It was early morning in the late fall of 2014, my  friend Emily asked me if I wanted coffee, and if so, did I want her maternal or paternal grandmother’s recipe. It was about 6 AM, I had spent the entire previous day and night at a checkpoint trying to get in to Ramallah, and completely unsure of how to answer that question. She looked at my silence with pity and then announced: We will have my maternal grandmother’s coffee. I watched and listened to her as she proceeded to talk to me about how this coffee had to be made to her grandmother’s specifications. She helped me imagine the entire process and the materials used by her grandmother: the coffee grounds, the cardamom, the length of the boil, then the waiting, the number and duration of the re-boils, the bubbles, their color, and the aroma.

Earlier that month my sister snap chat an image of a cappuccino and sent it to my other sister. Waste of digital space, I told her. After 10 seconds it disappears, she retorted. This is ridiculous; I bet no one but my sisters use this silly app, I thought to myself. Turns out, I was wrong: over 60% of US 13-34-year-old smart phone users, use snap chat. Also, now snap chat keeps your image or video for up to 24 hours, allowing you a full day within which you might calibrate your own recollection time. Choosing how to recollect within a 24-hour experience seems to be positioned as a very long time in this 13-34-year-old statistic.

In my experience, how we recollect has never been something we have been able to calibrate. Over 20 years ago in Karachi, I heard a bullet go into a body and the body fall to the ground. I could smell the blood and gunshot residue. I watched as a pool of blood slowly fought its way into focus through the dust and dirt on the surface of the ground next to the car I was hiding behind. I must have been crouched behind that car for less than 10 seconds, looking at the blood pool for what felt like 500 years.  My friend and I went back to the spot less than 24 hours later in an effort to try to understand what had happened; there was a fruit vendor selling fruit at the spot in front of the cafe, and there were no visible traces left of the blood, the body, or the gun residue. We stood outside the cafe feeling slightly uncertain of ourselves, decided to order a Nescafe, got back into the car, and silently drove away.

Mamhoud Darwish starts his prose poem, Memory for Forgetfulness. August, Beirut, 1982, with dreaming and waking up to only be in a nightmare of war. As he tries to push toward dawn, he evokes the desire for coffee:

I want the aroma of coffee. I want nothing more than the aroma of coffee. And I want nothing more from the passing days than the aroma of coffee. The aroma of coffee so I can hold myself together, stand on my feet, and be transformed from something that crawls, into a human being. The aroma of coffee so I can stand my share of this dawn up on its feet. So that we can go together, this day and I, down into the street in search of another place.

How can I diffuse the aroma of coffee into my cells, while shells from the sea rain down on the sea-facing kitchen, spreading the stink of gunpowder and the taste of nothingness? I measure the period between two shells. One second. One second: shorter than the time between breathing in and breathing out, between two heartbeats. One second is not long enough for me to stand before the stove by the glass facade that overlooks the sea. One second is not long enough to open the water bottle or pour the water into the coffee pot. One second is not long enough to light a match. But one second is long enough for me to burn.

As Emily made me coffee that morning, and the mornings that followed, I noticed that every day I felt I was getting to know her family. The making of coffee as a form of hospitality is one that, in its process, builds relationships. Every morning I would hear stories or even just an aside, that linked her to the coffee grounds, to the practice of boiling, to the copper vessel, and to the sensory impact of the aroma of coffee.  I know how significant the everydayness of that exercise was for me in those days in order to ensure some feeling of safety and security. It was as if coffee attested to an insistence of sheer existence – as ephemeral as it may feel in a space of constant violence. Knowing you can have your coffee in the morning makes one feel normal. I began to recognize echoes of particular slivers of time in Karachi, Iraq, and Ramallah during times of violence and how they deposited in layers atop one another in my memory and recollection. I began to understand the experience of a war that I did not witness but gleaned an insight to through prose-poetry.

I want the aroma of coffee. I need five minutes. I want a five-minute truce for the sake of coffee. I have no personal wish other than to make a cup of coffee. With this madness I define my task and my aim. All my senses are on their mark, ready at the call to propel my thirst in the direction of the one and only goal: coffee.  (Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness August, Beirut, 1982)

The link between coffee and poetry in the Middle East is not a light and frothy matter. Quite the contrary: it is the root of statecraft, politics, and links to landscape. In my current work in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), I have been utilizing poetics as a way to encounter unfamiliar landscapes. The use of art, poetry, and literature to learn about a history of a place is not a usual methodology for archaeologists, but my usual training led me towards silent landscapes – and it has only been through art and poetry that the landscape has opened up to me. In Nabati Poetry: The Oral Poetry of Arabia, Saad Abdullah Sowayan discusses the manners in which poets engage themselves in some labor or crafting to aid in composition… or they make coffee. Sowayan goes on to discuss in detail the rituals in composition of both coffee and poetry: “The way a man makes his coffee is his numas, since it reflects his nimbleness, alertness, composure, tact, and taste. A man takes as much pride in his coffee making as he does in his poetic composition.” (1985: 96) This link between masculinity and the making of coffee is something that Darwish reflects upon as well, as he describes the interstitial moments of boiling: Swelling and breaking, they’re thirsty and ready to swallow two spoonfuls of coarse sugar, which no sooner penetrates than the bubbles calm down to a quiet hiss, only to sizzle again in a cry for a substance that is none other than the coffee itself—a flashy rooster of aroma and Eastern masculinity. Masculinity is, of course, far more complicated than coffee, but these claims and links make Emily’s grandmother’s recipes all the more significant and reflective of intersectional politics within the fleeting moment of dawn.

Over 15 years ago, another dawn in a different place and pushed into a different time, I stood with my friends Praveena and Peter on the Iron Age mound at Gilund (Rajasthan, India) and they pointed to various spaces in the trench and spoke of ephemeral layers. They had called me over from my trench to talk through what an approach to excavating ephemerality might be. We stood for a while talking about how we had no idea what to do with these layers. We must have stood there a bit longer than our director liked because he walked over. He took one look at it, looked at us, and then said: document it and keep digging until you find a floor or a wall, then call me. We all nodded at his wisdom and got back to work.

I don’t remember much about what I dug up during that season (I think I was working on a wall), but I do remember the ephemerality of the Iron Age mound. It was not a trench I worked in or on, nor had I experienced its time or the effort to reconstruct human events – but in its ephemerality it left a long lasting image within layers of my memory.

I also still remember the rose in cappuccino foam.

All images copyright by Pablo Figueroa.

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Inside the Fukushima Exclusion Zone: Place and Memory after Disaster

by Pablo Figueroa

FROM BEHIND THE WINDSHIELD of the moving car the landscape looks exuberant, unpolluted. Warm morning sunlight bathes the forest to the side of Tomioka highway, a 69 km stretch of pavement also known as National Road 114 that connects Fukushima with the town of Namie. It’s a Sunday morning and few people can be seen. The feeling of emptiness is vast and real. From time to time, large plastic bags appear along the road, neatly stacked one on top of the other. The orderly layout obliterates a much more messy reality: The bags contain highly radioactive soil that was removed from villages and fields during the so-called “cleanup efforts” following the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Their final destination undecided, the ominous recipients are a painful reminder of what happens when trying to decontaminate the environment after a nuclear catastrophe. You can scrape topsoil and wash the surface with pressure hoses as much as you like but Cesium-137, which has a half-life of 30 years, will keep coming down from hills along with other radioactive isotopes, carried by rain and wind, dispersing in manifold and uncontrollable ways.

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I have been to this part of Japan for ethnographic fieldwork before, but never to Namie Town. In April 2011, the government declared a 20km radius from the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant an exclusion zone, and Namie fell into this perimeter. Without a permit issued by the Town Hall, people cannot go through the checkposts. Police zealously custody the almost empty towns. The authorities are fed up with thieves, journalists, and other trespassers. Defying this ban can lead to fines and imprisonment.

We are three occupants in the car. One of them, Yosuke Kinoshita (This is not his real name, for privacy reasons I am using a pseudonym) is originally from Namie. Namie—like other neighboring villages—became deserted due to forced evacuation (local residents were told to escape but not why; they did not know where to go, or how long they would be away).  Because his family house is located within the no-go zone, he is allowed permission to enter for a few hours at a time, in order to visit the abandoned property. The officials at the checkpoint, wearing gloves, masks and helmets, inspect our documents, IDs, and open the gate letting us into the forbidden zone.

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We drive through town. It is odd that the traffic lights are working when there are no vehicles. There is nobody around, either. The scenes in front of us testify that time in Namie has stopped. In the turmoil of earthquake, tsunami, and evacuation, bicycles and cars were left abandoned; shops remain untouched after owners were forced to escape. And then, during the days to come, hydrogen explosions at the stricken reactors emitted an invisible blanket of radiation that silently and tragically covered Namie.

I get off the car at the main street to snap a few photos when suddenly police stop us. We are questioned at large. Why are we carrying cameras? What are we doing here? Are we journalists trying to pass as visitors? This treatment somehow puzzles me; as officers trying to enforce the law, their reaction is perhaps understandable but seems out of proportion. If criminal actions are to be found, it is surely among people and organizations that privileged their own self-interest rather than protecting public wellbeing.

Once cleared out, our trip continues and we head to the Kinoshita’s household.  We get off the car wearing gloves and facemasks although we know they offer little protection against radiation. The aerial levels of radiation are supposed to be lower than the standard required by the Japanese government for decontamination—so we are told—but there is reason to believe there might be undetected hot spots (In addition, whether the official readings of radiation can be trusted, is a matter of dispute). We follow Kinoshita through the rubble in the garden and into the falling house. The construction is badly deteriorated.  “It’s worse every time I come”, he says. “The floor is rotten. Watch your step.”

He guides us into the living room, kitchen, and other sections of the house. Objects lie all around exactly as they fell after the earthquake four years ago: family photographs, furniture, a TV set, golf clubs, kitchen utensils. I look into Kinoshita’s eyes; they look sad and pensive. A long silence falls upon us and I can’t help but imagine the tranquil life his parents must have led in this idyllic place before becoming nuclear evacuees.

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Later on we go to the coast, where the tsunami washed away the entire lower part of town, getting as far as two kilometers inland. The debris has been cleared out and is now placed in designated dumpsites. At the port of Ukedo I climb up a wall facing the beach. The silhouette of Fukushima Daiichi, which I have seen uncountable times on photographs and videos, appears in the distance, the reactors enshrouded in a heat haze. Waves break in the shore while seagulls plunge into the water, oblivious to the massive amount of radioactive water that is spilled everyday into this striking ocean. Here stands a monument to institutional failure, to corporate irresponsibility, a truly Man-Made Disaster, framed into a beautiful postcard-like image. Fukushima Daiichi is such a perfect metaphor of the human condition at the Capitalocene.

I sit and silently weep. This unexpected release of emotion makes me momentarily void of thoughts. The only feeling that remains is awe of the deep-blue sea in front of me.

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The socioanthropological contribution to society in times of disaster is surely limited; no amount of ethnographic writing can ever fix a human tragedy in a measurable way. The pre-existing social fabric of Namie (and Fukushima) has ceased to exist, never to be recovered. Almost five years on, the future of hundreds of thousands of evacuees remains uncertain. And yet, people of Fukushima want to have their stories told. As anthropologists, it is our job and our mission to tell those stories in a meaningful way.

In the official discourse, Japan is fine, Fukushima is fine, nuclear power is fine, and the affected people are fine. Almost five years on, the victims of nuclear power remain, in a way, victims. The tragedy was imposed on them. Their voices have not been heard; rather, people’s notions of place and memory have been subsumed into an official discourse crafted by a state narrative.

Just days after the Fukushima disaster Nobel laureate Oe Kenzaburo wrote, “Once again we must look at things through the eyes of the victims of nuclear power, of the men and the women who have proved their courage through suffering. The lesson that we learn from the current disaster will depend on whether those who survive it resolve not to repeat their mistakes.” (See, Oe Kenzaburo, History Repeats. The New Yorker. March 28, 2011. Link.)

This is something the Japanese government, the nuclear sector, and society as a whole should learn from.

After decades of well-documented, prominent cases of memory distortion, people whose professions put a premium on facts and truth—journalists, politicians, business leaders, judges, lawyers, and public figures—should be aware of these limits. In fact, they have a responsibility to understand the fallibility of their memories and to take steps to minimize memory mistakes. If you are relying exclusively on your own memory when saying anything of consequence, especially when someone’s reputation is at stake, you must think twice.

I especially like the point that our most vivid and frequently recalled memories may be the most subject to distortion because “each recounting has the potential to introduce new distortions.” Worth keeping in mind!