In 2011 Cornell University in New York City hosted an exhibition, ‘Nuke York, New York: Nuclear Holocaust in the American Imagination from Hiroshima to 9/11’.Footnote ¹ The curators’ description read: ‘depictions of a nuclear attack on New York City are as emblematic of the atomic age in the United States as is the mushroom cloud. Nuke York, New York encourages visitors to experience and interpret this recurring imagery from the Cold War and beyond’.Footnote ² Images of a nuclear apocalypse with modern metropoles reduced to piles of twisted rubble and displays of iconic memorabilia, such as comics, magazines, and books, filled the hall. The compilation showed just how deeply images of ‘unthinkable’ nuclear war were made thinkable through visual iconography that positions places such as New York (and other American cities) as victims of nuclear violence.

On 1 March 1954, the United States had itself initiated the ‘unthinkable’ when fallout from a bomb detonated on Bikini Atoll in the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI) rained down on unsuspecting inhabitants. Codenamed Castle Bravo, the 15-megaton blast sent radioactive fallout throughout the archipelago and across the world.Footnote ³ The highest concentrations of visible, ashen-like radioactive debris landed on Rongelap Atoll; Utrik Atoll also received fallout, albeit of lesser concentration. About two days later, the US military came to evacuate the Rongelap and Utrik atolls. Many exposed persons recounted their acute radiological poisoning, from nausea and vomiting to intensely burned skin and loss of hair. They were instructed to leave their belongings, disrobe, and board a ship to Kwajalein Atoll, the nearest US military base. While the Utrikese were able to return home, the Rongelapese would be away from their homeland for three years, and became subjected to extensive medical examinations and scientific studies.Footnote ⁴ As communities were displaced, they composed new stories and songs to deal with their new realities and new social relations.

Yet, through nuclear colonialism the Marshall Islands, a tropical ‘paradise’ scarred with bomb craters, has become part of the visual culture of nuclear ruination – aestheticized and fetishized. Countless media stories feature Runit Dome, a concrete structure on Enewetak Atoll that houses tons of radioactive debris now threatened by rising seas, and Bikini Atoll, which in 2010 was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The UNESCO website's description of Bikini reads: ‘the violence exerted on the natural, geophysical and living elements by nuclear weapons illustrates the relationship which can develop between man and the environment’.Footnote ⁵

The fictionalized urban ruins and the UNESCO heritage ruins do cultural work as US imperial projections. They conjure an atomic nostalgia that procures an inattention for the present where the United States becomes both victor and victim. The nuclear relationship between ‘man’ and ‘environment’ normalizes notions of mastery by ‘man’ (human) over an ‘environment’ (as landscape). Importantly, the Marshall Islands and its Indigenous communities are subsumed into the role of atomic theatre. The lived experiences of nuclear war, which was forced onto the Marshallese without their consent or concern for their well-being by the US government, are all but effaced. So too are the Indigenous lifeways and social relations that have been forever altered by the US military and modernizing infrastructure set up to direct the terms of the nuclear project and radiological studies. As such, these venerated nuclear ruins, which capture a moment in nuclear history, can be read alongside other ruins of empire and capitalism that are fetishized by elite audiences and register differently with local communities.

Marshallese radiation songs, written during and after the nuclear testing period as nuclear survivors tried to make sense of their sufferings, yield insight into processes of imperial ruination, rupture, and fragmentation by resounding the powerful impress of radioactive decay in Marshallese lives that continues to transform and unravel the customary connections of Indigenous communities.Footnote ⁶ Radiation songs amplify the radioactive aftermath of nuclear explosions by sharing how radiation is present in singers’ bodies and homelands. Singers indicate the presence of radiation lyrically and affectively with vocalized moments of decay. Radiation songs are at once both formal and help trace the formalization of radiation's presence. Such formalizing work yields insight into how radiation comes to be felt and known by different groups and individuals. In assessing the parameters through which radiation becomes sensible, how, and to whom, it becomes all the clearer how the US nuclear project can be considered in terms of ‘imperial ruination’. US geopolitical accrual has depended on the structural dispossession of Marshallese from their Indigenous agency rooted in and routed through their matrilineal culture.

In these songs, I read the Marshallese voice in terms of marking various nodes of rubble, or the material sedimentation of destruction, which is an idea that I borrow from Gastón R. Gordillo's Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction.Footnote ⁷ Gordillo shifted from looking at ruins to the ‘multiple forms of destruction’ that have amassed in place as rubble, which ‘as a conceptual figure … can help us understand the ruptured multiplicity that is constitutive of all geographies as they are produced, destroyed, and remade’.Footnote ⁸ Geographies can be thought of in terms of interconnected bodies in their relational constellations. These relations – the impressions of their interactions – are contoured by how bodies make sense of, and shape, each other. Gordillo emphasizes that rubble can help us approach the negative, or what has been destroyed through ruination, and the disentangling of social relations in order to make way for geographies of the present. Thus, nuclear destruction is part of the longue durée of the institutionalized decimation of Indigenous lands and matrilineal cultures by nation-states.

Radiation songs operate as expressions of nuclear ruination through which the nation-state – a gendered construct – came to fruition. The RMI, as a modern nation-state, became autonomous by entering into a Compact of Free Association with the United States in 1986.Footnote ⁹ This agreement permits the US military to remain on Kwajalein Atoll and has absolved the United States of financial liability dealing with nuclear damages in the ‘past, present, and future’.Footnote ¹⁰ Marshallese communities that have been the most impacted by nuclear testing and military activities, including the people of Bikini and Rongelap, were not in favour of the Compact because it takes away their relative autonomy to deal with the United States by instilling the state (RMI) as intermediary. The Compact can be read as a political tool of the United States as ‘imperial formation’, a term I borrow from Ann Laura Stoler. ‘Unlike empires’, Stoler writes, imperial formations ‘are processes of becoming, not fixed things. Not least, they are states of deferral that mete out promissory notes that are not exceptions to their operation, but constitutive of them: … trusteeships, delayed autonomy … military takeover in the name of humanitarian works, violent intervention in the name of human rights, and security measures in the name of peace.’Footnote ¹¹ Here, Stoler places ‘ruination’ as the work of ‘imperial formations’ that procure – through dispossession, decomposition, and dislocation – the inequitable and differential access to resources and rights of those colonized.

Radiation songs provide keys to reading the gendered politics of voice in US nuclear professionalism and the making of the modern nation-state, as part of imperial ruination. This politics can be understood in terms of vocal decay, or matrilineal dispossession, and state-based fraternal accumulation. As part of the secret studies conducted by US medical doctors, Rongelapese women (and men) were subjected to new intimacies that frequently broke taboos. For example, women were given gynaecological examinations and had to take three sanitizing baths a day while at Kwajalein (for three months) in front of their male relatives, which breaks the taboo in which relatives of different genders cannot see or even speak of bodily parts and processes that can be related to sex. Male scientists and doctors collected urine and blood samples, extracting the waste products of Marshallese human subjects to contemplate non-radioresistant organs and give insight into what large-scale exposure does to the human body by reworking the irradiated body. That is, through scientific procedure, they were able to ‘to listen into’ Marshallese bodies or make irradiation intelligible and quantifiable without qualitatively listening to hear Marshallese accounts of their bodies. In the process of reworking the body through scientific fragmentation, classification, and designation, societal relations were also reworked, forming new hierarchies that placed Marshallese male voices above women's voices, politically and socially.

In 1963, thyroid nodules started to show up in Marshallese who had been exposed to fallout. Within three years, fifteen of the twenty-two children present at Rongelap when Bravo was detonated (all of whom were under ten years of age) had developed nodules. After thyroid surgeries, women's voices were more noticeably lower than men's and fell out of their ‘gendered’ bounds. Cultural perceptions of gendered voices – and audible departures from them – emphasized vocal pathology as radiation pathology. These women were stigmatized and called ‘ribaaṃ’ (‘bombed people’). Rongelapese women explained how the thyroid surgeries impacted them, for instance:

In the Marshall Islands, voice – as a metaphor for political agency, identity, and freedom (of expression) – is rooted in and routed through the land and matrilineal custom. The editors of a book on traditional Marshallese medicine affirm that ‘in traditional Marshallese society, the ultimate voice was feminine, and inheritance of the land as well as power and authority rested with women. The female chief or lerooj, who was generally the sister of the chief held the ultimate authority; however, the administration of affairs was deferred to men with the understanding that all matters were to be consulted upon.’Footnote ¹⁴ The inheritance and care-taking of the land depended on learning how to listen to the land. Knowledge of the land, passed down in stories, songs, and chants, teaches Marshallese how to listen and concurrently about respect (for the land and lineage/elders). As Barbara Rose Johnson and Holly Barker explain, ‘in many cases, place-names represent the physical manifestations of social relationships over time. Land is inherited through family name and valued for its connections to future generations. The name of the land in itself can depict important events and relationships.’Footnote ¹⁵ If the ‘ultimate voice’ was once feminine in customary Marshallese culture, the US nuclear project, by wiping out all the sopranos (the prized feminine voice), devastated the feminine voice in its literal capacities and thus its capacities to harmonize in dynamic expression.

Thyroid nodules (and the scars that mark their surgical removal) can be read as nodes of rubble – a material sedimentation of nuclear destruction – that connects to the other nodes of rubble within a broader constellation of nuclear ruins. In performance, the singing voice amplifies these nodes of rubble through decay, acoustical roughness, and the breaking of harmonies. The corporeal fragmentation of a person is demarcated at the site of the throat, which is, in Marshallese cultural perceptions of the body, akin to the Western heart as the seal of the soul and emotions. It is also the site of consubstantial (spirited) interconnectedness that connects individual with human and non-human communities. Rongelapese musical performances amplify the node of rubble (the thyroid as surgically removed) by pointing to their inability to harmonize or sing at all as caused by thyroid issues or surgeries. Rongelapese women took occasion to point to their irradiated throats via vocal decay during songs that lyrically evoked their struggles with the US nuclear transparency.

When the Rongelapese returned home in 1957, they were not aware that scientists deemed the Marshall Islands (and their home atoll in particular) one of the most contaminated places on earth. They continued their subsistence-based lifestyle and began noticing ailments, such as thyroid nodules, burning sensations after eating, and, for women, reproductive complications and birth abnormalities. Throughout this time, they were monitored by the Atomic Energy Commission, and, eventually – armed with scientific data from Japanese scientists and their own observations – they petitioned the US government for help with relocation in 1985. Their request for help was denied, so the Rongelapese relied on Greenpeace and other Marshallese to relocate to a neighbouring island, Mejatto. Their relocation inspired the song, ‘Ta in Emokaj Aer Ba’ (‘What are they talking about?’), which described their plight on Rongelap for other Marshallese who came to help them. Their message, via song, also made its way to those in Majuro, the capital, where more people (including the government) could hear about their struggles with radiation and with the United States

‘Ta in Emokaj Aer Ba?’ depicts the confusion of Rongelapese as they are being forced to move from their atoll in 1985: ‘What are they talking about? What happened? They say we have to move from Rongelap Atoll because there are many dangers, we move. Because the computer (a Geiger counter) says, “there is too much plutonium – it's irradiated (radiation in us)”.’ The second verse adds a line about ‘177’, which refers to Section 177 of the Compact. This section outlines compensation for nuclear damages and has the Espousal Clause making it impossible for the United States to be held accountable for further damages, even though radiation is a generational problem. The third verse was always difficult to discern, and I could never get it translated. Instead, I was told that it is about the elders, their homeland, and inheritance. Here, the untranslatability of the third verse is juxtaposed with the clear messages of the first and second verse that share how imperial technologies – scientific (the Geiger counter) and political (Section 177) – become privileged ways of listening to the land and directing Marshallese movements.

The first time the Rongelapese women sang ‘Ta in eṃōkaj aer ba’ for me, I was unable to hear the lyrics or melody. About six women, along with Abacca Anjain-Maddison – the former Rongelapese senator who was helping translate – were sharing songs and stories at my request. They planned to sing a final song for our day of recording. For about four and a half minutes, the women spoke amongst themselves with the phrase, ‘computa ej ba eḷap an too much plu’, and then they would try to harmonize with each other. Unable to harmonize, they would stop singing and then try again until Abacca sensed my confusion. She offered: ‘Because they had thyroid operations, they are having problems with their voices … But they're trying. They're trying.’ Their attempt to sing a song that marks the insensible radioactive rubble that connects them with their land – this trying – works alongside the broader message of the song. The confusion marked by the questions and the subsumption of voice from the Native population to the Geiger counter – the scientific technology and tool that then speaks to the presence of nuclear rubble – are all part of the silencing of matrilineal means of empowerment and voice-based authority rooted in and routed through the land. Laurie Stras posits that, ‘the disrupted voice … is indicative of a passions, suffering, disease, malfunction, abnormality. We hear it, too, as the result of labour – the physical trace of an agent working on the body, a measure of the body's cumulative experience of extrinsic (environmental) or intrinsic (entropic) forces. Time and trauma take their toll on the voice.’Footnote ¹⁶ The material sediments of radiation, under the purview of the singers, were no longer insensible but rather shaped their bodily capacities and the formal existence of the song. This allows trauma to be heard in real time, through the struggle to use the voice.

Rongelapese women also shared their actualized voicelessness in performances of the song ‘Kajjitok in Aō Nan Kwe Kiiō’ (‘These are My Questions for You Now/Still’). ‘Kajjitok’ affirms the ongoing medical problems and silence of the scientific/medical community that has effaced Marshallese voices in health, healing, and self-care. The song petitions the Department of Energy (DOE) for answers to the medical complications experienced by the women. In 2008, Rongelapese musician and anti-nuclear activist Lijon wrote the song as a compilation of the questions she heard from Rongelapese women in the community that echoed her own. She shared concerns about how doctors would visit the Rongelapese community, ‘listen’ to their complaints, and issue them a clean bill of health – only for some of the women to end up back in the hospital a couple weeks later. The Rongelapese women wanted to share their concerns with the DOE, which was meeting with the RMI government. However, the women were denied access to the official space of the meeting, so Lijon composed the song as a form of entertainment. They threw the DOE a party and sang their song as a politically subversive move.

The song begins with a statement: ‘These are my questions for you now/still.’ The word ‘kiiō’ translates to both ‘now’ and ‘still’, intimating both the urgency of now and the import of the persistent problems and struggles the women face, as radioactive rubble continues to shape the rhythms, tenor, and texture of their daily lives. The statement is followed by the questions, such as ‘Why don't I have a dentist? A doctor for my lungs, my kidney, and my liver?’ ‘Can I please find meaning, so that I can find peace of mind? Because I might go insane not knowing.’ The song asks if there will be an end to taking medications and ends with an inquiry into whether the pills are damaging specific body parts: kidneys, brain, and heart. The lyrics speak to how, under the medical establishment, the body partitioned is the body watched, monitored, and studied – but not heard or healed. While data have been extracted and included in scientific studies that bring in financial gain and cultural capital for those in privileged positions to dictate the production of nuclear knowledge, the song gives insight into how the Rongelapese women are in physical pain and psychological distress.

The imperial debris of US corporate means of profit litters the song. For example, the women's days are punctuated by taking pills to survive without knowing the side effects or if the pills are helping more than hurting. The song asks if there will be an end to taking medications; this biomedical dependency, for life, can be understood in terms of accumulation of bodies for the pharmacological industry. Other notable lyrics emphasize the inability to sleep or be at peace (‘I might go insane without knowing’) without health consultations or information. The restrictions placed on the women that prevent them from being in dialogue with the DOE maintains the gendered hierarchy of power in the production of nuclear knowledge and health. This uneven power dynamic is part of the destructive constellation through which ruination is etched into bodies partitioned from themselves. It echoes too in vocal materiality, where voice becomes withheld in musical aphonia. Gordillo asserts, following Léopold Lambert:

Rubble, or the afterlife of nuclear destruction (as ruination), is reified in the institutionalized disintegration of bodies and matrilineal sociality. The physical embodiment of nuclear ruination manifests at a particularly poignant performance of ‘Kajjitok’ that took place at the 2009 Nuclear Victims and Survivors’ Remembrance Day (NVSRD), a national holiday held on 1 March to observe the Bravo event and aftermath, in Majuro. The conductor, Betty, would intermittently turn to the audience and point to body parts listed in the song, such as teeth. Then, about two minutes (halfway) into the song, the women's voices began to diminish. The audience began to clap, and Betty turned to them, shook her head and pointed to her throat – the location where many of the singers had a scar from thyroid operations. ‘Ah, tyroit!’ she exclaimed as she turned back to the women who were regaining their vocal momentum to finish the song. I had heard the women's voices go in and out of audibility while singing this song previously. Yet, I read this moment for its importance in amplifying women's recomposition amid nuclear ruins as temporal and processual – thus intimating ongoing expressive, political, and social ruination within the architectural design of the commemorative event, as part of the modern nation-state's calendar.

The Rongelapese women's voices unravelling, punctuated by Betty's vocalization (as intermediary herself), cut through diplomatic speech with a song inspired precisely because they were denied a voice at an official meeting. The singers threaded together the nodes of rubble by returning to their violated throats, the Marshallese site of interconnection and consubstantiality and the US locus of invasion, medical mining, and radiological study as part of imperial profit-making. From Betty's reaction, it was clear that we – the audience members – did not know how to listen to or hear the Rongelapese performers. Our ears, like the commemorative holiday that exists as one day isolated from many punctuated by removals, scientific technologies (e.g., Geiger counter, pharmacological medications), and sleepless nights, can be read as part of the rubble, for they have been designed within the processes of imperial ruination that value scientific and modern intermediaries.