely as
radiation seared the hackberry tree. Lin lost his emotions as well as
his will to live. Lin became like the shellfish clinging to the shores
and stones at Stones of the Golden Women. The shellfish were dislodged
and upturned during the tsunami and left to die and burn under the
South Seas sun—irradiated and demolished.
I came to believe that we are all Moka. The word means “human beings.”
How
many of us have stood ancient and strong in spirit through incredible
challenges, only to be felled by an unexpected typhoon of physical or
emotional assaults or betrayal? The challenge comes when we pick
ourselves up and whittle away to find the core of our existence, shape
it, reform our lives and go on to make beautiful music that originates
in our core--the soul. Sometimes we can accomplish this on our own,
sometimes it takes an angel or two to salvage what is left of us after
we experience our personal disasters, and sometimes love is all we need
and love is forever elusive.
The expression of that struggle and
triumph is the true stuff of art. And true art is also elusive. Beware
the individual who calls himself/herself an “artist.” At the P.E.N.
conference, all contributors were known simply as “participants.”
There
were six Americans at the P.E.N. conference in Tokyo. “Music” and “art”
conferences are a billion dollar business in America and attract
hundreds of thousands of participants. What have we Americans
contributed that is of any real value, when we are defined in the rest
of the world by celebrity culture? It is an audacity, irony, and
affront to the human spirit that some “art” in the United States is
known as “Americana;” especially when one considers that the American
A-bomb almost destroyed the essence of the hackberry tree that now
fills auditoriums with the strains of Amazing Grace.
Scream. Survive. Start Anew.
Amazing.
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