04/11/2024
Hiroshima Mon Amour. I was introduced to this cinematic masterpiece in my late 20’s by my then partner, a filmmaker, and was mesmerized by it.
Little did I know that not long after I would meet a Japanese man and have a daughter with him and some 30 years later I would travel to Japan and visit Hiroshima…
Fast travel through time and space and half way around the world and I am back in Costa Rica. My physical body is, but my mind is still savouring, still processing so many impressions, still lingering in Hiroshima.
As I came out of the Peace Memorial Museum I was mute from the emotional impact and somehow in slowmotion followed the way through the park past the monument, the eternal flame, past the children’s monument and to the Atomic Bomb Dome, the only structure left standing where the first atomic bomb exploded on 6th August 1945.
To then ponder by the riverside on the horror of what took place there and so many futile other horrors that continue to take place in the world.
The river has kept flowing and around the city are the mountains like silent sentinels watching over the city. Six branches of the river Ōta flow through the city (giving it its name City of Water) culminating in the bay of Hiroshima with its numerous islands.
Today, after its total reconstruction, this city has a lightness, a sense of spaciousness about it. At least for me the perceiver those days, I enjoyed the wide avenues, the parks and trees, the people on their bikes, the water, mountains, the tram, the breezes from the ocean.
I ponder on the theme of memory in the film Hiroshima Mon Amour.
What does it mean to remember?
How our understanding of the past is often limited. What is the relationship between memory and time? A memory can indeed be like a scar, a permanent marking of a moment of past trauma.
I think about taboo’s, forbidden loves, I think about my grandmother. Yes it is sometimes as horrible to forget as it is to remember? Our past can haunt our present and mostly we are not so well equipped to deal with it.
And yet trauma can lead to rebirth as we can see so well in nature. Nature is our great teacher.