How “Natives” Drink. Bravo Shots, For Example: Mourning and Nuclear Kitsch

David W. Kupferman (bio)
University of Hawai’i – West O’ahu

Abstract

Between 1946 and 1958, the United States tested sixty-seven nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands, the largest of which was the “Bravo Shot” at Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954. In the intervening years, the historical memory of that legacy has largely been reduced to a case of perpetrator and victim. Yet there is also an undercurrent of lowbrow discourse and nuclear kitsch, as well as questionable stewardship of the nuclear question, in and around contemporary Marshallese society, notably effected by prominent members of the American expatriate community. The “Bravo Shot,” to take but one example, is now available as an alcoholic drink at the airport bar in the nation’s capital. This paper considers the ways in which kitsch interferes with the work of mourning, and calls into question the ethical responsibility of a popular social imaginary that either rationalizes or willfully ignores problematic political decisions, such as ordering Bravo Shots at the bar, and thereby perpetrates violence against those whose very memory is at stake.

“The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.”’ —Cicero

The next time you are in the airport in Majuro, the capital atoll of the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), stop in at the Hangar Bar and get yourself a Bravo Shot. For $4.50, you get a shot made of one-third Cointreau, one-third Kahlua, and one-third Baileys. The layered drink, which has been around since the opening of the bar in 2006, should be familiar to mixologists and drinkers more commonly as a B-52, providing a fitting pedigree for the Bravo Shot since the actual B-52 Stratofortress was designed specifically to carry an atomic payload. It was a B-52 that dropped a bomb on Bikini Atoll during Operation Cherokee in 1956, two years after the Bravo detonation. Alternatively, if you find yourself with some time to kill in Majuro around March 1, during the national holiday commemorating the Bravo test of March 1, 1954, in which the US dropped its first thermonuclear hydrogen bomb with a yield equivalent to fifteen megatons of TNT (Lindqvist 136), you can also head over to the Flame Tree, a local bar and restaurant that features Friday Shots as part of their “Nuclear Survivors’ Special” (see Fig. 1). Who wouldn’t need a drink after surviving a nuclear explosion?¹

If drinking isn’t your thing, you can always read the local paper, the Marshall Islands Journal, which reported on student activities during the 2012 March 1 holiday with the title “Students Have Explosive Day.” And then there’s the crossword, “The RMI Riddle,” which occasionally recycles clues like 3-Down from puzzle number 376 on December 12, 2011: “Yippee for bomb!” (Hint: it’s five letters.) Those familiar with the history of nuclear testing by the United States in the Marshall Islands will be reminded by 3-Down of the title of Holly Barker’s book, Bravo for the Marshallese, in which she explains that she chose the title

for two reasons. First, I want to document how the Bravo test … and the U.S. nuclear weapons testing program fundamentally altered the health, environment, language, economy, politics, and social organization of the Marshall Islands. Second, I want readers to know the Marshallese not as helpless victims rendered powerless by the events that took place in their land, but as the fighters and advocates for their communities they are. (xiii)

She goes on to explain, somewhat condescendingly, that “The Marshallese people deserve praise (bravo!) for the ways they resist” the U.S. government today. But who is conferring this praise and how does the polysemous character of the word “bravo” act in this context? Does appropriating the name of the most devastating test in this way diminish the terror and violence of colonization and nuclear weapons that are also conjured up by this name? There seems to be a third interpretation of the book’s title, which is that the Bravo bomb was, deterministically, for the Marshallese, as if they somehow deserved or earned it. A much more effective reappropriation of the word, ironically enough, can be found on the cover of the second edition of Barker’s book from 2012, in which a Marshallese woman is holding a sign that reads “Bravo to U.S./Contamination to Ailuk,” suggesting both that the US should sarcastically be applauded for its nuclear weapons program, and that the Bravo test should have taken place in (or at least been sent to) the United States. Indeed, while it may seem a small point, the reference to the Bravo Shot changes shape, meaning, and effect depending upon whether one uses the preposition for or to, and which entity (the US or the Marshall Islands) it is directed at; what is becoming apparent is that Bravo/bravo is a term that should not be treated lightly.

Still, the evocation of the Bravo detonation and its use for cheerleading can also be found in the second edition of Jack Niedenthal’s For the Good of Mankind, which is published by Bravo Publishers. Indeed, Bravo Publishers employs a curious use of the Greek β rather than the Latin B to symbolize Bravo (Publishers), suggesting a connection with the sign’s use in physics to denote beta radiation and nuclear decay. It is not clear whether the use of β is intended to be clever or ironic, or perhaps both, but it is nonetheless problematic in the way that it winks to the knowing reader, sitting as it does on the publication page of the book atop the word “Bravo!” thereby poking fun at, and so potentially diminishing, the horror of the actual Bravo detonation. (It should be noted that a different edition of the book, published by Micronitor Publishing – the parent company of both the Marshall Islands Journal and the Flame Tree – does not include either the β or the word Bravo anywhere on the publication page.)

And speaking of the Micronitor, we can also find a rather troubling nod, in the vein of Dr. Strangelove, to the comedy that is nuclear annihilation in Joe Murphy’s novella The Socialist Republic of the Marshall Islands, which chronicles the takeover of the Republic of the Marshall Islands by a Soviet commander named Ivan “La Midi” von Kotzebue. To be sure, this book is a joke, as it is dedicated to “President Saddam Hussein: ‘Perhaps one of the most misunderstood and under-appreciated leaders of the 20^th Century.’” As appalling as this sentiment is, it pales in comparison with the ending of the book, when La Midi meets with the RMI President and various cabinet ministers at a restaurant in Majuro to discuss the terms of his socialist takeover of the islands. The story takes place just as the Compact of Free Association with the US is going into effect in 1986, also the height of the Cold War under the Reagan administration, and on the last page the United States’ response to the Soviet takeover is to nuke Majuro:

A firm smile worked its way through the Soviet’s lips. “Passage of the compact is of no consequence. The Americans acted too late. Besides, the matter now goes to the United Nations Security Council and we have a veto. Regardless of American political objectives we are now a socialist republic of the Pacific.” “Not with our agreement,” repeated President Chutaro. “Oh, yes, with or without your agreement. The Americans have no choice. To interfere or block our move would mean war. We are here permanently. We remove you, all of you, and replace you with more cooperative elements. It’s that simple.”… “And the Americans can do nothing about it?” repeated Minister LiTokwa [sic] Tomeing. “Nothing,” agreed La Midi. Again silence, filled with the dribble of the phallic [fountain]. Then, suddenly, a flash brightens the morning sun-filled sky. No one moves, not even to blink. It was Justice Minister John Heine who realized first, and even though he was certain, he couldn’t resist having the absolute last word: “Nothing?” (77)

Thus, between the “flash” in the morning sky and the “absolute last word,” in this telling the government of the Marshall Islands finds it preferable for the United States to use nuclear weapons to eliminate the Soviet threat in Majuro than to abide a socialist takeover of the islands. What is so troubling about this, and our examples above, is that I should not have to point out how troubling they all are, from a standpoint of memory, mourning, ethics, and good taste. Granted, the drink specials at the Flame Tree, the Marshall Islands Journal, and The Socialist Republic of the Marshall Islands are the work of one individual (or those who work for that individual), a long-term American expatriate resident of the RMI. Yet this form of memory, or rather of kitsch as memory, interferes with the work of mourning, and provides the slippage necessary to produce the Bravo Shot at the Hangar Bar (which, incidentally, is also owned by a non-Marshallese), among other elements of such “memory,” as legitimate, if not necessarily with serious intentions.

So what are we to make of the Bravo Shot, and what role do Islanders and non-Islanders (and specifically Americans) play in how the Marshall Islands’ nuclear imaginary is produced and structured? What is appropriate, and what can be appropriated? What are the limits of – impossibly – good taste? In order to focus on these issues more immediately, I should briefly mention what this work does not do. I do not offer a history of nuclear testing in the Pacific, or specifically in the Marshall Islands, as that subject can be found elsewhere (see, for example, Firth; Weisgall; and Johnston and Barker). Nor do I concentrate on the impacts and aftermath of the testing in an anthropological sense; those interested in the history and legacy of the removal of Islanders should see Kiste’s 1974 study of the Bikinians, Carucci’s 1997 work on Islanders of Āne-wetak (Enewetak), and Barker and Barker and Johnston for analyses of Rongelap Islander experiences. And despite the title of this piece, I do not actually address alcohol in the islands, although there certainly is a need for an examination of the link between the terror and violence of nuclear testing and that of alcoholism and its corollary effects of domestic violence and social disintegration.

Rather, what I am concerned with here are the ways in which the Bravo Shot at the Hangar Bar, and fetishistic kitsch of this kind, provides us with an opening for a dialogue about death. For death hovers above this entire discussion—specifically, the deaths of those Marshallese who have crossed an atomic border, an “atomic situation” that, Michel Foucault argues, is predicated on the concept that “the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual’s continued existence” (137). And what of the power to remember that whole population?

Perhaps, then, we should start from a point of mourning, for that is how we, the living, trace the border of death through memory. But what form does, or should, mourning take? Derrida, in his essay eulogizing Emmanuel Levinas, suggests that the work of mourning operates in that space where we must speak of the dead, and yet “at that very point where words fail us, since all language that would return to the self, to us, would seem indecent, a reflexive discourse that would end up coming back to the stricken community, to its consolation or its mourning” (Mourning 200). Our work in this instance requires us to interiorize or remember the person/s whom we are mourning, and to allow the departed to speak for themselves. Here we find the aporia of death and the work of mourning, in that we are speaking of and to those who cannot respond to us. We are engaged in an impossible response, and as such we must take care to interiorize without internalizing, to have the dead speak “in us” rather than “through us” or mediated by us, lest we do violence to them. Derrida engages in the tricky act of distinguishing interiorizing from totalizing by appealing to Levinas’s notion of the infinity of the other. For Levinas, “The epiphany of the face is ethical” (199) in that it signifies a Being for whom we are responsible and whom therefore we cannot totalize. Likewise, Derrida acknowledges that the aporia of death and mourning requires one to interiorize but without totalizing. In other words, interiorization for Derrida is a matter of approaching rather than appropriating the other, of keeping the interiorized other at arms’ length; and this trick is then aided by the second part of his formulation of mourning, that of allowing the dead to speak in their own words, what Brault and Naas refer to as the “impossible performative” of interiorization.

Michael Shapiro cautions us that violence in this sense “refers primarily to the violence of representation, the domination of narratives of space and identity” (59); and as all we have are representations of the dead, it is incumbent upon us to delineate the aporetic boundaries which we must limn but can never cross so as to avoid perpetuating the very violence to which misappropriations of memory and mourning – in other words, totalizing – can so easily lead. In the case of the Bravo Shot, and our other examples above, we find a fetishistic form of mourning, one that concerns itself less with ethics and responsibility towards the other and instead primarily through a mourning for ourselves, thereby creating the conditions of sentimentality that produce its most problematic and violent form: kitsch. For while the aporia of mourning is “an impossibility, nevertheless, that constitutes an infinite demand” (Zembylas 92), kitsch is both constructed by and reflective of mourning defined by resolution, finality, and closure, effectively by erasing the other and claiming to cross the border. While it is not my intention to provide an analysis of kitsch, per se, I must acknowledge the ways in which it has metamorphosed from the time that Clement Greenberg traced its origins to the rise of the industrial revolution and its mechanistic assemblage of “low” culture, to its service as a “rear-garde” (in contrast to avant-garde) form of totalitarianism, to Judith (now Jack) Halberstam’s creative use of kitsch and kitsch/iness as “low theory.” Throughout, as Friedlander explains, “kitsch is the complete subordination of the means of a medium to the communication of subject matter or to the creation of effect” (378); that is, it merely apes effects, it cannot produce them. We would do well, then, to turn our attention to nuclear kitsch and its troublesome effects on mourning.

In 1946, Superman flew to the Pacific during the atomic tests at Bikini Atoll (see Fig. 2). In Action Comics #101, a gang led by Specs Dour kidnaps Lois Lane in Metropolis, and Dour forces her to drink a formula that makes her go insane. When Superman arrives to try to rescue her, Dour forces Superman to drink the formula as well, and the Man of Steel proceeds to wreak havoc on the city, before floating away unconscious. Eventually he winds up in the middle of the Pacific just as the US is about to test a nuclear weapon over Bikini, and the explosion in fact cures Superman, implying perhaps that there is something beneficial to nuclear fallout (at least for those born on Krypton). The story was timely, arriving on newsstands as it did in October, just a few months after the testing took place. If we skip ahead four decades, however, we see Superman responding to nuclear weapons much differently during the late 1980s, at a time in the Cold War when nuclear annihilation seemed possible, if not likely, under the Reagan administration. In contrast to his first encounter with nuclear destruction, which restored him to his old self, in the film Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, Superman literally rids the world of nuclear weapons, detonating them out in space. And when he confronts Nuclear Man, Lex Luthor’s version of Frankenstein’s monster, Superman is harmed by the radiation to which he is exposed when Nuclear Man scratches him with his claws.

Not to be outdone, in Marvel Universe’s early 2000s The Ultimates, by Mark Millar (the blueprint for the cinematic Avengers series and its constituent spin-offs), Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor lead a team of operatives to an unnamed island in Micronesia to battle an invading alien force. The confrontation is a trap, however, as the alien base on the island is deserted, as is the island itself emptied of any actual Islanders, and instead a booby-trapped nuclear detonation eradicates the superheroes’ team (although the principal characters, we find out later, are unharmed). Of note for our purposes is that the conditions produced by nuclear kitsch make it possible for the comic book to incinerate almost nonchalantly yet another anonymous Micronesian island (though to the trained eye the visual depiction of the island is based on aerial views of Yap in the Federated States of Micronesia), complete with one frame of a palm tree foregrounding the imminent mushroom cloud. The complete lack of native inhabitants is never explained, and we are therefore left with yet another thermonuclear Bravo-type shot that, in the popular imaginary, harms no one, and thus produces no one to mourn.

Surprisingly, neither of these pop-culture entries is included on the Bikini Atoll website list of Bikini- and nuclear-related kitsch, although the list does include Salvador Dalí’s 1947 painting Three Sphinxes of Bikini, an inventory of seventy-eight movies with the word “Bikini” in the title, and a reference to the SpongeBob SquarePants episode “Dying for Pie,” which features footage of the Baker Shot detonation, presumably blowing up Bikini Bottom (Niedenthal, “Bikini Atoll”). The website also features the webmaster, Jack Niedenthal, an American former Peace Corps volunteer who serves as the liaison for the Bikini Atoll local government, is married to a Bikinian, and refers to himself as a Bikinian. He is also a self-proclaimed filmmaker–in a nod to kitsch, Niedenthal’s film company is called Microwave Films. To date he has produced five feature-length movies on various aspects of Marshallese culture and “legends”; all five were written, directed, and produced by Niedenthal, including his effort from 2012, The Sound of Crickets at Night, a take on the nuclear legacy of the islands starring Jack Niedenthal. The name of his company denotes the island-ness of the films and their producer, with “Micro” referring to Micronesia and “wave” evoking the importance of water to the region and to the Marshall Islands in particular; however, the name cleverly alludes to nuclear testing and its aftermath, as in “microwave radiation.” It should also come as no surprise that Niedenthal’s email handle on the Bikini Atoll website is “bikinijack,” employing kitsch to identify Niedenthal with both the suffering, and the cooptation of sentimental righteousness, of Bikini.

My concern with kitsch then is threefold: first, that kitsch leads one to sentimentality; second, that the deployment of kitsch erases difference, and is therefore an act of violence; and third, that kitsch masquerades as Derrida’s interiorization as part of the process of mourning but in fact corrupts the work of mourning by totalizing the other. In Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant warns against accepting sentimentality as necessary for moral duty and ethical obligation; rather, it is only out of a sense of duty that one can truly, ethically love and act. Thus, “beneficence solely from duty … is practical and not pathological love, which lies in the will and not in the propensity of feeling, in the principles of action and not in melting sympathy” (15, original emphases). The danger posed by this adherence to “melting sympathy” is that it counterfeits the actual and results in “a false sense of empowerment by the experience” (Friedlander 383); in other words, one evades ethical duty by actively embracing the sentimental, by engaging with the emotional (grounded in sympathy) rather than with responsibility (produced by the will).

The problem with kitsch is that it leads to Kant’s “pathological love,” and so we drink our Bravo Shots and read through the list of beach movies on the Bikini Atoll website without any sense of moral obligation to those whose lives were affected, and often destroyed, by the reality of the experience and the horror of the event. As Robert Solomon warns us, “The objection to sentimentality in both art and ethics, in other words, is not just its lack of sophistication and bad taste. Kitsch is dangerous…. Kitsch and sentimentality lead to brutality” (3, original emphasis). We can therefore dismiss the experiences of those Bikinians removed from their homes in 1946 and concentrate instead on the effects of nuclear testing on Superman or the Avengers and marvel at the worth of a comic book or comic-book movie franchise (rather than the worth of those Islanders’ lives).

The second effect of kitsch is to highlight the privileging of narcissism through the erasure of the other. As Karen Engle suggests, “Kitsch reflects a profound narcissism – a desire to insert oneself into a historical or otherwise significant moment” (72). And so we turn again to Niedenthal, who inserts himself into the narrative of Bikini Atoll on the dedication page of his book For the Good of Mankind, when he writes that the book is “For our elders, alive and dead, who have struggled to keep our community together over the years, reminding us of who we are and where we came from—and of what we still have to accomplish for our people” (emphases added). The use of the first person plural allows Niedenthal to claim the mantle of Bikinian righteousness, despite his coming from Pennsylvania, not Bikini, and although it stands in contrast with the subtitle of his book: “A History of the People of Bikini and Their Islands” (emphasis added). Why not “A History of the People of Bikini and Our Islands,” or is that too far a bridge to cross right on the cover?

In a cover story from The New York Times Magazine in 1994, Jeffrey Davis writes of the Bikinian community members’ struggle to balance their newfound wealth, island heritage, and the precarious environmental future of their atoll. But the article really revolves around the tensions between Bikini’s two American representatives: Jonathan Weisgall, their lawyer, and Niedenthal. Here we see numerous instances of Niedenthal’s insertion of himself into the story of Bikini: “‘When the Bikinians have to deal with the outside world … you need someone to deal with powerful personalities,’ Niedenthal says. ‘I’m their link to the outside” (Davis 47); or again, “‘I am a member of this community, and I have certain rights,’ Niedenthal argues” (Davis 72); and, as Davis describes him: “Niedenthal, ever quick to speak for the Bikinians” (Davis 48). And yet, as Engle warns us, “Kitsch enables the statement of universal community and belonging. This is the danger: the erasure of difference, the reduction of distance and the non-recognition of the Other all have as their unspoken desire the dream of homogeneity and absolute power” (78). Thus, we have no need of actual Bikinians; we have Niedenthal to “speak for” them, much as Dr. Seuss’s Lorax speaks for the trees. In this way, Bikinians are erased, and replaced with the narcissism of privilege, a privilege that reeks of the similar effects of colonization’s erasure of the ways of being, humanity, and lives of indigenous peoples. The only true Bikinian is now not even a Bikinian at all, but rather an ersatz Bikinian, one whose motivations, dripping as they are with Kant’s melting sympathy (as Davis puts it, “Much as it may distress Niedenthal the Bikinians are no longer the innocents they were in 1946” [73]), do not, in fact, even allow for Bikinian voices to speak for themselves. And so, in a letter to the editor following the publication of The New York Times Magazine article, Niedenthal’s sister writes that she “is grateful that he [Niedenthal] is there to protect what remains of their [the Bikinians’] heritage, while safeguarding their possibility of a future” (Niedenthal Axberg 8), since apparently the Bikinians are incapable of doing so for themselves. More recently, Niedenthal spoke before a group of yachties on Majuro, where he “told the story [of nuclear history] from the Bikinian viewpoint” (“Cruisers Spellbound” 18); tellingly, no Bikinians attended the gathering, nor did they need to, as Niedenthal has deftly coopted their story and, through the colonial gaze, mediates and controls it.

So what about the tourist patrons of the Hangar Bar and collectors of nuclear kitsch, and by extension of nuclear sentimentality? They, too, are implicated in this pathological drive towards “melting sympathy” and the erasure of the Bikinians, since they can also experience nuclear tourism through trinkets and souvenirs. Specifically, on sale in Majuro for $7.50 is a Bravo Shot shot glass that one can bring home and presumably use to enjoy a homemade Bravo Shot (see Fig. 3). In the words of Engle, “Through possession of my souvenir, I forge a connection to the tragedy. Now, I have a story to tell. I was there become words belonging to both survivor and tourist” (75, original emphasis). This sentimental tourist experience is certainly not limited to the Marshall Islands, however: as the entrepreneurial spirit of New Yorkers demonstrated after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the image of the World Trade Center as memorial adorned any number of items, including key chains and refrigerator magnets; and there is even a gift shop at Auschwitz, where I once saw a rack of postcards for sale. (To whom exactly do you send a postcard of Auschwitz, and what are you supposed to write on it? “Wish you were here”?) While Proust speaks of a “posthumous infidelity” (309), kitsch, I argue, engages in a form of posthumous promiscuity by demanding that the interloper, the observer, the faux participant insert her/himself into the narrative. This in turn totalizes and absorbs the other, which, according to Levinas, the self cannot do. Kitsch disavows this separation, and incites violence against the other, the violence of totalizing. As Derrida reminds us, “every reduction of the other to a real moment of my life, its reduction to the state of empirical alter-ego, is an empirical possibility, or rather eventuality, which is called violence” (Writing and Difference 128, original emphases).

And therein lies the ethical danger of the Bravo Shot and its companion shot glass: “This is the realm of kitsch. Kitsch says: we can all be One, and be united in our common purpose. But this One is totalitarian, and it desires no less than the extermination of its foes” (Engle 77). It is this extermination of foes, of difference and the other, of the reality of experience, that is at stake; indeed, there is nothing less at risk than legitimizing sentimentality as somehow ethical, authentic, and pure, and thereby threatening the memory of those connected to the event and displacing our responsibility to them. The duty, as Kant would command, is not to mistake the emotional for the actual, and thereby displace it; rather, it is to demonstrate fidelity to one’s duty to the other, by creating conditions that legitimize the very differences that separate the survivor from the tourist. The question becomes not “How do I insert myself into this story?” but rather “What is my responsibility to the memory of the other?” We must interiorize and allow Bikinians to speak, rather than speak for them and in so doing totalize them. Niedenthal does not allow the Bikinian people to speak “in us” – he does not give their voices a chance to have the last word. As Brault and Naas explain of Derrida’s impossible performative, “interiorization cannot—must not—be denied; the other is indeed reduced to images ‘in us.’ And yet the very notion of interiorization is limited in its assumption of a topology with limits between inside and out, what is ours and what is the other” (11). Kitsch is dangerous precisely because it delineates this topology while simultaneously erasing it. Kitsch bears witness not to the dead but to the living, to the appropriator, to us as we order our Bravo Shot.

At this point we can consider the effects of kitsch, and the ways in which the conditions of possibility delineated by kitsch corrupt the work of mourning. For if kitsch totalizes the other and violates the requirement that we interiorize the dead while allowing them to speak, it also denies the face of the other, and the ethical epiphany of that face. It is our ethical responsibility, as Levinas instructs, to resist this denial, and to embrace the infinity of the other: “The face opens the primordial discourse whose first word is obligation, which no ‘interiority’ permits avoiding” (201). The epiphany of the face brings us squarely in confrontation with the ethical impossibility of totalization, of, in effect, killing the other. We can contrast this with the ways in which totalizing subjectivities of “victimhood,” especially those in popular historical imaginaries, continue to reinforce not just the moment of the Bravo Shot but also its eternal drumbeat of violence against the very people that, say, a national holiday is intended to commemorate and mourn. The work of mourning is to operate as an antidote – a definitive antithesis – to the work of kitsch; yet kitsch does not abide what Shapiro describes as “the ethical sensibility,” which permits “various forms of alterity with contending modes of denotation and meaning to enter into the negotiation of space and identity” (80). There is no negotiation with kitsch; its effects are totalizing, as it denies what Shapiro names the ontology of encounter.

And what of that holiday, which is an officially sanctioned day for engaging in the work of mourning through the social imaginary? Since 1988, March 1, the anniversary of the Bravo Shot, has been designated as a Marshall Islands national holiday, originally called “Nuclear Victims Remembrance Day” (Marshall Islands, PL 1988-16 33). At stake in the naming of such a holiday is the advent of foundation, with this act of naming calling the memory of the Bravo Shot into existence; at the same time, the subjectivity of those whose deaths (and importantly not their lives) are to be commemorated and remembered is secured in a state of victimhood. In the first instance, national memory is deployed in the service of fixed meanings, while the phenomenon of foundation ensures that something that is assumed to exist (the Bravo Shot) must first call itself into being (through the holiday). Horwitz offers that “The irreducible nonclosure of context that can be found in the event of foundation due to its paradoxical structure always allows for an opening onto the politics of fixing contexts and deciding upon and stabilizing meanings” (163–164), suggesting that the Bravo Shot, since the founding of the holiday, possesses some essential and determinate meaning: namely, that it is a day for mourning (rather than celebration or even productive reflection), and that there is a narrowly proscriptive “right” way to mourn (for victims).

Yet it is with the second instance, that of subjectivity, that we begin to run into trouble. The foundation of the event may consistently be March 1 (since at least 1988), but the subjects worthy of commemoration and mourning have not always been so clear. In 2003, the government changed the name of the holiday to “Memorial Day and Nuclear Survivors Remembrance Day,” giving as its rationale

that the effected [sic] peoples wish to be remembered as survivors rather [than] victims [sic]. The holiday therefore should be a remembrance of their drive and to signify their struggle not to be defeated by their conditions but to continue to live their lives despite the physical, emotional and mental ravages of the nuclear testing program. (Marshall Islands, PL 2003-99 4)

Here there is a clear demarcation between subjectivities, between victims and survivors, and a break between remembrance and mourning. Indeed, one does not typically mourn survival. Importantly, this different holiday cites an ongoing struggle by the survivors, which has the effect of collapsing the notion of the linearity of time and history: the survivors are still alive (and therefore are not in need of mourning), the foundation of the event of the Bravo Shot is therefore renewed in the present, and “such symbolic synchrony of ‘now’ and ‘then’ reflects our conservative urge to do away with the very distinction between them” (Zerubavel 47, original emphasis). In short, we are commemorating here not death but life, in fact our own lives in the present moment, through the continuing ordeal of “survival.”

This recognition of the living did not last long, as the name of the holiday reverted to its original iteration, “Nuclear Victims Remembrance Day,” in 2005, without explanation (Marshall Islands, PL 2005-35 1). What then of the survivors from the two years previous? What becomes of their subjectivity (to say nothing of their lives), and what effect does the restoration of victimhood have on both the event and the revitalized memorialization of the dead? It seems that we have returned on March 1 to a set of fixed meanings and universal rules, and to a totalizing of the other, of the Islanders directly and indirectly affected by the US nuclear testing program writ large. Derrida explains the ethical formulation of Being in Levinas’s terms: “alone permitting to let be others in their truth, freeing dialogue and the face to face, the thought of Being is thus as close as possible to nonviolence” (Writing and Difference 146, original emphasis). The erasure of survivance and prolepsis of victimhood enshrined in the holiday in its current form therefore totalizes the experience of the nuclear-affected other, not the least result of which is the denial of the face (and face to face) of survival in its binary dance with that of victimization, as per the discourse operating within the naming of the holiday. We are commanded here to violence by denying this Being of the other, by denying the other to speak in their own words. As Derrida reminds us, “The experience of the other (of the infinite) is irreducible” (Writing and Difference 152); yet that experience here is reduced to a problematic subjectivity on an annual basis.

The March 1 holiday is in a way, then, a new form of state-sanctioned violence against those who are least able to speak, as we do not allow them to speak “in us.” Perhaps the greatest trouble with the naming of the holiday, according to Shapiro, is that “the ethical is the enactment of a response to the summons of alterity beyond or prior to any institutionalized normativity and foundational conceptuality. Among what is required to heed this summons of the Other is a distancing from the prolepses through which others are already inscribed” (77). The holiday thus refuses us the possibility of approaching those who are supposed to be mourned, and instead instructs us to appropriate the dead for our own totalizing ends.

Still, that cannot be the end of our responsibility to those whose lives were affected, and in many cases ended, by the legacy of US nuclear testing. Rather, we should recognize the work of mourning and its productive qualities, should we choose to engage them. The naming and renaming of the holiday demarcate the universality of victimization and the horrors of colonization, suggesting that there is an essential and totalizable subjectivity that is eligible for national and global commemoration (and that no longer includes survivors); in this way, there is a narrow, proscriptive, and “correct” mode through which to remember the Bravo Shot, and any deviations from that normalized and non-contingent subject – the victim – are suspect. The Bravo Shot drink, however, erases this other by thumbing its nose at the very real violence of nuclear annihilation, alcoholism, colonization, and the effects of totalizing, of integrating the other within ourselves: “Ontologies of integration are egoistically aimed at domesticating alterity to a frame of understanding that allows for the violent appropriation of the space of the other” (Shapiro 64). The holiday, in turn, erases the conditions of possibility for alternative subjectivities by legislating national victimization, and thereby establishes the official narrative of victimhood as history.

And so what is the holiday for? Is it to open that space for impossible mourning, in which we restore the subjectivity of the other (and thereby our own as well), or is it simply a day to head to the nearest bar to take advantage of the nuclear survivors’ special? It is easy simply to be outraged at the barbarous acts perpetrated by the US on the people of the Marshall Islands. It is far more difficult, and therefore necessary, to move beyond the subjectivization of the other as “victim” and instead consider the possibility of the impossible, of the impossible “I” of the other, that which Oliver terms the “sovereignty effect” (192). To presume a posture only of the former is not only dangerous (not the least because it is the most “universal” response available to us), but it is negative as well, as it results in the erasure not only of the other (here the Bikinian, the Enewetakese, the Rongelapese, the Utrikan) but also of history and memory. By adhering to universal rules of mourning and recognizing only “victims,” we abdicate our responsibility to the other and can thereby avoid having to make any kind of decision. If we have no responsibility to others, then it is of no consequence if we relegate human suffering to a joke at a bar or to a kitschy shot glass.

So how do we turn, or rather return, to the work of mourning, to the imperative of interiorization while carefully avoiding the totalization of the other, and thereby commemorate not ourselves but the dead? How do we allow the dead to respond “in us” rather than speaking for them? As a useful counterexample to the Bravo Shot drink, to Niedenthal, and to nuclear kitsch generally, let us consider one more example of representation of the Bravo test, namely the flag of the Bikini Atoll local government (see Fig. 4). Assembled to look like the US flag, it showcases a field of twenty-three stars in a sea of blue, each of which stands for an island in the atoll. The two stars to the bottom right of the flag represent Kili and Ejit, the two main contemporary population centers of the diasporic Bikinian community; the three stars in the upper right corner represent the three islands in the lagoon that were destroyed by the Bravo blast. This imagining of the Bravo shot as integral to the history of Bikini also suggests a number of other factors at work in the local nuclear imaginary, specifically the convergence of history, memory, colonization, dislocation, and modern conceptions of statehood (and its signs, such as the flag). The very name of the electoral district of Kili/Bikini/Ejit (KBE) is a reminder of the ways in which this community has been constructed as an effect of nuclear testing, western notions of national security and scientific progress, development, and displacement. A group of Islanders from Enewetak (which was the site of the majority of the sixty-seven nuclear weapons tested by the US between 1946 and 1958), Rongelap and Utrik (whose communities were devastated by the fallout from the Bravo test), and Bikini have periodically held demonstrations in Majuro, calling themselves ERUB after the four affected atolls, a word that can be glossed in English as Marshallese for “broken.” As a self-chosen designation, erub denotes a complex paleonomy, or weight that words carry. It also enables the survivors of the Bravo test to allow the dead to speak “in us,” to interiorize without erasing.

A painting hanging in the halls of Bikini Atoll Town Hall in Majuro shows a mushroom cloud flanked on either side by two upright nuclear bombs, one labeled Able and the other Baker, both with the year 1946 underneath their names. Running along the top of the painting is the wording from the Bikini flag, in English and then Marshallese: “Everything is in God’s hands… Men otemjej rej ilo pein anij.” Beneath the image of the bombs and mushroom cloud appears the phrase: “One nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day.” One Bravo Shot at the bar, I would add, can disrupt the work of mourning and ruin our ability to approach Bikini’s nuclear legacy soberly.

Footnotes

1. To be fair, the Flame Tree is not the only establishment to try to develop catastrophe and alcohol tie-ins: to commemorate Pearl Harbor Day in 2013, Murphy’s Bleachers Bar, across the street from Wrigley Field in Chicago, suggested on its marquee that patrons “Remember Pearl Harbor With Bombs & Kamikazes.” The difference between the two bars, however, may be that Murphy’s was called out in The Huffington Post and subsequently apologized “for the actions of our staff to our whole country” (“Chicago Bar”).

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