August, 2017: In her new poem ‘Anointed’ Marshallese poet and activist Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner explores the nuclear testing legacy of the Marshall Islands through the legends and stories of Runit Island on Enewetak Atoll.
The poem was written and performed by Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, the video was directed by Dan Lin, and produced by PREL (Pacific Resources for Education and Learning). The video was published April 15, 2018 and Dan kindly gave me permission to post the video on this site.
Anointed
I’m coming to meet you
I’m coming to see you
What stories will I find?
Will I find an island
or a tomb?
To get to this tomb take a canoe. Take a canoe through miles of scattered sun. Swallow endless swirling sea. Gulp down radioactive lagoon. Do not bring flowers, or speeches. There will be no white stones to scatter around this grave. There will be no songs to sing.
How shall we remember you?
You were a whole island, once. You were breadfruit trees heavy with green globes of fruit whispering promises of massive canoes. Crabs dusted with white sand scuttled through pandanus roots. Beneath looming coconut trees beds of ripe watermelon slept still, swollen with juice. And you were protected by powerful irooj, chiefs birthed from women who could swim pregnant for miles beneath a full moon.
Then you became testing ground. Nine nuclear weapons consumed you, one by one by one, engulfed in an inferno of blazing heat. You became crater, an empty belly. Plutonium ground into a concrete slurry filled your hollow cavern. You became tomb. You became concrete shell. You became solidified history, immoveable, unforgettable.
You were a whole island, once.
Who remembers you beyond your death? Who would have us forget that you were once green globes of fruit, pandanus roots, and whispers of canoes? Who knows the stories of the life you led before?
There’s a story of a turtle goddess. She gifted one of her sons, Letao, a piece of her shell, anointed with power. A leathery green fragment, hollow as a piece of bark. It gave Letao the power to transform into anything, into trees and houses, the shapes of other men, even kindling for the first fire he almost
burned us
alive.
I am looking for more stories. I look and I look.
There must be more to this than incinerated trees, a cracked dome, a rising sea, a leaking nuclear waste with no fence, there must be more than a concrete shell that houses death.
Here is a legend of a shell. Anointed with power. Letao used this shell to turn himself into kindling for the first fire. He gave this fire to a small boy. The boy almost burned his entire village to the ground. Licks of fire leapt from strands of coconut leaves from skin and bone and while the boy cried Letao laughed and laughed.
Here is a story of a people on fire – we pretend it is not burning all of us.
Here is a story of the ways we’ve been tricked, of the lies we’ve been told:
It’s not radioactive anymore
Your illnesses are normal
You’re fine.
You’re fine.
My belly is a crater empty of stories and answers only questions, hard as concrete.
Who gave them this power?
Who anointed them with the power to burn?
Ends
The following description of Kathy can be found on her website (see below):
Kathy is a Marshall Islander poet and spoken word artist. She received international acclaim through her poetry performance at the opening of the United Nations Climate Summit in New York in 2014. Her writing and performances have been featured by CNN, Democracy Now, Mother Jones, the Huffington Post, NBC News, National Geographic, Nobel Women’s Initiative, and more. In February 2017, the University of Arizona Press published her first collection of poetry, Iep Jāltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter.
Kathy also co-founded the youth environmentalist non-profit Jo-Jikum dedicated to empowering Marshallese youth to seek solutions to climate change and other environmental impacts threatening their home island. Kathy has been selected as one of 13 Climate Warriors by Vogue in 2015 and the Impact Hero of the Year by Earth Company in 2016. She received her Master’s in Pacific Island Studies from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Iakwe
I’m coming to meet you I’m coming to see you What stories will I find? Will I find an island or a tomb? To get to this tomb take a canoe. Take a canoe through miles of scattered sun. Swallow endless swirling sea. Gulp down radioactive lagoon. Do not bring flowers, or speeches.
