The Ocean on Fire: Pacific Stories from Nuclear Survivors and Climate Activists From Atomic Tests to Rising Seas
CAPAS-Fellow Anaïs Maurer Explores Pacific Resistance Strategies
When nuclear-armed powers developed their nuclear arsenal, they detonated the equivalent of on Hiroshima bomb a day, every day, for half a century, on the Pacific islands they used as their nuclear playground. Well before climate change became a global concern, nuclear testing brought about untimely death, widespread diseases, forced migration, and irreparable destruction to the shores of Oceania. Anaïs Maurer’s latest publication, The Ocean on Fire, analyzes the Pacific stories by Indigenous survivors that incriminate the environmental racism behind radioactive skies and rising seas.
In The Ocean on Fire: Pacific Stories from Nuclear Survivors and Climate Activists, CAPAS-Fellow Anaïs Maurer identifies strategies of resistance uniting the region by analyzing an extensive multilingual archive of decolonial Pacific art in French, Spanish, English, Tahitian, and Uvean, ranging from literature to songs and paintings. Pacific storytellers reveal an alternative vision of the apocalypse: instead of promoting individualism and survivalism, they advocate mutual assistance, cultural resilience, South-South solidarities, and Indigenous women’s leadership. Drawing upon their experience resisting both nuclear colonialism and carbon imperialism, Pacific storytellers offer compelling narratives to nurture the land and each other in times of global environmental collapse. These multilingual stories should be shared the world over, particularly in other frontlines against militarism and petrocapitalism.
The first two chapters of The Ocean on Fire explore the ideologies mobilized in the ongoing assault on Pacific peoples. For centuries, Westerners have seen Pacific islands as isolated islets outside of modern history. Imagining the tropical Island as marooned at the earliest stage of a supposedly unilinear path to “progress,” Western narratives have denied Oceanians both the right to history and the right to a future. Indigenous people were contaminated with viruses and irradiated by nuclear bombs because they were considered outside of the realm of humanity, and doomed to disappear. Today, the very same imperial obliviousness structures Western nations’ responses to the climate crisis, which ranges from compassionate apathy to downright indifference. Countering this ideology, Pacific philosophies challenge the Western-lead glorification of Cartesianism, or the belief that (some hu)man(s) can become master and possessor of nature. Pacific stories suggest rather that, in Oceania, modes of being in the world stem from the consciousness of sharing a genealogical relationship with the ocean, which can only be protected collectively.
The remainder of the book explores looming or ongoing climate threats that have already been inflicted upon Pacific peoples under nuclear colonialism: the threat of estrangement from other-than-humans, the threat of increased death and diseases, the threat of exile and forced migration. Nuclear colonialism shattered the relationships between humans and archipelagic creatures as fish and birds became irradiated; Oceanians communities were ravaged by nuclear-induced diseases affecting the living and their descendance for generations; and Pacific people were forced into exile as their islands were seized by colonial powers to be turned into nuclear testing sites.
Drawing from traditional forms of genealogical recitation, Indigenous humor, and Indigenous mourning rituals, antinuclear writers and artists pay homage to their irradiated lands, their loved ones, and the broken multispecies relationships that sustain them, all the while suggesting the decolonial potential and regenerative power of traditional storytelling in the face of the apocalypse.
Unlike antinuclear activists and climate militants in the global North who barely talk to each other, Pacific environmental activists today draw from their experience of the nuclear apocalypse to cultivate resilience and regeneration in times of climate collapse. Oceania was the first continent destroyed by thermonuclear fire on a previously unimaginable scale. It is also the first continent to imagine the new world emerging from the ashes of the old one.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Raised in Mā’ohi Nui, Anaïs Maurer is Assistant Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, and Affiliate Member at Columbia University’s Center for Nuclear Studies. Her research foregrounds how Pacific artists and activists have resisted environmental racism in Oceania, from the genocidal epidemics of earlier centuries to our contemporary period of nuclear colonialism and carbon imperialism. From January to December 2024, the scientist will conduct research as a fellow at CAPAS.
