Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner became widely known as a ‘climate change poet’ after being selected to speak at the opening ceremony of the UN Climate Summit in New York in September 2014. She spoke passionately about the dangers of global warming for Pacific Islanders, and performed a poem addressed to her baby daughter, titled ‘Dear Matafele Peinem’. The poem describes the catastrophic consequences of global warming for the Marshall Islands and other low-lying Pacific islands, which will disappear below sea level if global temperatures rise by two degrees.
'Dear Matafele Peinam' poem
Dear Matafele Peinam
dear matafele peinam
you are a seven month old sunrise of gummy smiles
you are bald as an egg and bald as the buddha
your thighs that are thunder and shrieks that are lightning
so excited for bananas, hugs and
our morning walks past the lagoon
dear matafele peinam,
i want to tell you about that lagoon
that lucid, sleepy lagoon lounging against the sunrise
men say that one day
that lagoon will devour you
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
they say you, your daughter
and your granddaughter, too
will wander rootless
with only a passport to call home
dear matafele peinam,
don’t cry
mommy promises you
no one
will come and devour you
no greedy whale of a company sharking through political seas
no backwater bullying of businesses with broken morals
no blindfolded bureaucracies gonna push
this mother ocean over
the edge
no one’s drowning, baby
no one’s moving
no one’s losing
their homeland
no one’s gonna become
a climate change refugee
or should i say
no one else
to the carteret islanders of papua new guines
and to the taro islanders of the solomon islands
i take this moment
to apologize to you
we are drawing the line here
because baby we are going to fight
your mommy daddy
bubu jimma your country and president too
we will all fight
and even though there are those
hidden behind platinum titles
who like to pretend that we don’t exist
that the marshall islands
tuvalu
kiribati
maldives
and typhoon haiyan in the philippines
and floods of pakistan, algeria, colombia
and all the hurricanes, earthquakes, and tidalwaves
didn’t exist
still
there are those
who see us
hands reaching out
fists raising up
banners unfurling
megaphones booming
and we are
canoes blocking coal ships
we are
the radiance of solar villages
we are
the rich clean soil of the farmer’s past
we are
petitions blooming from teenage fingertips
we are
families biking, recycling, reusing
engineers dreaming, designing, building
artists painting, dancing, writing
and we are spreading the word
and there are thousands out on the street
marching with signs
hand in hand
chanting for change NOW
and they’re marching for you, baby
they’re marching for us
because we deserve to do more than just
survive
we deserve
to thrive
dear matafele peinam,
your eyes are heavy
with drowsy weight
so just close those eyes, baby
and sleep in peace
because we won’t let you down
you’ll see
The text of ‘Dear Matefele Peinem’ was taken from Kathy Jetñil Kijiner’s blog post, ‘United Nations Climate Summit Opening Ceremony — A Poem to My Daughter’, published 24 September 2014: https://www.kathyjetnilkijiner.com/united-nations-climate-summit-opening-ceremony-my-poem-to-my-daughter/.
'Dear Matafele Peinam' video
UN Climate Summit performance
Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner has raised international awareness of US military imperialism in Micronesia through her performance poetry and her blog, jkijner.wordpress.com. Her work is closely attuned to the environmental damage wreaked on the Pacific as a result of nuclear testing and other Western geopolitical manoeuvres.
Kathy has said that performance poetry is her favoured genre because poetry ‘brings humanity’, ‘touches people’ and tells ‘stories we remember’ in ways that bald facts and statistics cannot. She began experimenting with performance poetry while living in California, to address Americans’ lack of awareness about the history of nuclear testing and American imperialism in the Marshall Islands.
At the opening ceremony of the UN Climate Summit in 2014, Kathy spoke passionately about the dangers of global warming for Pacific Islanders, and performed ‘Dear Matafele Peinam’.
Two degrees is the limit widely advocated by governments committed to mitigating global warming — a limit with potentially devastating consequences for Pacific islanders, since if global temperatures rose by two degrees, the Marshall Islands and other low-lying Pacific islands would disappear below sea level. When Kathy attended COP21, the global conference on climate change held in Paris on December 2015, she advocated a lower target of 1.5 degrees to protect her homeland.
Through social media, Kathy and fellow Marshallese activists created a public campaign for which Marshallese people of all generations produced art, music, and web publicity advocating the 1.5-degree threshold. They succeeded, and Paris Agreement formalised the new target of 1.5 degrees in November 2016.
Millions of people have watched Kathy’s 2014 UN address and performance of ‘Dear Matefele Peinem’ on the UN Web TV Site (webtv.un.org), or through shared links on Youtube, Facebook, and other websites.
Hundreds of thousands more have seen recordings of her other poems, interviews, and lectures online. Kathy has written that ‘Before I became a published poet, I was more of a youtube poet’. Watch more of Kathy’s performances on video via her website: https://www.kathyjetnilkijiner.com/videos-featuring-kathy/.
Portions of this text were adapted by Olivia Ferguson from Michelle Keown’s article, ‘”Children of Israel”: US military imperialism and Marshallese migration in the poetry of Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’, Interventions 19.7 (November 2017), 930-47: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369801X.2017.1403944.