The Edge of Paradise
Kluge, Paul Frederick (1991). The Edge of Paradise. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-0-394-58178-1.
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Abstract: The author, a Peace Corps volunteer in Micronesia in 1967, recounts his journey back a generation later, providing an intimate view of the paradox of cultural imperialism. No scholarly trappings.
Kluge, a man haunted by history, is at large in a place with a resonant history of its own. The very place names are deeply evocative for any reader who remembers World War II: Kwajalein, Truk, Saipan, Tinian, Peleliu. And Kluge confirms that the war is a persistent ghost. Japanese tourists still come to the South Pacific to collect the bones of their fallen ancestors from long-abandoned bunkers and sunken warships. Kluge himself, a poet and an adventurer with a firm grasp on history, describes how he happened across the airfield where the Enola Gay was armed and dispatched to Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
“Sensing I’ve come far enough, I turn left into a lateral tunnel, which might take me where I want to go or, then again, someplace I’ve never been--an antiaircraft gun, a Japanese bunker, a shot-down plane,” he writes. “Then: daylight, space, eternity . . . the high-water mark of American power--August 6, 1945.”
But Kluge witnessed what came after the war, when the victorious United States--”the uncola of colonial powers”--tried to figure out exactly what to do with these islands. As he reminds us, a few of them were literally obliterated by the test-firings of thermonuclear bombs. At least one island republic later offered to turn its atolls into garbage dumps for the benefit of American consumers. “A sleazeball garrison island, a B-grade back-door California” is what Guam became, Kluge tells us, and what the rest of the islands are in danger of becoming...
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DOI: 10.7202/1083889ar CorpusID: 258364456 OpenAlex: W4367158612
