Popular Culture Review Vol. 18, No. 1, Winter 2007 | Page 36

32 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