Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner (b. 1989, Marshall Islands) is a poet, artist, and activist who chronicles the depredations of nuclear colonialism and petrocapitalism in the central Pacific. Her poetry addresses both the tangible effects of climate change and its psychic toll, in particular the feeling of solastalgia caused by the “lived experience of negative environmental change” (Albrecht 2019, 38). Jetñil-Kijiner’s signature medium is the “video poem,” which she describes “as an essential part of how I share stories with the world” (Jetñil-Kijiner, n.d.). Often, this involves reciting verse against the backdrop of a landscape that has been poisoned, scarred, or otherwise imprinted by climate change and the U.S. nuclear-weapons testing program, which detonated sixty-seven bombs in the Marshall Islands in the mid-twentieth century.

In 2014, Jetñil-Kijiner gained international renown when she read “Dear Matafele Peinam” during the opening ceremony of the United Nations Secretary-General’s Climate Summit. In this poem, the narrator vows to protect a seven-month-old infant from the encroaching sea: “They say it will gnaw at the shoreline / chew at the roots of your breadfruit trees / gulp down rows of your seawalls / and crunch your island’s shattered bones” (Jetñil-Kijiner 2017, 70). Beyond warning of an implacable monster that will gobble up the low-lying islands, “Dear Matafele Peinam” prefigures the deracination of future Marshallese, who “will wander / rootless / with only / a passport to call home (Jetñil-Kijiner 2017, 70). In this way, “citizenship is unmoored from its territorial ground and the lagoon of home is replaced by the pathos of a passport from nowhere” (Oh 2020, 608). At the same time, it has been argued that Jetñil-Kijiner’s poetry eschews “the teleology of extinction,” positioning climate change (and before it, the detonation of nuclear bombs) as a catalyst for worlding rather than as a future-annihilating event (Oh 2020, 614). From this point of view, the Marshallese are untethered from linear time, instead inhabiting a cyclical temporality in which they are periodically stricken by disaster but always build the future anew.