In June 2018, Lou Cornum gave a lecture for “Future Perfect” at Data & Society Research Institute in New York. In it, they drew links between several geographies and their peoples, who have been affected by the slow and accelerated deaths of uranium and the atomic bomb. They insisted more particularly in the parallel between the history of Dene workers of Port Radium and that of their own Diné elders—despite being geographically distant, Dene and Diné (Navajo) people share an Athabaskan language—who were subjected to similar deathly radiation. Through this commonality, they coined the manifesto notion of “Irradiated International” that links communities and nations evoked throughout this issue. As such, it was important for us to include an excerpt (the final third) of Lou’s lecture in it.
The weapon of mass destruction is the nation. The United States of America for one. But also the very notion of nation itself.
Kazakhstan, Canada, Australia.
Niger. Russia. Namibia. Uzbekistan. China. The United States.
These are the nations mining the most uranium, all connected by histories of competing empires and lines of radioactive commerce.
Where can you imagine pain? Where can you register it? Where can you see violation? What lines demarcate your concern?
What happens when people across great swaths of time and space witness if not together then in tandem?
I will myself to radiate outwards, to exceed the constraint of a national body, of a closed border body, to meld with a mutant consciousness and deform what deforms me.
The work to do: Making visible, Making felt, Making it stop. I don’t yet know the chain reaction that links these acts. There is no reversal reaction to take away the death and slow death already enacted by leaky waste sites and test site winds. The irradiated international are here, everywhere. In the nodes and lines linking this uncollected collective is the invisible power of radiation itself, radiation made otherwise. In their poem “Infected Sunset,” Demian DinéYazhi writes from Navajo lands: “I talk to the uranium beneath my body/It tell me it is lonesome/it is warmblooded and resilient/it is angry and it has been violated/and in this way it is just as angry as an Indian.” How do you journey to the uranium and ask for forgiveness? There is no way to undo the violation but perhaps there are shared trajectories for our anger.