Rewriting the Disaster: Body-Bagged Earthworks, Postmortem Landscapes, and the De-Scription of Fukushima

Abstract

This photo essay is inspired by Blanchot’s (1995) The Writing of the Disaster, especially the book’s sensitivity to the self-effacing double movement of writing as a violent inscription that brutally “de-scribes,” and Derrida’s (2010) Athens, Still Remains, which revolves around a series of photographic stills or snapshots and the polysemic phrase “nous nous devons à la mort” (we owe ourselves, or we owe one another, or we owe each other to death; or else up until death; or even to Death personified). The photo essay de-scribes (sic), through ill-said words and ill-seen images, my experience of Fukushima Prefecture in the wake of the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster (often dubbed Japan’s 3/11), and the remedial redescription thereafter, during a journey through the Prefecture in July 2017.