In her work, Hiroshima and the Inheritance of Trauma, Sarah Stillman follows the family of Sabath, a granddaughter to the eighty eight year old Shoji who survived the attack years back. For years, Shoji has gone through many traumatic episodes ranging from fear to nightmares. From the time she experienced the bomb to her old age she had a number of difficult moments in life when her inside seemed like giving up on her. These issues come to haunt her granddaughter, Sabath after she learnt of the Hiroshima nuclar bomb attack while visiting Japan’s Peace Park. “Each time she saw a plane in the air, she panicked, just as her grandmother continued to.” Stillman’s main claim is Trauma is a contagious disease that affects people related to the person that experience the trauma.
This seems to be proved by some of the researches and reports that have been carried out on a number of relatives of people who became victims of trauma. Studies have shown that there is evidence of related trauma in people closely related to the survivors of the Holocaust, American and Croatian war veterans. These findings seem to be in line with Sarah’s claim. The families of traumatized person experience trauma and it may go down the line for years. For example in Sabath’s case; she was born many years after her grandmother had survived the bombing but still experiences the same symptoms just her grandmother.
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Relating to Yoshino’s essay on covering, Sarah’s story on the family of Shoji tries to bring out the burdens which the survivors and their families have to carry; hide their identity at all costs. As she puts it, “the hibakusha (survivors) was not an honorific thing but a source of shame, a secret to be closely held.” All this was because of fear of how the community will see them, with the perception that there might be segregation due to the perceived genetic changes. They have to live low, not being able to freely talk about their experiences, something Yoshino strongly disputes in. When Shoji travels back to Japan, to receive treatment as decreed by the Japanese government, she met fellow survivors. They were a community of the hibakusha and could freely talk about their experiences of the bomb and life after. She felt way better, psychologically relieved. And as a result she decided to talk about her experiences. Probably, bringing people who have survived similar catastrophes could be a way of helping them heal quicker, just as with Shoji’s case.
Reference
Stillman, S. (2014). Hiroshima and the Inheritance of Trauma. The New Yorker . Accessed November 8, 2016 at: http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/hiroshima-inheritance-trauma
