Response to Aftershocks

 Posted by Sofia Berinstein on March 13, 2012
Mar 132012
 

Reading the recalled memories of the moment of the earthquake, I feel the only way to react is to tell another story. There is very little here to interpret or question, and I wish that I had my own story to tell to convey my understanding. I’ve never experienced an earthquake, not a tornado or a flood. Heavy snow, tropical storms are really the only natural ferocity that I’ve ever experienced, but these things were not accompanied by fear. I want to understand what the fear of a an earthquake is, but I feel too distant from the emotions of the storytellers to understand fully. 

In some ways the tone of the stories remind me of the narratives I would hear in the weeks and months that followed 9/11. During the time of the disaster I felt very disturbed at the incoherence of the responses from my peers and the way in which the events of the day did’t yet have names. Because of this namelessness, we couldn’t speak to each other with the shared understanding in which we alway had spoken about second hand disasters. The storytelling was of course a process of constructing the names and contexts of that we needed to communicate about the situation. It seems that this collection of stories of the 3/11 earthquake is a similar attempt to build shared understanding. It also may bear some resemblances to that memory of mine because the nature of the disaster was multiple catastrophes, as was 9/11.

Thus, it seems like this collection is most meaningful to those who survived or had concurrent experiences either in Japan or with other earthquakes. There isn’t any form more powerful that the sharing of personal stories in order to understand a disaster. I am struck by the universality of this form of communication, as well as the honesty to the fact that this is the scale on which it is experienced and comprehended, by the emotions first, and the communication and absorbition of media second.

A question for me is In what ways is this form of storytelling universal? What similarities exist between modes of recounting disaster in order to build it a cultural context and identity?