Bidding ^Tarewell to Bikini^
31
tomorrow.’’ 1 refrained, because there would be no returning
for me—nor perhaps for them. Civilization and the Atomic
Age had come to Bikini, and they had been in the way.*'
A little less than a year after Markwith’s essay appeared. National
Geographic ran photographs of the Bikini tests. The photographs provided
visual confirmation of the power of the American authored Atomic Age. One of
the photograph captions effused that “Uranium Explodes with the Power that
Lights the Stars,” while another proclaimed, “Swift and Silent, Its Mushroom
Cloud Rises from Bikini L a g o o n . T h e camera’s focus is on the mushroom
cloud. The Marshallese have disappeared from the record and from the narrative
of the tests—they simply ceased to exist. Just as life in the lagoon had been
obliterated by the atomic blasts, so too were the Bikinians erased. The atomic
bomb is a powerful eraser of people, of memory, of history.
“The Evil Demon of Poison”
We also need to look beyond National Geographic to recover alternate
stories of the exile and testing. In 2001, Jack Niedenthal published a collection
of oral histories of the original Bikinian exiles and their descendants. Rubon
Juda, son of “King” Juda who had led the Bikinians through the relocation,
remembers
the Americans did come to see us. 1 recall that while we were
still on Rongerik some ri-hellies [“Americans” or
“foreigners”] came and showed us pictures of the bombs that
they were about to detonate on Bikini.”
They presented us with globes of the earth to explain where
America and Bikini were located. Afterwards, they asked
Juda, my father, to travel with them from Rongerik to Bikini
in ܙ\