For the Land has Eyes: Soils and Bodies in Kathy Jetñil Kijiner’s Poetry

In recent years, Marshallese poet Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner has increasingly entered academic debates. Working at the intersection of poetry, performance, reportage and activism, her art is a fitting example of both aesthetic and material engagements with the legacy of nuclear colonialism and the environmental crisis. The ways in which she re-interprets her community’s local lore provide a link between the Pacific islands’ past and their uncertain present, which is jeopardised by rising sea levels. Going beyond Epeli Hau’ofa, who identified the ocean as a unifying element for Pacific islanders (2008a), this paper proposes to read a selection of Jetñil-Kijiner’s poems starting from human-land relations. In particular, poems such as “Fishbone Hair,” “Hooked,” “Lidepdepju,” and “Tell Them” (published in Iep Jāltok, 2017) will be discussed to explore how past and present catastrophes have reconfigured islanders’ relationships with the land. These relations are exemplified by their changing diets and imported foods, and by the dynamics of eating and being eaten (Chao 2021) that play out through human and more-than-human bodies in the South Pacific region. Specifically, the human bodies portrayed by Jetñil-Kijiner could be interpreted as territories of transition that connect the soil to the ocean and past injustice to present precariousness. They might be compared with ecological ecotones that link not only ecosystems but also timescapes in an ecological continuum, while retaining their own specificities. In a 2015 article, Jetñil-Kijiner suggested that the land has eyes. Indeed, even if people ignore or forget this aspect, soils bear the evidence of anthropogenic disturbance, exploitation, and slow violence.