Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner

A slim but powerful collection of poems from the Marshallese author and activist Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner. She is an accomplished poet, one who uses her voice to insist on the humanity of the Marshallese ("We are sweaty hands shaking / another sweaty hand in heat / Tell them we are days and nights hotter / than anything you can imagine / We are little girls with braids / cartwheeling beneath the rain") in the face of, in spite of, the appalling ways that her people have been treated in recent centuries.

Jetn̄il-Kijiner is frank about the very real dangers that her nation faces from climate change (the Marshall Islands are, on average, no more than 2 metres above sea level), and the ongoing health impacts from the U.S. military's mid-twentieth-century use of their country and its people as guinea pigs for nuclear testing (miscarriages bring forth "jelly babies/tiny beings with no bones/skin—red as tomatoes"; the young and the old die painful deaths from cancer). Yet at the same time she also celebrates Marshallese culture, and shows us the rich texture of life that the whole world would lose if the Marshallese lose their islands.

Not all of the poems work as well for me as did others—a defter touch would sometimes have served Jetn̄il-Kijiner better—but there's no doubting the passion which imbues all of them. Recommended.… (més)

109/2020. These poems are creative with language in a variety of thoughtfully structured forms, from concrete to free verse. They speak movingly about traditional Marshallese culture, family history, the fallout from U.S. nuclear bombing, emigration, racism, and climate change. All these experiences, including the most painful and difficult, are communicated with impressive clarity in the poet's chosen forms.

The banality of a car crash transformed into art (extract):

In the hospital a male nurse
strung stitches
through the blooming wounds in my wrists
the only remains
of the passenger window

His blue aloha shirt
reminded me of home
I wanted to tell him I wasn't from here
I wanted to tell him I missed my mom
I wanted to tell him I was scared
of dying in someone else's country

As whimpers escaped from my lips
he yanked the black thread just
a little
tighter
sealing my voice into my wrists

One of the poems namechecks fellow poet Emelihter Kihleng from Pohnpei, who was the first Micronesian poet to publish a full volume, so I note that at least two of her poems are legally available to read online (they didn't inspire me to buy her book but you might have different taste in poetry).

Note: I hope the author will forgive the tag "Micronesia" in addition to "Marshall Islands". I understand her point that the word elides and erases nine separate cultures (Marshallese, Chuukese, Yapese, Pohnpeian, Palauan, Kosraen, Nauruan, Chamorro, and Kiribati) but I hope that as a tag it functions less as a diminishment and more as an expansive interlinked map to help more people find their way. I've also used a "Pacific Islands" tag.… (més)