“not yet / under water” – Rejecting Victimhood and Weaving Solidarity in Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s Eco-Poetics

Abstract

The works of Marshallese poet, performance artist and environmental activist Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner simultaneously evoke and refuse the extinction narratives projected onto the Marshall Islands in the face of climate-induced sea-level rise. Putting Michael Rothberg’s theorisation of the implicated subject and Rob Nixon’s notion of slow violence into productive conversation, this article investigates the victimizing discursive structures at play concentrating on the rejection of victimhood through poetic practices of weaving that establish transindigenous as well as planetary relations of solidarity in Jetñil-Kijiner’s poetry collection Iep Jāltok and the video poem “Rise” (2018). I suggest that the written and video poetry negotiate the space between and entanglements of perpetration and implication by weaving together the violent nuclear Pacific history and its discursive continuations in the present anthropogenic climate crisis. Although strategically playing with common rhetorical tropes surrounding the figure of the victim, the lyrical works reject the rhetoric of Pacific extinction and instead reclaim agency through a variety of strategies, such as the integration of Marshallese legend or the gendered motif of the child, while also commenting on Indigenous climate (im)mobilities. Further, the transindigenous relations of solidarity performed by Jetñil-Kijiner and Niviâna contribute to a refusal of victimhood by expanding Tongan scholar and philosopher Epeli Hau’ofa’s theorisation of Oceanic kinship through evoking imageries of water and stone as well as poetic practices of weaving. These solidarities are then expanded to open up planetary relations of solidarity that include implicated subjects of nuclear and climate violence against the Marshall Islands. Ultimately, Jetñil-Kijiner’s weaving poetics upset the binary of perpetrator and victim, work across multiple solidarities, and renegotiate implicatedness.