Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner

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.

One of Jetñil-Kijiner’s best-known video poems is “Anointed,” for which she embarked by boat to the Tomb, a concrete repository of radioactive topsoil on Runit Island, part of the Enewetak Atoll. Once there, Jetñil-Kijiner climbed to the top of the monumental dome-shaped structure, where she recounted how the breadfruit-rich island, once under the protection of irooj chiefs, was incinerated by nine nuclear weapons. One of the bombs imprinted a hundred-meter-wide crater on the island, “an empty belly” that was then filled with “plutonium ground into a concrete slurry” (Lin and Jetñil-Kijiner 2018, 1:59). At the conclusion of the video poem, Jetñil-Kijiner tells the story of a turtle goddess who gives her son, Letao, a piece of her shell with the power to transform him into anything he wishes. He turns himself into kindling for the first fire, which he then gives to a small boy who almost burns his village to the ground. The malicious Letao is delighted: “Licks of fire leapt from strands of coconut leaves, from skin and bone, and while the boy cried, Letao laughed and laughed” (Lin and Jetñil-Kijiner 2018, 6:08).

The metaphor of an empty belly, or a belly inseminated with monstrous spawn, resonates with the reproductive injuries inflicted on islanders exposed to nuclear fallout. Decades after the U.S. had scuttled its nuclear-weapons testing program in the central Pacific, Marshallese women continued to give birth to “jelly babies,” infants with no bones and transparent skin who lived for only a few hours and seemed to be “trembling on the cusp of unreality” (Farrier 2020, 187). Perversely, the U.S. government has justified the horrifying consequences of nuclear testing by invoking the greater good or the good of humanity. As Jetñil-Kijiner writes: “God will thank you they told us / like God just been / waiting / for my people / to vomit / vomit / vomit / all of humanity’s sins / onto impeccable white shores gleaming / like the cross / burned / into our / open / scarred palms” (Jetñil-Kijiner 2017, 21–22). Indeed, this narrative not only absolves the agents of nuclear colonialism but compels the islanders “to participate in their own destruction” (Biswas and Ryan 2023, 47).

The geological signature of nuclear fallout is most pronounced in the Northern Hemisphere but can be detected everywhere on the planet (Waters et al. 2016, aad2622-5). Similarly, climate change is spatially unbounded, present everywhere at once. In 2018, Jetñil-Kijiner collaborated with the Inuk artist Aka Niviâna on a video poem addressing the planetary scope of climate change—in particular, the fact that meltwater from the dwindling Greenland ice sheet is contributing to sea-level rise, which in turn poses a grave threat to the Marshall Islands. Standing atop a melting glacier in southern Greenland, the “sister of ice and snow” (Niviâna) and the “sister of ocean and sand” (Jetñil-Kijiner) pledged to slay “these colonizing monsters that still to this day devour our lives” (Jetñil-Kijiner and Niviâna 2018, 3:42).

Jetñil-Kijiner is the daughter of Hilda C. Heine, president of the Marshall Islands. The artist is based in Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands, and Portland, Oregon, in the United States.