B R U N A was pleased to host the first public presentation of the poet BRANDON Shimoda’s Hiroshima Library during August, September, and October 2019. The library was available to the public through an array of activities, among them, vigils for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a film screening, a reading and book launch, a children’s storytime hour, and a public lecture. Opening cultural, literary, and historical questions thrust into consciousness by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which extinguished over 225,000 lives nearly 74 years ago, the Hiroshima Library and its accompanying events program, co-developed with local organizations, invited new relationships with the unfathomable, unconscionable events of 1945.
The Hiroshima Library is an itinerant, sometimes spontaneous, often undisclosed collection of books on the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and their ongoing afterlives, as well as the environments and situations in which the collection either publicly or privately exists. The collection consists of hibakusha testimonies, history and journalism, art and photography, poetry, novels, graphic novels and comic books, art and literary criticism, theory, politics, science, and also contributions by the communities in which it appears. It is inspired, in part, by the Rest House in the Peace Memorial Park in Hiroshima; the ice cream vendor in the Hypocenter Park in Nagasaki; the reading areas in the MRT stations in Kaohsiung, Taiwan; abandoned gas stations and strip malls throughout the United States and Japan; as well as mundane, workaday spaces adjacent to catastrophic life, which occupy a frequency between communal mourning and melancholy, private refreshment, and idle and free associative learning, and into which an individual (passerby, tourist, wanderer, child), motivated by an aimless yet open curiosity, might enter and, for a moment, disappear.
The collection was first conceived in 1988 when Shimoda received, as a gift from his parents, a copy of Keiji Nakazawa’s manga, I Saw It: The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima: A Survivor’s True Story (English translation, 1982). That same year he visited, for the first time, the city of Hiroshima. He was ten years old.
About BRANDON Shimoda
BRANDON Shimoda is the author of six books of poetry, most recently The Desert (Song Cave, 2018) and Evening Oracle (Letter Machine Editions, 2016), which received the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. His first book of nonfiction, an ancestral memoir called The Grave on the Wall, is new from City Lights Books. His writings on Japanese-American incarceration have appeared in/on The Asian American Literary Review, Densho, Hyperallergic, The Margins, and The New Inquiry, and he has given talks on the subject at the University of Arizona, Columbia University, Fairhaven College, and the International Center of Photography. He is also the co-editor, with Thom Donovan, of To look at the sea is to become what one is: An Etel Adnan Reader (Nightboat Books, 2014). Born in the San Fernando Valley, California, he lives, for now, in Tucson, AZ.
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This project was made possible in part by the generous support of the Whatcom Community Foundation and fiscal sponsorship from the Whatcom Human Rights Task Force.
Community partners include the Bellingham Public Library, Pickford Film Center, Whatcom Human Rights Task Force, and the Whatcom Peace & Justice Center.