"From 1946 through 1958, the United States used the islands in the western Pacific as a test site for nuclear weapons. The most devastating of these, a hydrogen bomb code-named Castle Bravo, was detonated on March 1, 1954, on Bikini Atoll. Castle Bravo was about 1,000 times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the fallout sickened people living on the neighboring atolls of Rongelap, Rongerik and Utirik. The islanders were given no advance warning, and were not evacuated until several days later.
Intrigued by a Bikinian song of mourning that made reference to nuclear testing and its fallout, both figurative and literal, she contacted the liaison between the U.S. government and the Bikinian people. He encouraged her to come and listen to the inhabitants’ songs in person.
Not long after that conversation, Schwartz relocated to the Marshall Islands, where she spent two years conducting the research that became her dissertation, “Resonances of the Atomic Age: Hearing the Nuclear Legacy in the United States and the Marshall Islands, 1945–2010.”
Schwartz’s scholarship focuses on how different communities throughout the Marshall Islands were affected by the nuclear tests. The people of Rongelap, for example, suffered radiation poisoning after the initial blast and again after they returned to their still-contaminated island in 1957. Rongelap, just 75 miles from Bikini Atoll, is uninhabitable to this day. Its people were evacuated again in 1985, and are now scattered throughout the Marshall Islands as well as parts of the United States.
In her research, Schwartz explores how Marshallese communities engage with their nuclear legacy through song as well as through silence. Many of the songs that they sing address the detonation of Castle Bravo and its aftermath, including their exile from their homeland and the battery of medical tests they have endured at the hands of U.S. doctors. And when they are unable to hit the right notes as they sing, some will gesture to their throats and blame their damaged thyroids.
Marshallese folk songs may seem like a far cry from the punk music that originally sparked Schwartz’s interest in musicology. But she sees parallels in terms of the ways that people express the feeling that their stories have been silenced."
READ MORE: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/stories/uclas-professor-of-punk
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