Poetic disaster narratives: “Blood Dazzler” and “Tsunami vs. the Fukushima 50”

Patricia Smith

Back in Issue 1 of The Lawrentian this year, Annabella Dlugi wrote an article on Patricia Smith’s poem “34.” (If you haven’t read it, please go back and read it!) That article, along with the fact that Patricia Smith’s book “Blood Dazzler” is one of our new First-Year Studies books, really inspired me to look at more of the poems from that book.

Photos Provided by Academy of American Poets.

And when I did? I was enthralled, because I was immediately reminded of a poetry book that I read last summer called “Tsunami vs. the Fukushima 50” by Lee Ann Roripaugh. Both are incredible collections of poetry surrounding two historic natural disasters. For Smith’s book “Blood Dazzler,” the poems surround Hurricane Katrina and for “Tsunami vs. the Fukushima 50,” it’s the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan and the subsequent Fukushima nuclear accident.

Both authors deal with these natural disasters and the humanitarian crises that followed in a very similar way: the personification of the disasters.

We meet Hurricane Katrina as a personification in the first official poem of “Blood Dazzler,” after the prologue: “5 P.M., Tuesday, August 23, 2005.” This poem tracks the “birth,” so to speak, of Hurricane Katrina and contains an epigraph from the National Hurricane Center describing how an Air Force reserve unit noticed a broad low pressure area that had become organized enough to be classified as Tropical Depression 12. Katrina herself has things to say about this: “…How dare / the water belittle my thirst, treat me as just / another / small / disturbance.” Katrina, as Smith has defined her, is a woman full of rage and anger.

Meanwhile, in the first poem in “Tsunami vs the Fukushima 50,” called “ontology of tsunami,” Roripaugh categorizes the tsunami this way: “tsunami has no name / call her the scalded splash / of tea jarred from / a broken cup’s cracked glaze” and “call her the blood-soaked shirt / and cutaway pants / pooled ruby on the floor rising biohazard.” Tsunamis, unlike hurricanes, are not assigned names when they form. Regardless of this fact, it does not stop Roripaugh from also assigning this phenomenon a gender, just like Katrina, of “she.”

This dual perspective of disasters as being personified into women is enough for me to want to write an academic paper on by itself. I will spare you all from that, but I will not spare you from my own ill-formed thoughts. This juxtaposition of womanhood and the two natural disasters is an uncomfortable one in the same way that a truly violent woman is uncomfortable. How many times in media of all forms have we seen a woman taken and smoothed around the edges until they fit a certain mold? There’s a reason there’s been this sudden internet desire to define “true” female rage. This idea of uncomfortable, engendered rage permeates both books while still allowing these disasters to be seen as the massive tragedies that they were.

Outside of the personification of the hurricane and the tsunami, these books share something else in common. They tell the stories of those who were caught up in these disasters.

One particularly striking poem from Smith in this style is “Ethel’s Sestina.” Herbert Freeman had assured his mother that help was on the way. It never came and he was forced to leave her dead body behind, where it sat for days outside of the New Orleans Convention Center. This poem is told from Ethel’s perspective and gives us an idea of her last moments: “Ain’t but one power make me leave my son. / I can’t wait, Herbert. Lawd knows I can’t wait. / Don’t cry, boy, I ain’t in that chair no more.” It’s a truly emotional poem and one that doesn’t shy away from the horrors of what happened in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. But it’s also one that provides this sense of hope. A light in the darkness moving forward.

Similarly striking is Roripaugh’s “radioactive man,” which tells the story of one man who stayed behind after the nuclear reactor meltdown in Fukushima following the tsunami to take care of the animals that had been abandoned. The poem opens with the man talking about why he is called the radioactive man. According to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, he had the highest radiation levels in anyone they had ever screened. Later, he says, “sometimes I think of visiting / my two kids, who live / with my ex-wife in Tokyo, / but then I remind myself / of the invisible dust coated / in cesium particles that’s in / my clothes, my hair, my skin.” Once again, we see a poem that shows the tragedy of the situation at hand — and there’s no avoiding that. But we also see this little bit of hope — a man willing to stay behind to tend to otherwise abandoned and hopeless animals.

Both of these poetry collections are incredible reads with rich themes and incredible imagery. I highly recommend them both.

As a final thought, I wonder why we have a tendency to do this as people? To personify these natural disasters that devastate our lives? Is it a way that we can cope with it in a way that is not so immediate? Do we include these stories of real people in the midst of the chaos to remind us of our own humanity in the face of these situations? As the world and the weather get crazier and crazier, I hope that we continue to find hope and love and continue to express them in the ways only we can.