The Power of Words

Making metaphors is easy. At least when you’re an English teacher and you pepper all your feedback with niceties; you dust all your encounters with layers of connotations; you dissect intentions innately, holding filaments discretely in the tweezer-hold of linguistics and carefully gliding them into the light. I’m certainly not suggesting I fold every paper I receive into a dainty origami. Nor do I sand wood down until corners transform into smooth arches, or bury cars one snowflake at a time. Yet I am overcome by the power of language. To change. To heal. To accuse. To minimize. To justify. To exploit.

About two years ago, I crawled slowly through the galleries of the peace museum in Hiroshima on a cold February day. In a numb state of bewilderment I absorbed photographs of houses obliterated into nothingness, tiny melted shoes, subtitled documentaries of siblings lost, drooping spoons found beside plates of food unfinished, outlines of vaporized people blasted into cement walls, and factual displays outlining horrific side effects of radiation poisoning. With each memoir, I felt tides drag me deeper into a muddled sea of loss, guilt, and helplessness. Before me, the sores of humanity lay raw and oozing; I felt incapable of even swatting the metaphorical flies away.

After I finished wandering the main gallery, I decided to peruse the lobby’s basement, an exhibit of misfit items, while I waited for my friends. I found a wall of crayon drawings that resembled children’s doodles. I soon discovered these rudimentary sketches were painfully etched by the wobbly hands of old men and women, years after the atomic bomb incinerated sisters, bosses, mothers, sons. They were snapshots of unspeakable horrors, representations of nightmares, of realities.

I edged down the line. The only other person in the room was an elderly Japanese man. He too shuffled from picture to picture. From time to time, he let out a low moan and muttered to himself in Japanese. Every few pictures, our eyes met. Mine questioned the man: Did he lose someone? Did he see that infamous cloud? Was he one of the distraught kids ushered out of tottering buildings? Or was he lucky enough to be on foreign soil? Could he be old enough to have fought in the war? Would he fight again? His damp wrinkled eyes merely smiled at me knowingly. I nodded and averted my eyes, refocusing on the stick figures’ tears. My own tear ducts stoically sealed, awaiting solitude.

When I reached the corner I allowed myself to glance around the spacious hall. A few haphazard cases in the center beckoned me with their dim florescent lights. Beneath the beams I discovered newspaper clippings from August 6, 1945. Familiar images greeted me, mushroom clouds ballooning out of cover creases. I skimmed text that relayed known statistics. And then I saw the headline, the one that broke me. It was from an American paper: “Giant Golf Ball Dropped on Japan.”

The crayon depictions? Just reminders of another day on the greens. That man with charred skin? You could say his day was equivalent to a few strokes over par.

I staggered to a bench, emotions cascading from my eyes. For a few moments I floundered between pity, responsibility, shame, and anger. Images swirled at the forefront of my mind. I shut my eyes, attempting to regain equilibrium. Then I felt someone take my hands. I looked up into the face of a man whose country suffered at the hands of my own. I looked directly into his eyes as he spoke reassuringly to me in calm Japanese. His grip tightened as he continued his speech. Slowly my breathing settled and my shoulders stopped heaving. I found my lips muttering in apology, in appreciation, in understanding. Eventually, I rose and we parted.

To this day, his words are as illusive to me as I am sure mine were to him. Yet I am certain that on that afternoon, sitting on a stone bench in a deserted museum basement, we made a vow of peace and responsibility.

It is now over two years later. I sit at my desk in Uganda and scroll through digital headlines of radiation leaks, tsunami evacuees, beaches lined with hundreds of bodies, and vanished trains. Thousands of miles away. The images look nothing like the Japan I traveled. I skim the pictures and do not find his face. My eyes go back to the headlines. Again I find myself wondering at the words and at their power. Is the media amplifying aftershocks? Is anyone tipping the figurative caddy this time? Or instead, are words lifting the rubble, one piece of plywood at a time?