Radiant Language and Entangled Listening in Svetlana Alexievich’s Chernobyl Prayer

This article meditates on the noisily entangled relations of listening, writing, and our perception of culture in the aftermath of nuclear events. Thinking through the material traces, containment, and waste of the Chernobyl disaster, Alexievich’s Chernobyl Prayer (1997) opens up a reconceptualization of the Chernobyl disaster as an event that alters the nature of testimony, challenging the lost sonic source of an event that is simultaneously in the past and yet to come. Chernobyl Prayer’s more than human perspective explores the exclusion zone as a sonic space in which radiation becomes audible through the silence of other species. In this way, sound extends itself to that which is present as well as absent. This reading of Chernobyl Prayer rethinks our understanding of sound as species-specifc and in doing so acknowledges the displaced position of the auditor.