Interview with Bikini Atoll

Interviewer: What is the original name for your island chain now called Bikini? What happened to it? What has it become here and now? What is your future? Bikini Atoll: Well where do I begin? We have been assaulted from the very beginning. The name for the island is 'Pikinni', meaning a "flat surface of coconuts". German colonials corrupted this to the offensive name 'Bikini'. Less than 200 people lived here originally. Perhaps because we were so few to matter, and so isolated, our beautiful island was chosen as the site for multiple nuclear bomb tests, including the mighty 'Bravo' which was 1000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, The Japanese name of which means 'wide island' . Our beautiful island was destroyed, all but obliterated. We cannot go back there for countless generations to come because the dangerous radiation lingers long and fades so slowly. We tried to go back once, it looked so lovely as the coconuts gathered again, on the clean atoll beaches but the hidden radiation made us sick, and we had to leave. My people of Pikinni want to return to their homeland, but their hope is frustrated with despair. The price my people paid is immeasurable and never ending. Here is their lament: Why choose Pikinni to blow up with your bombs? What did we ever do to you? All we wanted was to live in peace in paradise here on our lovely island atoll far away from it all. Instead you blew us up, left your lingering scourge of radiation, hidden away and deadly. While our island has recovered its beauty and externally became paradise on earth once again, it is forever unlivable. Go to hell and stay there forever for what you have done to Pikinni and its refugees living in foreign lands unable to return! The river of our relentless tears lies collected within the green coconuts strewn on the sands of Pikinni atoll, on our 'flat surface of coconuts', on our home on our one and only land.