Runit Dome

Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner wrote her poem ‘Anointed’ in anticipation of the MAP trip to Runit Island. In February 2017 she performed the poem while standing on the Runit dome.

 

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 along 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 scattered with white sand scuttled

through pandanus roots

beneath looming coconut trees

beds of watermelon slept still

swollen with juice

and you were protected by powerful irooj, chiefs

birthed by 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 caverns

you became tomb

you became concrete shell

you became solidified history

immovable, 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?

Here is a story of eternal 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

to anything, to houses and trees

to shapes of other men

even kindling for the first fire

he almost burned us alive

I’m 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

without a fence

there must be more to this than

a concrete shell that houses death

Here is a story of another shell

anointed with power

Letao used it to transform 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 skin and bones, from strands of coconut leaves

while the boy cried Letao laughed

laughed

This 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

the lies we’ve been fed:

it’s not poisonous 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?

 

In February 2017, members of the MAP team travelled to Runit Island, where Dan Lin filmed Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner performing her poem ‘Anointed’.

The MAP trip to Runit features in the Okeanos Foundation’s documentary film, The Starchasers, which will be out later this year.
Watch the trailer for The Starchasers: https://www.map.llc.ed.ac.uk/photography/.

MAP interviewed Kathy about the process of writing ‘Anointed’, and the trip to Runit.

“When I was learning about the nuclear legacy, there were so many awful facets to it that Runit never actually registered in my head. It wasn’t until later that I was teaching about it with my students at the College of the Marshall Islands — that’s when it really hit me. And it also hit me that some of the students didn’t know about it, or it was normalised. And so that’s when I started getting the idea to do a poem from the dome, and that’s when I thought ‘Dome Poem’. Then I happened to share my idea with my friend Dan, when we met, and he was like, ‘Yeah, we’ll make this happen’. But people say that all the time, and it doesn’t pan out, and I never really expected it to actually happen…

Runit is a legacy of the Pacific, it’s not just our burden. When I was doing a lot of nuclear work before, I used to be very possessive of this history. I remember we had an event on nuclear issues when I was at the University of Hawaii, and they tried to bring in all these different activists and different issues to our nuclear commemoration day that was for Marshallese people, and I was like ‘Why? This is our history’. But then you realise that’s not really the way to look at it, it’s all linked. I think it’s definitely a global legacy.

There’s a part of the video where I carry this basket, this woven basket. And it had these white stones in it. That is actually a metaphor that other Marshallese might be able to understand. When we have the burial, we have the ‘erak’. The erak, that’s the last funeral rite. This is when we go to the grave again, everybody comes to the grave, they take these white stones and they scatter them around the grave. Everyone dumps out, from the same baskets I was carrying, they dumped out the white stone. It’s supposed to be a way to cleanse it, a moment to cleanse your relationship with that person, and to let go of grudges. That was how it was explained to me.

I heard originally that the dome was called a tomb by a lot of the people of Enewetak. So I saw this as a tomb and I wanted to personify the island. I wanted to be able to show that this is not just an object, or an event — it’s a living being. It’s an ecosystem, right? So the way I’ve been thinking about it for the past couple months is, this is someone I’m meeting. This is someone I’m gonna go see. So that’s how the poem starts out: ‘I’m coming to see you, I’m coming to meet you, What stories will I find?’ The concept behind it is that I’m coming to meet this island, to basically do its last funeral rite. I’m coming to have that last funeral rite for it, to mourn this island. That’s why I chose to wear black; that’s why I chose to carry that basket and to symbolically leave the white stones in the centre.

It was supposed to represent the horrific death of a place that was once alive, that was once lush. This was a place that people went to for food, they lived here, and it fed our ancestors. And now it’s completely dead. There’s so many things that can’t grow on it anymore. Even though there’s vegetation around, it’s pretty much dead. It’s not as fruitful as it once was. From the interviews I conducted, they were saying it was one of the more plentiful islands that they visited for food. This was an interesting practice, as I was creating art, and I was performing, but it was also performing a ritual, in a sense. And that’s what this entire process has been for me. And I was editing the poem all the way up to last night: ‘This doesn’t feel right; this doesn’t feel right; this doesn’t feel right’. And I think that was the value in it. I think that’s why it’s important to me. That’s why I really believe in this project, and I’m just really glad to be here, to have this kind of relationship with this place, that I might not have had if I hadn’t been able to do all of this. If I hadn’t talked to Dan, if I hadn’t come up with this idea about being here.

Originally the poem talked about how ‘We’ve tricked ourselves into believing lies’. So it uses a legend about a trickster, who tricks a boy into setting his village on fire. And I connected that to how we have been tricked into setting the ocean on fire through radioactive pollution. And so I say, ‘This is a story of a people on fire. We pretend it is not burning all of us. This is a story of the lies we tell ourselves. It’s not radioactive anymore. We’re fine, we’re fine’. That’s the original line. I changed that line, because I realised that it sounded like I was making the people of Enewetak say that they were lying to themselves. They’re not lying to themselves! After talking to so many people, they’re so aware of how poisonous their own island is, and how poisonous Enewetak is. They were just dropping little facts — not to fit into some narrative, they were just dropping things. I visited a woman who was burning trash, and she said, ‘They told us that if the fire ever burns blue or green, that’s a problem’.

So the line changed to ‘This is how we’ve been tricked, this is how we’ve been fed lies’ — ‘It’s not radioactive anymore. Your illnesses are normal. You’re fine, you’re fine’. So it’s a very subtle difference. But it was influenced by my time with the people of Enewetak, who are so kind, just so giving the entire time we’ve been here.

To be honest, I think a lot of people romanticise the ocean and islander people’s relationship to the ocean. Even islander people — in some ways, sometimes I feel like we romanticise it. Because at the end of the day, it’s a dangerous place. It’s dangerous, it’s exhausting. Yeah we get food from it, but we also die from it. Like I said, I’ve never been the type of person to want to be on a canoe. I knew how dangerous the ocean is. I have thought about it — I understand that the ocean is connecting us, that so much more of our territory is ocean than land. But I think the feeling that I’ve always had towards the ocean is one of respect and fear, rather than one that’s intimate. There’s a bit of a distance for me, because of that fear. Being on the walap reminded me why I’ve been afraid, but it also gave me a bit of intimacy too that didn’t exist before. Seeing the dolphins swimming through. Hearing Eva, steering the canoe, whispering to the ocean: ‘Calm down, calm down’. Watching the sun rise. There were so many aspects that you always knew would be beautiful, but when you see it…

Enewetak is extremely far away. It’s definitely one of the reasons why they chose it as a testing site. It has its own time zone. It has its own culture. That’s what makes it really beautiful. But it also made it vulnerable.”