How “Natives” Drink. Bravo Shots, For Example: Mourning and Nuclear Kitsch

Between 1946 and 1958, the United States tested sixty-seven nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands, the largest of which was the “Bravo Shot” at Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954. In the intervening years, the historical memory of that legacy has largely been reduced to a case of perpetrator and victim. Yet there is also an undercurrent of lowbrow discourse and nuclear kitsch, as well as questionable stewardship of the nuclear question, in and around contemporary Marshallese society, notably effected by prominent members of the American expatriate community. The “Bravo Shot,” to take but one example, is now available as an alcoholic drink at the airport bar in the nation’s capital. This paper considers the ways in which kitsch interferes with the work of mourning, and calls into question the ethical responsibility of a popular social imaginary that either rationalizes or willfully ignores problematic political decisions, such as ordering Bravo Shots at the bar, and thereby perpetrates violence against those whose very memory is at stake.

“The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.”’

—Cicero

The next time you are in the airport in Majuro, the capital atoll of the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), stop in at the Hangar Bar and get yourself a Bravo Shot. For $4.50, you get a shot made of one-third Cointreau, one-third Kahlua, and one-third Baileys. The layered drink, which has been around since the opening of the bar in 2006, should be familiar to mixologists and drinkers more commonly as a B-52, providing a fitting pedigree for the Bravo Shot since the actual B-52 Stratofortress was designed specifically to carry an atomic payload. It was a B-52 that dropped a bomb on Bikini Atoll during Operation Cherokee in 1956, two years after the Bravo detonation. Alternatively, if you find yourself with some time to kill in Majuro around March 1, during the national holiday commemorating the Bravo test of March 1, 1954, in which the US dropped its first thermonuclear hydrogen bomb with a yield equivalent to fifteen megatons of TNT (Lindqvist 136), you can also head over to the Flame Tree, a local bar and restaurant that features Friday Shots as part of their “Nuclear Survivors’ Special” (see Fig. 1). Who wouldn’t need a drink after surviving a nuclear explosion?¹

Fig. 1.

Nuclear Survivors’ Drink Special advertisement in the Marshall Islands Journal.

Used by permission. Courtesy of the Marshall Islands Journal.

If drinking isn’t your thing, you can always read the local paper, the Marshall Islands Journal, which reported on student activities during the 2012 March 1 holiday with the title “Students Have Explosive Day.” And then there’s the crossword, “The RMI Riddle,” which occasionally recycles clues like 3-Down from puzzle number 376 on December 12, 2011: “Yippee for bomb!” (Hint: it’s five letters.) Those familiar with the history of nuclear testing by the United States in the Marshall Islands will be reminded by 3-Down of the title of Holly Barker’s book, Bravo for the Marshallese, in which she explains that she chose the title

for two reasons. First, I want to document how the Bravo test … and the U.S. nuclear weapons testing program fundamentally altered the health, environment, language, economy, politics, and social organization of the Marshall Islands. Second, I want readers to know the Marshallese not as helpless victims rendered powerless by the events that took place in their land, but as the fighters and advocates for their communities they are.

(xiii)

She goes on to explain, somewhat condescendingly, that “The Marshallese people deserve praise (bravo!) for the ways they resist” the U.S. government today. But who is conferring this praise and how does the polysemous character of the word “bravo” act in this context? Does appropriating the name of the most devastating test in this way diminish the terror and violence of colonization and nuclear weapons that are also conjured up by this name? There seems to be a third interpretation of...