Abstract
The secret city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee was a Cold War era nuclear production site for the Manhattan Project, enriching much of the uranium for Little Boy, the bomb that would destroy Hiroshima. It was a planned community that was home to author Lindsey Freeman’s mother and grandparents and became a special refuge for young Freeman who grew up in a neighbouring town and would visit for weeks at a time in the summer and on holidays. Her childhood entwines so deeply with the atomic that this political and scientific history begins to synthesize with the author’s own, asking where the bomb starts and Freeman ends. This Atom Bomb in Me is a memoir of growing up with the bomb, a work of auto-theory that shows how memories irradiate much like the nuclear, extending beyond the event to stalk the present.
Freeman’s writing liberates traditional academic prose, disposing of objectivity and cool language to ‘follow a different path’ that uses ‘imperfect data’ to craft her method, formed by Oak Ridge and involving the people in her life, her mother, her grandparents, her brother (p. 7). This complex creates what she terms the ‘atomic sensorium’, not simply a matter of place or places, such as the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) or the Y-12 National Security Complex (institutions that remain key to the maintenance of the US arsenal), but a nuclear effect that saturates the city, infuses the lakes and rivers, lives in the grass, and pulses through the author’s very body, indeed in her writing. Freeman delivers the sensorium by converging the genre of ‘sociological poetry’ – a term coined by C. Wright Mills (1961) to praise James Agee’s (2001) ‘participant observation’ for revealing both fact and human meaning in the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941) – with the ‘active experimental poetics’ of Fred Moten’s ‘critical poetry’ (Moten, 2017: 7–10). It strikes me as though a reader trained in traditional forms of scholarly reading might at first resist Freeman’s strategy. For instance, I found myself flipping backwards for a table of contents, rescanning pages for thesis statements, and looking ahead to see if a familiar chapter structure would appear later. Instead, the book reads in shorter, only semi-linear vignettes that require some untraining in order to unfold Freeman’s story of Oak Ridge. These episodic fragments, each titled as one might a poem, suffuse poetics with critical theory and historical evidence and are devoid of much quotation. This style gives a life-force to the act of doing theory, positioning memory as active and activating, yet uncontrollable. Events are remembered like mushroom clouds, the effects of which take Freeman years to observe. She calls this ‘atomic memory’ and, following Donna Haraway (2016), she begins to map ‘what thoughts think thoughts’ (p. 11).
This Atom Bomb in Me has a cast of recurring characters from arts and letters: Mrs. Dalloway, Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, the famous town spectre, the Ghost of Wheat, but none so prevalent as Piet Mondrian and his works, taken up by Freeman to reveal the structure of the book through the artist’s famous grids. In the early pages of the book, a section describing the floor plan of her grandparent’s Cemesto ‘B’ house moves into a short discussion of Mondrian, gently prodding these two architectures together as a way to show abstract order. The Cemesto was housing designed for the Manhattan Project – about 3000 cement and asbestos homes that shared a floor plan which only differed in size, the letters A–E denoting smallest to largest. These pre-fab walls set the scene for a life described for its complicated simplicity. As Mondrian’s grids first appear as neatly slotted patterns, only to reveal in the extremities of the right angle a philosophy seeking unobtainable balance, the Cemesto too is fragile in its make-up, ever permeable to the effects of its neighbour, the bomb.
The grid comes to shape the book, a containing space for a variety of times and ways to think of time: time-travel, simultaneous time, time for sorrow and joy, dangerous time. Mostly everything is ‘Mondrianated’ (as Freeman calls it): the town’s roadways thickly separate the square shaped Cemestos, her child-size denim jumper makes a small box, so does her mother’s yellow pant suit, so does her mother (pp. 14–17). These are things that can be squared off yet radiate bright tones. Colour is important, particularly in how she thinks about time: ‘the past when viewed through the glass of nostalgia is rarely washed in dull tones; it is most often chromatically rich’ (p. 17). This is memory cloaked in black, white and primary colour, rather than dipped in sepia, marking the author’s decisive focus towards the future, or rather the ways in which the past continues to nourish the present and what may come after.
Mondrian’s primaries are found early in the book by a young Freeman in the Oak Ridge Public Library, who discovers them in the supersuit of the comic book hero Captain Atom. Like so many heroes before and since, Captain Atom was a nuclear accident. He was ‘a radioactive fallen angel’ who had to reassemble himself atom by atom after an explosion flings him into the galaxy (p. 38). He returns to Earth clad in a lattice of white, blue, yellow and red spandex – a ‘superdandy’ emblazoned with the atomic symbol. Freeman describes him as ‘an example of the new humanity’ that populates the post-Hiroshima atomic sensorium (p. 40). Under his tights, the Captain’s new body was sheathed in a second garment of liquid metal made to shield the world from his superform’s toxic radiation. Freeman sees this coating as a new ‘iron cage’, more insidious than the prison-like encasement described by Max Weber in the early twentieth century. Not an ‘outside layer’ of steel-like commodity like Weber (2003) imagined, but instead, new skin, new muscle and new fat that coursed with ‘liquid metal, fast like mercury, powerful and toxic, and nearly impossible to shed’ (p. 40). After 1945, she writes, it becomes too late to imagine shaking the grasp of the material world. Like radiation poisoning, this sensorium is no longer around us, we have now absorbed it. It has become us. The Captain’s tights may announce an incredible power for good deeds, but this is merely a cloak for a form of power of which there is no superhuman control.
This anecdote signals the book’s overwhelming theme, the persistence of the invisible. Freeman’s short tales reflect her persuasion towards scaring herself, a preoccupation with Oak Ridge’s uncanny where her dreams are stalked by zombies and radioactive fish, also a phantom named the Ghost of Wheat who appears in the glint of her grandfather’s glasses. A few more obvious versions of ghosts live in her grandmother’s photographs, where her mother’s old flames are whited out to erase the existence of anyone who is not Freeman’s dad, even well after her parent’s divorce. So humorously, Freeman’s mother appears next to blobs of Wite-Out to disguise old dates: ‘Anyone visiting my grandparents’ home might think my mother had a thing for phantoms’ (p. 45). These corrected escorts, funny as they are, disturb the author. Returning to Mondrian, she notes that it was his white squares that were more requiring of his attention: ‘he wasn’t laying a background or creating a blank space for future possibilities; the white square marked the end of those spaces – they would be white and nothing else’ (p. 46). For Freeman, the white blobs mark the limit of who her mother could have and love, also lending a strange half-life to the men who she would never have again because they had been buried rather than allowed to simply time-out in photographic fashion, fading in little rectangles on the fireplace.
At a later point, Freeman’s grandfather dies and at his wake she watches as her grandmother slides with grief down the white grid of her kitchen wall. Her grandmother, dressed in black, makes an uneven stripe that cuts through the brick lines. This moment of true mourning and despair frightens Freeman much more than the earlier witness of her grandfather being lowered into his own rectangle in the ground, marking a shifting point for the author, who sees herself for the first time fragmented from her ‘atomic childhood’. She writes, I understood that life was made up of periods of brightness and darkness – there were moments when you could see the grid of your life clearly, and moments when nothing made sense. I set to work collecting squares of time, forming them into blocks of text, as a protection against oblivion. (p. 70)
From this point on, Freeman’s grid grows darker, changing in tone from Captain Atom’s bright suit to become many shadowed layers.
In an earlier vignette, Freeman refers to Henri Bergson’s (1991) important work on memory, where he writes that neither is there a ‘drawer’ to house a collection of memories, nor is there a classifying register for these recollections (p. 33). Funny that the grid should figure so prominently when to follow Bergson (as Freeman does) is to neither see a container, nor organizing system. Freeman interjects, understanding that ‘drawers and their magical contents are not memory, and they are not a metaphor for how memory works; rather, they are sites of possibility for the irradiation of memories’ (p. 34). Just as the vignettes in this book read as so many blocks of memory, so too the grid becomes the place where these stories hang together, not in linear fashion, but radiating simultaneously – each memory at once, from its place within the frame.
Mondrian’s grids were an exercise in complementarity where abstraction emerged from balancing equivalent forces. This concept comes to the fore when Freeman describes her childhood Topsy-Turvy Doll that turns Little Red over to reveal the Wolf. This playful assemblage helps to convey the sensation of simultaneity or twoness that Freeman underscores throughout the book. This childhood doll connects both Red and the Wolf-Grandmother at the waist, flipping over the skirt of one to obscure the other, moving a bonnet over the wolf’s face to reveal Red’s grandmother. She writes, ‘In my small, pink hands they were all one beast, and I could decide which face to show the world’ (p. 30). This plaything, in so far as the girl’s, the beast’s and the grandma’s stories are dependent on the other’s narrative, made real to Freeman the knowledge that sweetness and violence are often conjoined in the same vessel, thus pushing us as readers to return to the title of the book, and the author herself. Towards the end of the book, Freeman writes, ‘There is a wolf in me’ (p. 93). Indeed, the wolf is the bomb, very clearly it ‘devoured’ her at a young age, likewise, she has since been feeding from it, and it comes to settle in her insides, nestling there with her own grandmother (p. 93). This Atom Bomb in Me, is a sensitive experiment in producing theory from the place of the wolf, the belly of memory.
The trajectory of the book covers a very small physical terrain, instead working outwards in a short radius from Oak Ridge to construct living parts that intersect (but don’t interfere) at the perpendicular. I read this short book voraciously twice. The first, much as I would fiction or poetry, in the ray of a vacation sun. The second, with notes and pencil in hand. As I was writing this review, I dreamt of Freeman’s prose, served as secret messages alongside an oddly plated meal in a steakhouse. It is unusual to reveal this in a review, except that given the contents of the book, the eruption of memory in any place begins to feel important as her story crosses with mine.