This must all seem very complicated to you. But it’s not really. I explained how in the days following the attack and throughout the occupation, the American doctors weren’t allowed to treat atomic victims. But they did have other rights. Like the right to carry out experiments. The right to remove a testicle the bomb hadn’t damaged and extract the sperm—apparently those little cells were stronger than I was—to inseminate an anonymous womb. Yoro was born, a baby destined from her first day of life to express the consequences of radiation on a fetus, on a child, on an adolescent… for however long she lasted. That was the reason for the periodic medical reports the foster families had to send in. But the signs of radiotoxemia had only begun here, in the mines. Yoro’s radiation sickness began manifesting itself when she worked with tons of atomic water over her head, extracting from rock the same material that had killed her at birth, but without which she would never have been born. Yoro was a daughter of Oppenheimer; a daughter and later a mother of uranium.
The same woman who showed me the document Yoro had entrusted to her said the only thing Yoro had done the last few days of her life was to pronounce her daughter’s name over and over again. As I said, she had given her daughter her own name, hoping to make her identification more probable: Yoro, like to cry in Spanish. I’ll never forget what Yoro asked in her letter: for Jim to care for Yoro so she could live to contradict the verb llorar. For me, Yoro, my daughter, had been fully identified by the fact that they’d given her my name. Who knows if it was motivated by some last-ditch act of compassion toward me as her father or, on the contrary, a complete lack of interest, creativity, or simply scorn, thinking Jim would never want or be able to find me. They thought so little of me that they gave my daughter my last name, like someone who hides in a closet not because they think it’s a good hiding place, but because he or she knows that nobody would look there. But Jim looked for me, found me, and revealed who I was. I loved Yoro. I looked for her as if she were my own daughter, never realizing that she actually was, crying over her absence throughout my entire life. Why did Jim hide the fact from me? you might ask. I don’t really have an answer for you. Probably the shock of encountering me a woman cast Jim into a knotty process of assimilation, so he must have needed time to work up a way of sharing the news; but death, as you know, took him too soon.
How many times did I wonder what happened to my genitals after the explosion? How many nightmares did I have of my penis and my testicles crawling around looking for me to no avail? Jim knew about it even more than I did. He’d always known. He knew where the precious element of my testicles had gone, what came out of me, my daughter. He was privy to the significant details of my life and he loved me like no other man ever had or ever wilclass="underline" as a woman and as the father of his daughter.
SO, AS I SAID, they told me in the mine that all Yoro the mother did was repeat her own name, which was her daughter’s name. In response to any question she gave the same answer: Yoro. And not because she’d gone mad, I’m sure, but hoping to make the name stick as long as possible, so the word would be on every tongue and spread until Jim, having read her message, came to find her. Think of the words she used in her letter: “If you can’t find me, please find your grandson or granddaughter, who will have my same name, and please allow her to live to contradict it.” I like to think that aside from having a practical motivation, Yoro had inherited my sense of how significant names are. I’m sure attentiveness to names derives from other traditions close to my own. Take the Chinese characters, for instance, used to express own name, which are formed by the words mouth and moon. Some say it’s because on the last day of each moon the Imperial Guard would call out the names of the men who were to stand in for their companions for the next few days; others—and this is my favorite explanation—argue that its etymology derives from something else: the name of a newborn could be whispered by the father to the mother only by moonlight. It was whispered as something sacred. I call myself H, which doesn’t mean it’s the initial of the name my parents gave me, parents who couldn’t even get my gender right. I chose this initial with something very clear in mind. After realizing that Yoro knew the meaning of her Spanish name, I started asking someone from Spain to say certain words. Eventually I asked how they pronounce the word Hiroshima in their language. “Iroshima,” they said. “The h is silent. We call it the mute letter.” It seemed marvelous to find a letter that existed without a voice. It’s a letter like me, with a presence, a body, but aphasic. That’s how I realized it was my name, the mute one, the one whose city had been razed. I’m H, the mute daughter of mute Hiroshima.
According to the woman at the mine, my daughter wasn’t allowed to speak much or my granddaughter either. Baby Yoro had been left unprotected when her mother died. Cannon fodder from the day she was born. To begin with, being the offspring of a black father and an Asian mother, she was neither-nor, mzungu tali tali. But she had certain features that set her apart too. Mostly the shape of her eyes and her very long neck. A Burmese guard who had helped her mother for years had placed a few golden rings around her neck as the girl grew to protect her from lions, he said, though he said different things at different times, like how the rings were symbols of nobility in his land. But what lions? And what nobility? Such things don’t exist underground.
When Yoro died, baby Yoro was taken to a refugee camp outside of Goma. With my eyes wide open when I arrived in the city, the first thing I saw was prostitution. That’s right, alongside all the five-and-dimes, prostitution is how many of the women eke out a living, selling their bodies for food or money. It’s why I could never understand this need for soldiers to rape underage girls or pay for sex with them in cookies or Fanta. Later it was explained to me when we arrived in the refugee camp. The soldiers figured these girls were more likely to be healthy; they wanted to avoid catching sexually transmitted diseases. As demand grew, prostitutes began arriving from surrounding areas, as happens in other countries, and set up shop there to satisfy the hankerings of UN people who, however much they try to hide the fact, are a cog in the machine that leads to human trafficking of minors.
There were hundreds of rape victims in that refugee camp, underage and adult women alike, who gave birth to what came to be known as a “MONUC baby,” meaning a baby conceived by rape or a criminal sexual transaction on the part of a UN blue helmet. Only girls not young enough to have had their first menstrual cycle were safe from unwanted pregnancy. I could verify it all on my own from firsthand testimonies in situ. Hanging all over the UN’s central pavilion were posters with illustrations prohibiting sexual relations with minors. Many women go to the UN for help. Can you imagine what it must feel like for them to encounter all these warnings directed at the peacekeeping staff, posted all around their supposed sanctuary? Just think of the confidence generated by all these posters in the selfsame headquarters of the people who have supposedly come to their country to protect them. It’s as if a wounded person showed up at a hospital where the operating room had posters in the halls around it reading “Killing patients is not okay.”