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Popular Culture Review
alive and still running around on the island. He related that the
hermit crabs could still be seen on the beach. The trees
remained intact and continued to blow in the wind. Some of
our houses were still standing. And so we stayed hopeful that
we would soon return to our islands and that our nightmare on
Rongerik would soon be over (Niedenthal, 51-56).
Note that the memory of Rongerik is a “nightmare.” Despite Juda’s
initial hope that life still survived on Bikini, it quickly became apparent that
radiation had done extensive, lingering damage beyond the explosion site itself
For Bikinians this radiation is often referred to as “poison.” For example. Lore
Kessibuki relates the story of the “Demon of Poison”:
Rongerik was once populated with thousands of demons that
used the islands of that atoll for whatever purpose they felt
necessary for them to sustain their evil ways; indeed, it was
considered a forni of hell. One thing they were known to
perform continuously on that atoll was the ritual burning of
fires day and night in order to prolong their evil spells—and
thus increase their power. The intense heat from the flames
made all of the plants and trees on Rongerik die or become
useless to ordinary humans because these fires had burnt for
many years on end.
Even after these bad spirits finally left the island it was
believed that if a tree started to grow there it would eventually
mature and create a fire on its own because the demons had
planted evil spirits within the seed of the young trees. All
remaining food on the island was later ruined by Litobora,
who came from the south and cast magic spells over the entire
atoll.
They say Litobora originally brought Rongerik from the
southern Marshalls to the north, where she decided to hide it,
and then make use of it for the promulgation of her own evil.
Eventually, if it weren’t for our benefactor, Worejabato, she
would have taken Bikini also. As the story goes, fortunately,
she realized that Worejabato’s power was much greater than
hers (because it was the power of good and righteousness) and
so she fled from Bikini never to return. But she did go to many
other islands in the Marshalls, like UJae, Rongelap, and then
finally to Ebaten Island in Kwajalein Atoll, where to this day
some of the fish are very poisonous because of her.
Litobora later died on Rongerik. Her smelly rotten and
decaying body, part of which was thrown into the lagoon
instead of being buried, poisoned most of the reef, and