Caught now, in the midst of wars
Against foreign disease, missionaries,
Canned food, Dick and Jane textbooks, IBM cards,
Western philosophies, General Electric,
I am talking about how we have been able
To survive insignificance.
– Simon J. Ortiz, “The Significance of a Veteran’s Day”
All this time,
witness to the changing tides.
All the while,
finding ways to make sense of all the lights.
To shape the winds,
to shape the currents,
and the rigid hives we’re living in.
– José González, “With the Ink of a Ghost”
Introduction: Native Continuance
Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner (b. 1989) emerged as a leading figure for climate justice at the 2014 United Nations Secretary-General’s Climate Summit, where she represented the Marshall Islands and performed her poem, “Dear Matafele Peinam” for a global audience. As a poet, performer, activist, and educator, her work continues to engage various modes of poetic response, resistance, and adaptation in reckoning with compounded precarities in the Marshall Islands, such as intensifying threats from climate change and US military imperialism. In this paper I explore how Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s debut collection, Iep Jāltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter (2017), demonstrates the role that poetry and storytelling serve in Native continuance, or the concept that Native writers’ use of literature at once extends ancestral traditions and consciously responds to histories of settler colonialism, genocide, displacement, and exploitation in Native communities affected by Western colonialism. Considering Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s collection in terms of what Pacific literary scholar Sina Va`ai describes as the postcolonial writer’s desire “to write out” their peoples’ resilience in the aftermath of colonisation (Va`ai 181), I expand on Va`ai’s claim and ask how the collection not only demonstrates Marshallese continuance through colonial legacies but also how it responds to a nexus of ongoing neocolonial forces, including climate change as “intensified colonialism” (Whyte, “Indigenous Climate” 154). In particular, I show that Jetn̄il-Kijiner creatively integrates Indigenous Marshallese oral traditions into a poetic strategy that calls attention to the North’s politically nested responsibilities for remediating ongoing environmental and sociopolitical harms in the Global South. The article argues for the ways in which writing becomes a method of literary resistance that employs a ‘poetics of continuance’, framing Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s work within a long-standing tradition of Native writers whose use of Native storytelling devices at once sustains ancestral traditions and engages actively in political struggles for justice, visibility, and self-determination.
Iep Jāltok foregrounds the legacies of the United States’ postwar military occupation of the Marshall Islands as part of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands mandated by the United Nations and the United States’ subsequent abuse of the archipelago as a nuclear testing site between 1946 and 1958. This period of military industrial exploitation resulted in widespread radioactive contamination of the Marshallese, their lands, and their waters and rendered the northern atolls uninhabitable to this day (Keown, “Children” 931). Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s poems place the socioeconomic, corporeal, and environmental precarities that Marshall Islanders now confront – including migration, cancers, and birth defects – alongside urgent questions about the future that low-lying atoll nations face in the era of sea level rise and climate breakdown. As she exposes the discursive and material links that connect US military imperialism with rising seas, her poems satirise rhetoric that relies on obfuscation of the lived reality and rights of Pacific Islanders as a means of securing non-Pacific interest and futures. The collection’s title, which translates literally to “a basket whose opening is facing the speaker”, refers to the matrilineal structure of Marshallese society, signalling the importance of women in the transfer and preservation of material wealth, creative labour, and cultural wisdom (Jetn̄il-Kijiner, Poems 2). Jetn̄il-Kijiner continues this lineage through her own poetic “offering”, holding for future generations her people’s storied traditions and the cultural values the traditions transmit, while interrogating the conditions that threaten the sanctity of this process and moving Native literary practises from obscurity onto an Anglophone global stage (History 10, 116).
As part of this move from obscurity to centrality, the phenomenon of tidal flows emerges as a powerful symbol in describing a processual, storied approach to cultural resurgence. The tide, a central element of a continuous, oceanic dynamic across interconnected bodies of water, represents the perspective in many Native worldviews that stories are “dialogic agents of change” (Blaeser, “Wild Rice” 245). Stories are also one of the ways in which Native continuance embodies and creates “affirmative tribal patterns of survival” (Moore 117). In the poem “Two Degrees”, Jetn̄il-Kijiner evokes poetic storytelling as the main vehicle through which she seeks to contest and transform US imperialist legacies in the Marshall Islands, comparing her practise with idik, the Marshallese word for neap tide, or the “best time for fishing” according to her father:
Maybe I’m
writing the tide towards
an equilibrium
willing the world
to find its balance (Poems 78, lines 90-97)
For Jetn̄il-Kijiner, to return to traditional Marshallese lifeways – such as weaving, basket-making, subsistence activities, and speaking Marshallese – is a way to realise and envision realities beyond the “burden of colonialism” and to contend against cognitive imperialism and cultural erasure (Simpson and Manitowabi 280, 282). The tide here signifies a force that is at once dynamic and steady, indicative of how “native survivance” simultaneously stays connected to the past and adapts to new conditions, as Anishinaabe writer Gerald Vizenor eminently proposed, through the “continuance of stories” (Survivance 1). Calling attention to tidal forces may also offer a nuanced reminder of the urgency of climate crisis, evoking the irony in the fact that the ocean, which has sustained and inspired Marshallese culture for millennia, now poses an existential threat to that culture, though the islands are estimated to contribute 0.00001% of global carbon emissions (DeLoughrey 175; Hamilton Faris 85; Fletcher and Sussman). As Marshall Islanders face overlapping crises, the power of the tide’s ebb and flow represents the resurgent, regenerative, and productive capacities of writing, pointing towards the ways in which Jetn̄il-Kijiner engages language, literature, and oratory to refuse neocolonial overdetermination and remake meaning and identification on her own terms (Te Punga Somerville 42).
In Native literary criticism, a poetics of continuance is not a new idea. Following the Native American Renaissance in the late 1960s, writers including Vizenor, N. Scott Momaday, Joy Harjo, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, and Simon J. Ortiz increasingly explored the possibilities for cultural resurgence and anti-imperialism through literature (Purdy and Ruppert 1; Blaeser, “Wild Rice” 245). Demonstrating the possibilities of literature as a means to create solidarity between Native communities, Harjo, Momaday, Ortiz, and Silko also served on the editorial committee for Iep Jāltok, which was published as part of the University of Arizona Press’ Sun Tracks: An American Indian Literary Series. Across Oceania, literary and cultural movements similar to the Native American Renaissance took place, including the Second Hawaiian Renaissance in the 1970s. These movements were further inspired by Fijian writer Epeli Hauʻofa, whose 1994 essay “Our Sea of Islands” proposes that Pacific artists and writers unite around a regional Oceanic identity and look to their cultural heritages for creative inspiration (Hauʻofa; Keown, Pacific Islands). Though distinct in myriad ways, Native American and Pacific Indigenous literatures share methods of literary continuance, and continuance, as a critical term, meaningfully articulates the diverse ways that Native peoples create and sustain their cultures despite settler colonialism (Goodyear-Kaʻōpua). Confronting attempts at genocidal extinction, or the “systemic elimination of Indigenous peoples”, historically links Pacific Islanders and Native Americans (TallBear, “Caretaking”). Today, Native American and Pacific Indigenous communities also face common struggles against high rates of cancer, poverty, and ecological desecration, as well as ongoing marginalisation and invisibility in surrounding settler-states including the US, Canada, and Australia (Brill de Ramírez and Lucero 37).
Relatively limited criticism has been published on Marshallese literature, with Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s 2014 dissertation for her Master’s degree in Pacific Island Studies a notable exception. This research, also titled Iep Jāltok, addresses the exclusion of Marshallese literature from both Western and Pacific Indigenous literary canons, correcting these lacunae in part by arguing for the dissolution of the binary between oral and written forms of knowledge production in Native literary methodologies (History 11). Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s poetry has received critical attention from Western critics as an Indigenous allegory that “parochializes the Anthropocene” (DeLoughrey 165), as a hydro-feminist performance (Hamilton Faris), as anti-nuclear protest literature (Keown, “Waves”), and as an ecopoetic critique of apocalypse narratives (Oh; Starr). While this work often addresses Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s Native approach and aesthetics, little attention has so far been paid specifically to Iep Jāltok and its critical engagement with Native continuance.
The Decolonial Challenge of Native Poetics
An American Studies framework informs my approach by thinking with the discursive issues with which the field currently grapples – such as how to produce new decolonial imaginaries that acknowledge both the shared experiences of oppression and the vast diversity of communities dispossessed by the American empire. As the field of American Studies “travels to the Pacific”, partly in response to the United States’ shifting security interests, military expansion, and geopolitical rivalries with China (Shu and Pease 23), I remain attentive to Alice Te Punga Somerville’s reminder that Oceanic peoples have long developed their own forms of scholarship, though Western disciplines often regard disciplinary turns toward Oceania as novel (30). By recognising the Pacific Indigenous and Native American epistemologies, literatures, and politics that my inquiry encounters, we might begin to articulate modes of expression that reckon with the consequences of tangled histories and presents.
Native poetics has long been recognised for its tendencies to critically invoke and involve multiple forms of witness and participation. More than most other contemporary poetry, Brian Swann argues, Native poetry is a “poetry of historic witness” because it confronts the ways in which the “unavoidable…weight and consequences” of history “make up the continuum of the present” (175). The prominent formal emphasis within Native poetry on retaining connections to oral traditions also attests to its engagement with history as ongoing, living, and participatory (Brill de Ramírez and Lucero 14). Many Native writers – including Momaday, Ortiz, and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson – discuss the importance of the narrative frame through which a historical event is told and continues to shape the present (Momaday 89; Maynard and Simpson 47; Ortiz “Towards”). Furthermore, the “rhythmic aspects” of Native poetry (Gunn Allen 71), including the tribal traditions and mythologies with which it is often interwoven, as well as its relation to local, continental, and world ecologies, are not recognised as separate from one another but rather as co-creating the “participatory force and vitality” (Brill de Ramírez and Lucero 45) of the literary work. Additionally, critics frequently underscore the networks of exchange accommodated by the orality of Native poetics, wherein the telling engenders relationships not only with the immediate audience but also with their communities and ancestors. Most poets, too, engage the poetic medium to evoke self-affirming and relational explorations of their own identity (Blaeser, “Sacred Journey” 86). Participation as part of a global readership here also means respecting that “not all knowledge is available for consumption” and that Native poets may create “coded spaces” within their texts meant only for cultural insiders (Berglund 264). Thus a Native poetics can assume a deeply embodied, decolonial approach which stresses the importance of stories for teaching ethical behaviour (Simpson and Manitowabi 288). It can include rich traditions of ritual and ceremony, as it engages the audience in “the creative reality” of the story (Blaeser, “Wild Rice” 245) and reversing the power dynamics often inflecting readership and critique in Western contexts.
Throughout Iep Jāltok, Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s engagement with similar poetic tactics engenders continuance and calls on readers to examine their understanding of and ongoing roles within the creation of history. The poem “History Project” does this through a semi-autobiographical story involving a high school research project Jetn̄il-Kijiner conducted six years after leaving the Marshall Islands to live in Hawaiʻi with her family (Poems 20; Keown, “Children” 931). “[T]ime to learn my own history”, she states (line 4), as she recounts searching through historical archives that expose both the brutal effects of 67 nuclear tests on the atolls of Bikini and Enewetak and the US administration’s attempts at “outright discursive erasure” (Davis 51) of the human and environmental cost of its Cold War nuclear programme (Keown, “Children” 931; DeLoughrey 176). As the lines shift into italics, Jetn̄il-Kijiner juxtaposes first-person testimonies of irradiated islanders with remarks by US officials that demonstrate dominant strains of Cold War discourse and the violence its rhetoric sought to justify (Davis 24; Keown, “Children” 934). For instance, she cites US military governor Commodore Ben Wyatt’s claim to the islanders of Enewetak and Bikini that the nuclear tests were “for the good of mankind” (lines 44-48), followed by firsthand accounts by Marshallese women who suffered miscarriages and birth defects since the detonations, their cases “gone unspoken” from the guilt and cultural taboos associated with what are known as “jelly babies” (lines 25-37). The young speaker of the poem pulls together her project – “graph[ing] my people’s death by cancer” and “gluestick[ing] my ancestors’ voice / onto a posterboard I bought from office max” (lines 113-117). She closes by quoting the three white judges who miss the bitter irony in her project’s title, “FOR THE GOOD OF MANKIND” (lines 112-128).
Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s use of polyphony in the poem is significant for several reasons. First, she becomes both a witness to and a participant in her homeland, dramatising her younger self’s horror and ferocious resolve in grappling with Marshallese history (Keown, “Children” 940-941; Starr 126; Oh 606). Sina Va`ai has identified similar processes of redress as a key motif of postcolonial Pacific Indigenous literature: by “setting down the record”, Va`ai argues, the writer is able to reaffirm a sense of self and community impaired during colonisation and enliven these foundations anew (179). Similarly, discourses of literature, trauma, and testimony point towards the reparative capacities of writing, helping negotiate a sense of “homeostasis” in the wake of overwhelming events, generational trauma, and scarring memories (Bokobza Khan). These two positions suggest the regenerative and resurgent capacities of “writing the tide” through a poetics of continuance, as they resonate with Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s claim that her work has “always been about” telling “stories we remember” in order to put human faces to injustices and process through challenging emotions (UN Climate Change).
Moreover, Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s use of polyphony creates dissonance between dominant US narratives and the lived realities of Marshall Islanders who endure the legacies of nuclear imperialism, subverting the historical amnesia of US military operations and revealing the violence of an American history frequently misrepresented in the Hawaiʻi state school curriculum, as well as the larger public consciousness (Davis 51). Her use of affective intensities and satire further add to the didactic tone of “History Project” and compel an ethical evaluation of US history. In the poem’s recollection of a photograph of goats used as nuclear test subjects, the caption describes thousands of protest letters sent in by American citizens shocked by “animal abuse” (lines 79-88). Creating an “embedded metacommentary” that emphasises a decolonial approach to history (Berglund 266), these poetic strategies resemble those described by scholars of Native poetics, including in the poem’s attention to “dialogues of intertextuality” (Blaeser, “Native Poetics” 412) and the ongoing construction of historical meaning (Blaeser, “Wild Rice” 243).
The use of intersubjective and heteroglossic voices in Native American literary criticism is argued to create a “performative dimension” in the text that shapes ethical and aesthetic responses (Moore 95). Michelle Keown notes the related ways in which Pacific Indigenous writers root their work in oral traditions and engage with contemporary Pacific Indigenous practises of speech-making, church sermons, prayer, dance, and drama (“Children” 940). Iep Jāltok incorporates such intertextuality in “Ettoļǫk Ilikin Lǫmeto”, as Jetn̄il-Kijiner recounts a song written by her great-grandfather, a German-Australian missionary to the Marshall Islands, then weaves the Marshallese lyrics together with lines in English to create her grandmother’s perspective (Poems 10-11). “Spoken Marshallese Lesson Nine” also deploys what Keown calls a “fluidity” in literary traditions to satirise a Christian catechism in Marshallese, suggesting a process of re-acculturation that is contingent on the speaker’s willingness to learn cultural techniques and knowledges (Keown, Pacific Islands 5; Jetn̄il-Kijiner, Poems 58). According to Keown, the incorporation of intersubjectivity into a text or performance can help to establish a “dialogical relationship” with the audience and to symbolically “call forth” ancestors into an active relationship (Pacific Islands 940), similar to ways Native American poets produce community-based work inflected with traditional rituals, ceremonies, and songs (Blaeser, “Native Poetics” 413; Moore 95). Through Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s use of polyphonic voices in “History Project”, she creates a community of speakers who represent the harsh realities of US nuclear testing. This includes her invocation of “her ancestors’ voice” (line 116), suggesting that she is at once soliciting the help of her deceased kin and acting on their behalf to turn the tides of injustice.
One of the most notable aspects that Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s poetry shares with a Native poetics is its oral style which renders her work “not just for the page, but for the stage” (History 117). Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s penchant for spoken word has driven much of her literary career and activism, from her reading of “Dear Matafele Peinam” at the 2014 UN Secretary-General’s Climate Summit to her online video performances accessible to global viewers, including her reading of “History Project” at the London 2012 Poetry Parnassus (“‘History Project’”; Keown, “Children” 939). In her master’s research, she writes that her affinity for spoken word boils down in part to the punch it packs: “It’s in your face – it doesn’t apologize” (History 117). Significantly, she describes Marshallese cultural traditions of bwebwenato and roro – storytelling and chanting – and the influence these practises have on her poetry; like traditional songs and chants, each of her poems contains a narrative and reflects the prosody of oral poetry (117). In Iep Jāltok, this performative emphasis registers in her print poems through the use of polyphony, repetition, enjambment, and narrative structure. Although not present in every poem, such poetic devices embolden the reading experience when read aloud, and their speech often places dramatic emphasis on the sociopolitical, environmental, and corporeal precarities of which the collection is concerned.
The capacity for written literature to incorporate the dynamic orality of various tribal storytelling traditions is explored by Ortiz, Silko, and Momaday, among others; according to Momaday, this work demonstrates the possibility that “elements of oral tradition” can exist “dramatically” within the framework of “a literary continuance” (Momaday 90). Silko, Gunn Allen, and Ortiz further identify significant aspects and patterns that follow Native American oral traditions, such as strategic shifts in voice, narratives that interweave the everyday with the imaginary, recognition of nature’s intelligence and animacy, and repetition for empathetic and emphatic understanding (Silko 164; Gunn Allen 70; Ortiz “Towards”; Brill de Ramírez and Lucero 46). I want to add that Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s use of frequent enjambment also reflects the cadence of impassioned speech and can intensify a poems’ emotional or satirical tone, supporting Silko’s assertion that the textual structure of Native literature is often “expressed from the heart”, rather than “linear or premeditated” (Silko 159). “Lessons from Hawaiʻi”, for instance, uses both frequent enjambment and polyphony to stress the unfair treatment and prejudice that Marshallese immigrants can receive in the US, as Jetn̄il-Kijiner cites her cousins’ self-conscious disassociation with “those / other” girls who dress like they would in their homeland:
Don’t they
know?
This
isn’t their country.
This
is America. (lines 59-65)
Such tactics enlist a poetics of continuance to “give urgency to the utterance” (Swann 175) and pronounce that the various precarities the collection discusses are critical, immediate, and ongoing.
Organised into four chapters, the collection’s structure “set[s] down the record” of neglected colonial legacies (Va`ai 179). It also starts at the beginning, revitalising mythopoeic traditions with new meanings and situating the genesis of Marshallese history and historiography at the site of their Indigenous cosmologies rather than in relation to timelines organised around Western contact (History 11, 27, 56; Hamilton Faris 82). Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s attention to temporality throughout Iep Jāltok is both linear and recursive, engaging with what Indigenous scholar Kyle Powys Whyte defines as a “spiralling temporality”, a simultaneous “living alongside future and past relatives” that involves “a certain form of philosophising” about which actions ought to constitute individual or communal responses to current situations (Whyte, “Indigenous science” 228-229). As I discuss, Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s poems signify layered and spiralling temporalities through recurrent diction and narrative cohesion, as well as through the use of prominent symbols like the tide and woven basket. Critically, the text’s progressive development conveys the transposition of various forms of “slow violence” that Marshall Islanders face across generations and locations – to use Rob Nixon’s term denoting insidious processes of destruction often eclipsed from media attention and strategic planning (Nixon 2-3).
Even and especially through “the dark tides of existence” (Swann 183), Native American and Pacific Indigenous literary critics recognise mythic and ceremonial narratives as vital to practises of survival and the continuation of Native life. The process of returning and reaffirming life through storymaking, Ortiz writes, is what Native peoples “have depended upon in their most critical times”, and the “insistence to keep telling and creating stories” is “the resistance against loss that has made life possible” (“Towards” 123). Not only does an engagement with origin stories provide a foundational basis for the construction of Native identity – “with this story, we know who we are”, says Silko (160) – but the creative readaptation of traditional stories further engenders continuance and can enlist “narrative imagination” to critique contemporary issues and envision alternative realities (Simpson and Manitowabi 286-287). In this way, many Native literary writers and critics argue that Native theoretical frameworks begin from the understanding that “story is theory” (Simpson and Manitowabi 286-287), as stories encourage readers or listeners to acknowledge the creative aspect of storytelling as well as their own responsibilities, values, and actions (Vizenor; Doerfler et al. xxiii). In a Pacific context, Hauʻofa cites the significance of Oceanic myths, legends, and oral traditions for subverting neocolonial narratives that portray Pacific Islands as small and isolated; rather, the worldviews that these stories communicate underscore the great potentiality of peoples interconnected by a vast ocean (152).
Considering such Native theoretical frameworks, Jetn̄il-Kijiner has described the “mythical strength” that traditional legends add to “heady topics” like climate change and nuclear legacies (“Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner”). The process of recovering traditional stories, she also notes, is not always easy and has required the help of elders to find, read, and understand Marshallese mythology and legends (History 11, 56). By explaining this process, Jamie Hamilton Faris writes, Jetn̄il-Kijiner de-essentialises her relation to the Marshallese language and traditional knowledge (Hamilton Faris 82). Again, it is important to acknowledge that the full significance of these stories may only be received by those who have access to cultural and spiritual knowledge traditions (Berglund 264). What I argue the collection’s engagement with traditional stories demonstrates is the Native worldview that the “creative power of words and thought is not confined to mythic time” (Brill de Ramírez and Lucero 36), as well as the understanding that “the spiritual world” is “influential” and dynamic (Simpson and Manitowabi 286).
Native Continuance as a Poetic Mode
Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s poetic retellings place particular attention on the importance of women within Marshallese matrilineality, emphasising and later recontextualising traditional stories that highlight women’s roles. The opening section of “Lōktan̄ūr”, for instance, traces the birth of seafaring traditions and the canoe as originating from “a Mother” (Poems 6, line 9). The goddess figure of Lidepdepju continues to evoke the motif of mythic feminine power in Marshallese storytelling, as Jetn̄il-Kijiner retells the legend of Lidepdepju, who avenges her sister’s death and becomes a monument off the islands’ shores (8-9). Lidepdepju reappears in the final chapter, stressing the story’s embodied knowledge as a way of responding to contemporary concerns. In “Just a Rock”, Jetn̄il-Kijiner returns to the shrine of Lidepdepju, but the speaker is only able to perceive the goddess’ monument as “a rock / on the reef”, her Native worldview eroded from colonially-induced cultural memory loss and her background as an emigree (Poems 59, lines 4-6). Jetn̄il-Kijiner then counts the goddess among the Marshallese community in the following poem, “Campaigning in Aur”, when they mobilise in support of her mother’s political campaign for president. Surrounded by passionate women and the rich material culture of their island, the poet observes the “mother of all mothers”, who “stand[s] in the oceanside / watching” as an aegis over the community (Poems 62, lines 64-66).
Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s engagement with traditional Marshallese storytelling further reflects Simpson and Manitowabi’s conjunction that “theory is personal” in Native thought and that “by inserting ourselves into these stories”, a Native practitioner takes on responsibilities “according to our own gifts, abilities, and affiliations” (Simpson and Manitowabi 286-288). The collection’s epigraphs signal these practises as founding motivations, pairing the definition of Iep Jāltok with a quote from Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s mother, Hilda Heine, who served as the Marshall Island’s first female president: “Girls continue the lineage” (Poems 2-3). The two poems that bookend Iep Jāltok, both titled “Basket”, suggest that Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s artistic-cultural offering perpetuates the wealth of her matrilineage represented by the woven basket. She then dedicates several poems to her female relatives – her cousins, her grandmother, and her daughter, Matafele Peinam – weaving a narrative which underscores the “great strength” that Native communities draw from intergenerational kinship ties (Swann 181-182) and using narrative structure and recurrent diction to call attention to the historical links between various forms of slow violence that affect her web of relations.
Jetn̄il-Kijiner emphasises these ties in the text’s organisational structure and by inverting the valuation of recurrent diction throughout her poems. This poetic strategy serves to loop connections between women; stress the links between settler colonialism, nuclear imperialism, and climate change; and bear witness to the ways in which intergenerational, somatic, and cultural memory can vanish or re-emerge. In “History Project”, she notes how the imperialist legacies of nuclear testing live on “beneath the glare / of hospital room lights / three generations later” (lines 96-98), the radiation carried down via nuclear isotopes that manifest in cancers, birth defects, and other illnesses (Keown, “Children” 941). Rebecca Oh has further argued that the placement of the poems around “History Project” reflects the movement of radioactive debris across the archipelagoes and extends the “temporal, formal, and spatial edges” of radiation poisoning (Oh 606). First, “The Letter B Is For” examines the limits and metrics of language for communicating atrocity, as the parodied dictionary translation of the Marshallese word “baam” mimics the pernicious descent of fallout on Marshallese bodies, lands, and waters in staggered typography (Poems 19). Then, Jetn̄il-Kijiner commemorates her niece Bianca’s battle with leukaemia in “Fishbone Hair”, comparing the six-year-old’s body to “territory” “conquered” on the grounds of manifest destiny (lines 13-18). Thus, Jetn̄il-Kijiner reveals the lingering consequences of the violent histories just exposed by her young speaker in “History Project”, collapsing the rhetoric used to justify both nineteenth-century Christianisation in the Pacific with that of US nuclear testing (Keown, “Children” 943).
Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s use of diction and imagery in “Fishbone Hair” also illustrates the continuance of Marshallese traditions and lifeways at work as a poetic mode. The “war / raging inside” Bianca’s bones (Poems 25, lines 13-14) recalls the unspecified “war” in “Lidepdepju” for which the speaker makes a visit to the goddess’ shrine to “pay tribute” and asks for “guidance” (Poems 9; lines 20-24). This use of this mythic imagery may also gesture towards a general sense of conflict for the speaker and her people as they practise survivance. Moreover, Jetn̄il-Kijiner concludes “Fishbone Hair” with a legend from Guam in Micronesia, wherein a group of women “saved their islands” from a monstrous fish by cutting off their hair the colour of the “night sky” and weaving it into “a massive…net” (30-31). She transposes various related words into dispersed nodes on the opposite page – “night sky”, “catch”, “moon”, “star” – and arranges them into a typographical image that at once resembles a fishing net, an astral constellation, a network of islands, or a Marshallese stickchart, evoking a vital cultural history that continues to guide, support, and bond the Marshallese people through profound loss (Poems 31; Starr 126).
Throughout the collection, Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s repeated use of terms like “bald”, “rootless”, “bones”, and “stitches” have a corporeal and even medical resonance, pointing further to the ways in which Marshallese bodies hold radiation as a form of somatic memory (DeLoughrey). In particular, hairlessness emerges as a motif that evokes the somatic consequences of neocolonialism, as the presence of hair suggests the braided strength of kinship and tradition. The word “bald”, used to signal Bianca’s alopecia (Poems 26, line 24), figures in the “balding white judges” at Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s high school research competition in “History Day” (Poems 23, line 131), and the word occurs again in the intimate letter penned to her daughter, “Dear Matafele Peinam”, who is “bald as an egg and bald as the buddha” (Poems 70, line 3). By relocating the term from describing her niece as a cancer patient to the baldness of her smiling, newborn baby, the poems suggest the ways in which time’s spiralling unfolding can simultaneously hold suffering, grief, joy, and rebirth.
“Dear Matafele Peinam” further echoes the rootlessness of Bianca’s hair – “that hair without a home” (Poems 24, line 12), as Jetn̄il-Kijiner warns her daughter of the islanders who are predicted to wander “rootless” if climate change is left to “crunch [her] island’s shattered bones” (Poems 70, line 17). The term “bones”, used to describe Bianca’s bone marrow transplant and thus the warzone between her life and death (Poems 25, line 14), is reconfigured to portray Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s headstrong cousin who acts out against the hardships of immigrant life in Hawaiʻi, bullying young Jetn̄il-Kijiner with taunts that “cut / straight thru bone” (Poems 36, line 13). Finally, she recounts the “questions” that “nag[ged] the bones of [her] skull” (Poems 42, line 6) when she returns to the Marshall Islands to visit Būbū Neien, who is dying from tongue cancer, and struggles to communicate with her grandmother in her native language. Unable to converse with one another, Būbū Neien shares her floral embroidery work with Jetn̄il-Kijiner and “smiles, / lips stretched / across crinkles” (lines 70-73). Deeply moved, Jetn̄il-Kijiner feels “sunlight / flood [her] insides” (lines 82-83).
The descriptors in the exchange between the poet and her grandmother reverberate backwards into the collection on several registers: Būbū Neien’s countenance resembles what the speaker describes as her stitched smile in the first “Basket” poem, whose matrilineal “offering” is “littered” and “tossed” (Poems 5, lines 38-40). “On the Couch with Būbū Neien”, however, describes the two women’s affectionate connection over the elder’s artistic production as a joyful, if slightly clumsy, act of passing on Marshallese tradition. In addition, the emotional radiance with which Jetn̄il-Kijiner responds resonates with her use of nuclear imagery in “History Project” to convey the spectacle of “blast[ed] / radioactive energy” (Poems 21, lines 49-50) – an image which Elizabeth DeLoughrey cites the US Atomic Energy Commission projected to sponsor US military power (171). Yet Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s writing reconceptualises similar signifiers from ones that evoke substantial grief and violence to sources of hope, connection, and kinship, even in the midst of mourning.
Finally, Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s use of recurrent diction reveals and troubles narratives of invisibility, expendability, and sacrifice that link US imperialist legacies with the systemic forces driving climate change. This central theme in Iep Jāltok reflects a growing body of research that recognises global warming and the manifold precarities it exacerbates as a historical extension of ongoing colonialism, capitalism, and industrial globalisation (Haraway; Whyte “Indigenous Climate”; Yusoff; Chakrabarty). Scholars in Indigenous climate change studies speak of climate change in terms of “déjà vu”, or an ongoing phenomenon of dispossession, displacement, and ecological desecration that Kyle Powys Whyte names as “intensified colonialism” (“Indigenous Climate” 155). In international and US discourses on climate change, the environmental impacts of militarism often remain “the elephant in the room”, according to DeLoughrey, who points out that the US is the world’s single largest institutional consumer and producer of carbon emissions (DeLoughrey 25, 69). Ironically, the origin of current scientific understandings of global warming and the so-called Anthropocene can be traced to the military-scientific development of nuclear technologies, as scientists first began monitoring biochemical changes in the Earth’s stratigraphy (DeLoughrey 26). One of the many critical links that connect these histories is the imperial dependence on exploiting and expending Native peoples for the expansion and maintenance of settler-states like the US (Te Punga Somerville 29; Wander 2; Maynard and Simpson 139).
In Iep Jāltok, Jetn̄il-Kijiner gestures toward the shared experiences of dispossession of Marshall Islanders and Native American tribes in the poem “To Laura Ingalls Wilder”, when she recounts reading Little House on the Prairie as a child and imagining the “wheezing heave of hundreds / of displaced feet” and the “little girls with tree bark hands / sun browned / like me” (Poems 38, lines 63-67). She explores a similar sense of solidarity and sisterhood with Inuk writer Aka Niviâna in the collaborative video poem “Rise: From One Island to Another”, as the two poets engage Native practises of gift-giving and performance to stage a galvanising dialogue that asks their audience to take climate action (“Rise”; Hamilton Faris). This emphasis on building solidarity across Native communities and the Global Majority also proved critical in Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s activism to establish the 2015 Paris Agreement’s goal to limit global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius, particularly in recognition of the existential threats that climate change poses to low-lying atoll nations (Keown, “Children” 939). Though the Marshall Islands are faced with increasingly extreme levels of coastal inundation, stronger storms, compromised water supplies, and growing emigration, Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s work makes clear her ongoing refusal to relegate Marshall Islanders to the status of what Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life”, or people who are objectified and excluded from the body politic by powerful entities (Agamben).
Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s use of recurrent diction in “Lessons from Hawaiʻi” and “Two Degrees” evokes the concept in Indigenous climate change studies that history “always / seems / to repeat itself”, as she writes in the first poem (Poems 45, lines 15-17). Conveying her exasperation with ignorant views that she has experienced as an immigrant, “Lessons from Hawaiʻi” deploys several of the characteristics that I have discussed as integral to a poetics of continuance and as a fusion of Native orality and spoken word techniques. The poem refers to a substantial and growing Micronesian diaspora in US states such as Hawaiʻi, Arkansas, and Oregon that is facilitated by the 1986 Compact of Free Association (COFA), an agreement between the US, RMI, and the Federated States of Micronesia which recognises the archipelagoes as sovereign nations and grants islanders the right to work and live in the US (Davis 23-25). For geographer Sasha Davis, Marshallese and Micronesian citizenship status under COFA exemplifies their representation in terms of Agamben’s “bare life”, due to the agreement’s legal binding that denies them full US citizenship while safeguarding the United States’ use of its military operating bases, legislative intervention, and the protraction of economic dependency (Davis 23-25). Under COFA, nearly a third of Marshall Islanders have migrated to the US in pursuit of better healthcare and educational and employment opportunities (Taibbi and Saltzman; Keown, “Children” 931).
Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s incisive poetic critique of racist assumptions and microaggressions in “Lessons from Hawaiʻi” satirises the term first proposed by French explorer Jules Dumont d’Urville in 1831 to describe the island groups (Poems 45):
MICRO
(nesian)
as in small.
tiny crumbs of islands scattered
across the Pacific Ocean.
Too many countries / cultures / nations no one
has heard about / cares about / too small
to notice. (lines 20-27)
Significantly, Jetn̄il-Kijiner reminds the reader of the term “crumbs” in the poem “Two Degrees”, as she compares Western rhetoric that justified colonisation, military exploitation, and nuclear violence with perspectives which deem the margin between 2 and 1.5 degrees in global temperatures inconsequential:
Like 0.5 degrees
are just crumbs
like the Marshall Islands must look
on a map
just crumbs you
dust off the table, wipe
your hands clean of (Poems 77, lines 48-55)
Though the difference in global temperature “seems small” (line 45), it is one which underpins the future of the Marshall Islands, as well as of billions of people around the globe. Countering this belittling and deterministic rhetoric which decides whose lives are “ungrievable”, to invoke Judith Butler (150), Jetn̄il-Kijiner demonstrates continuance in the two poems as her source of inspiration and strength.
In “Two Degrees”, she describes Matafele Peinam, who is named after their family’s ancestral parcel of land, as embodying their enduring connection to an island “not yet / under water” (Poems 79, lines 111-112). Though they face extreme circumstances, the poem highlights how Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s relationship with her daughter is an act of continuance rooted in a deep sense of place, perhaps representing motherhood in terms of what Potawatomi writer Robin Wall Kimmerer describes as “a net of living threads” which “lovingly encircle[s] what it cannot possibly hold” and “what will eventually move through it” (Kimmerer 90). Moreover, Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s proposal in “Two Degrees” to “writ[e] the tide towards / an equilibrium” (lines 94-95) turns on the insistence to portray Marshall Islanders’ full humanity – the “faces” behind “the discussions / numbers / and statistics” (lines 100-104). “Lessons from Hawaiʻi”, as well as the subsequent poem, “The Monkey Gate”, reifies that insistence by unsettling degrading and monolithic stereotypes of Micronesians, instead portraying islanders and their culture with pride and appreciation. Resonant with Hauʻofa’s proposal to acknowledge the ways in which contemporary Oceanic peoples sustain ancient voyaging traditions through “world enlarg[ing]” flows of people, ideas, and material resources (156), these poetic depictions amplify a rich material culture made possible by trans-oceanic movement. In describing valuable and vital aspects of Micronesian culture, such as the “shimmering dresses called guams”, the “sticky breadfruit drenched in creamy coconut”, and the “coolers of our favorite fish / wheeled from the airport” (Poems 46-47), Jetn̄il-Kijiner depicts people whose lives, though ostensibly “different” to some (line 76), can be described as anything but small.
Encouraging Decolonial Relationalities through Poetry
So far, I have discussed Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s deployment of poetic devices and engagement with Native thought in terms of the various modes of participation and witness on which they turn, arguing that these strategies engender continuance and support the recognition of Marshall Islanders’ humanity through historical legacies of colonial violence. My final thoughts address the ways in which Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s poetics of continuance involve readers in what Dakota scholar Kim TallBear calls “caretaking relations”, a Native framework that foregrounds paying “attention to our relations and obligations here and now” through the spatial metaphor of a “relational web” (TallBear, “Caretaking” 24-25). Whyte’s concept of “renewing relatives” names a similar process of “restoring persisting relationships” that make up “longstanding Indigenous heritages”, but he goes further in identifying the ways in which these sets of relationships can “support Indigenous peoples’ mobilising to address climate change” (“Indigenous Climate” 158). Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s poetics of continuance inspires culturally, sociopolitically, and ecologically responsible stewardship, encouraging thinking and acting along a “narrative path” at odds with the individualist hubris often taught by American ideologies (TallBear “Caretaking”). As the two “Basket” poems subvert hegemonic and gendered representations of the Marshall Islands, they evoke the symbol of the Marshallese woven basket to emphasise how relational ethics can be embedded in and manifested through a story’s structure. “Tell Them” extends these ethical reading practises into a poetic treatise on Marshallese representation, self-determination, and survivance by evoking traditional Oceanic practises of gift-giving and exchange.
In her discussion of Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s poetry as an “allegory of the Anthropocene”, DeLoughrey outlines the ways in which Jetn̄il-Kijiner highlights “webs of obligation” in order to tie together the local and the global in climate change discourse and help readers understand the connections between specific places and global change, or “tidalectics” as Edward Kamau Brathwaite terms it (Brathwaite; DeLoughrey 194). Pacific Studies scholar Maggie Wander further considers Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s work in terms of “creative constellations” that make visible “the networks of relations” connecting “differential power structures” which compose the present (Wander 8). From a Native perspective, the ultimate purpose of storytelling emerges from the experience and understanding of humanity’s place within the whole of Creation (Silko 160). Through “the sacred power of utterance”, Gunn Allen writes, Native storytellers seek to “direct and determine” the forces that shape all life, including the remediation of extensive and sustained colonial harms (63). The “currency” which sustains and constitutes such life-giving processes, according to Anishinaabeg thought, are conceived as “offerings”, including stories and knowledges which change depending on the demands of their surrounding relationships and contexts (Doerfler et al. xviii).
In the “Basket” poems, Jetn̄il-Kijiner gestures toward a similar concept of offerings from a Marshallese worldview, extending the proverb of Iep Jāltok into a sequence of reflections on women’s creative capacities in Marshallese society. Typographically forming two baskets, the concrete poems pair mirrored sequences that are each addressed to a collective “woman”. In descending, curved lines, the speaker alternates between tropes of sexual exploitation towards women with those of feminine wealth embodied by the Marshallese proverb (Poems 4-5, 80-81). On one arc of the final “Basket”, for instance, Jetn̄il-Kijiner describes the woman’s body as “a country / we conquer / and devour” (Poems 80, lines 18-20); the opposite arc then begins:
This juxtaposition echoes Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s strategies elsewhere in the collection in which her inverted valuation of diction calls attention to the lasting effects of US military imperialism, such as her description of Bianca’s body in “Fishbone Hair”. Marlo Starr similarly notes how the lines’ gendered tropes suggest the ways in which US military-imperialist discourse feminises representations of the Pacific Basin or Rim, portraying the region as “empty space” used to justify conquest and pillage for the sake of national security (Starr 122-124). The poems’ adjacent hemispheres, however, suggest the intrinsic value of such spaces in the Marshallese worldview; generative and potent, spatial voids are considered full of life-giving forces (Starr 120-123). These lines further counter what Teresia K. Teaiwa discusses as the colonial sexualisation and objectification of the female body in US nuclear discourse, exemplified by the appropriation of the term “bikini” from Bikini Atoll to Western-style bathing suits (Teaiwa). Instead, the “Basket” poems underscore a place-based understanding of the central role that women hold in Marshallese matrilineality as the stewards of material-axiological culture and as intergenerational conduits linking the past with the future (Starr 124, 129; DeLoughrey 193).
As a powerful symbol, the woven basket not only represents Marshallese women’s handicrafts but suggests the ways in which the poetic form holds a particular significance in its capacity to recuperate living Marshallese histories (History 12-13). This position resonates with the view that symbolism in Native American literatures is not simply metaphoric or poetic but conveys “statements of perceived reality”, often expressed via brevity and repetition (Gunn Allen 75-76). Through similar usages of symbolism and poetic devices, the “Basket” poems illustrate the formal significance of what Jeff Berglund calls the “internal spaces” in Native texts and their capacity to carry on continuance (264). The “space inside” of the symbolic woven basket can, in other words, be read through a decolonial understanding that stresses the importance of mutual respect, of “finding value” in the recognition that full participation in a poem is not available to all readers, and how these practises support continuance (Berglund 266, 279).
A further comparison can be drawn between Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s symbolic woven basket and the formal tendencies described by Ursula K. Le Guin’s “carrier bag theory” (Le Guin). Since a literary text – in Le Guin’s case, a novel – “holds words”, and “words hold things” as well as “bear meanings”, Le Guin argues that a text’s “proper, fitting shape” could resemble a container, similar to a basket (36). Elsewhere, literary scholar Vinh Nguyen engages Le Guin’s theory to discuss the critical role that writing and storytelling can serve in recuperating traumatic experiences in refugee literature, particularly through coalescing nonlinear temporalities into a cohesive narrative: “Writing is to resee the past and to travel in this spiral of time”, Nguyen says, allowing people and experiences to be brought into “a relation of resilience” and to hold “what is gone, not known or not knowable” (91-93). In a Pacific context, Kristiana Kahakauwila speaks of Le Guin’s vessel structure as a story model which suggests “decolonial and other politically implicated shapes” and encourages consideration of seemingly distinct narrative elements in relation to one another (Kahakauwila). Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s “Basket” poems, supported by the collection’s structure in general, task readers to acknowledge the ways in which the present is braided with multiple histories, discourses, and worldviews, engaging a poetics of continuance to make visible ongoing injustices and encourage decolonial methods of relation.
“Tell Them”, then, extends TallBear’s spatial metaphor of a “relational web” to involve the reader in recognising their responsibilities to change dominant discourses and the current course of rising seas. Significantly, Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s poetic manifesto engages traditional Oceanic methods of gift-giving, voyage, and trade to call readers into reciprocity, draw connections from afar, and move them to action: as she presents her “friends in the states” with baskets and earrings, she asks in her message that they educate their communities on Marshallese people, their culture, and the existential threats they face from climate change (Poems 64, line 2). Her instruction to “[s]how them where it is on a map” (line 23) confronts belittling stereotypes of the islands as mere “crumbs”, while the following stanzas offer an expansive definition of Oceanic identity through repeating the affirmative conjugation “we are” with tropical imagery and celebratory cultural tropes. She underscores her pride for Marshallese seafaring and matrilineal heritage, hoping to be represented as the “descendants / of the finest navigators / in the world” and in the “sweet harmonies” that are sung by “grandmothers mothers aunties sisters” (lines 27-29, 39-41). Lyrically, her list highlights modern cultural materialities while avoiding reductive notions of identity (Hokowhitu and Andersen 19; DeLoughrey 194). In these lines, Marshall Islanders are also “dusty rubber slippers” and “shards of broken beer bottles” tucked into “fine white sand” (lines 54, 64-65). The poem’s absence of punctuation gestures toward a sense of breadth and multifaceted continuity that Jetn̄il-Kijiner seeks to convey, and her use of the collective voice further emphasises embodied and place-based perceptions of Marshall Islanders, such as in their identification with the glow of “papaya golden sunsets” and the “ocean / terrifying and regal in its power” (lines 48-53).
In the poem’s second half, Jetn̄il-Kijiner turns to urging her American friends to voice publicly the existential impacts of climate change on the Marshall Islands: “Tell them / we are afraid”, she stresses, declaring finally that it must be understood “we / are nothing / without our islands” (lines 78-79, 93-95). As Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s gift-giving exchange seeks to bind giver and recipient into a relationship, her poetic strategies draw attention to the decolonial possibilities of “cultural sharing” (Berglund 266), as well as the need for non-Native readers to demonstrate what TallBear calls a willingness to “stand with” Native communities and “be altered” (TallBear “Standing”). Though for some readers this commitment involves caring for people whom they might never meet, Native thought stipulates that, as Simpson and Manitowabi write, learning is “personal” and “living in a good way” is in itself a “disruption of the colonial metanarrative” (288). Like Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s insistence in “Tell Them” that her friends wear their Marshallese earrings “to parties classes and meetings / to the corner store the grocery store / and while riding the bus” (lines 13-15), Manitowabi maintains that “we wear our teachings” to demonstrate and embody responsible living (Simpson and Manitowabi 288).
Echoing Blaeser’s claim that a Native poetics “involves the impetus to rise off the page” (“Native Poetics” 415), Jetn̄il-Kijiner’s concluding lines in the final “Basket” poem address the reader directly to suggest their obligation to reciprocate and participate in the resurgence her writing encourages. As she describes a dream in which her “words / were / a current / flowing/ to greet you” (Poems 81, lines 48-53), these lines not only underscore the tide as a connective, dynamic, and revitalising force, but perhaps also gesture towards a dreamspace which provides “glimpses of decolonised spaces and transformed realities that we have collectively yet to imagine” (Simpson and Manitowabi 282). Through a poetics of continuance, Jetn̄il-Kijiner illustrates the vital ways that Native writers engage poetry to endure and adapt on their own terms, to produce more life, and to urge others to practise a conscious recognition of one’s inherited and lived past. Engaging modes of rich, culturally rooted response, Iep Jāltok demonstrates how continuance can bring a sense of security, integrity, and empowerment through violent colonial legacies and intensifying climate breakdown. Her poems seek to catalyse an active relationship with her audience through cadences and techniques redolent of Native orality, as her attention to modes of ethical being-in-relation aims to spark conversations on positionality, accountability, and historical contingency within a decolonial context, redefining the Marshall Islands beyond the damaging confines of American hegemony.
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Image credit: IJAS Online believes that the use of this image from the video/poem recital “Anointed” (Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner and Dan Lin, 2019) to illustrate this article is excerpted from copyright under fair dealing or fair use.
