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A review by siria
Iep Jaltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter by Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner
emotional
reflective
sad
4.25
A slim but powerful collection of poems from the Marshallese author and activist Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner. She is an accomplished poet, one who uses her voice to insist on the humanity of the Marshallese ("We are sweaty hands shaking / another sweaty hand in heat / Tell them we are days and nights hotter / than anything you can imagine / We are little girls with braids / cartwheeling beneath the rain") in the face of, in spite of, the appalling ways that her people have been treated in recent centuries.
Jetn̄il-Kijiner is frank about the very real dangers that her nation faces from climate change (the Marshall Islands are, on average, no more than 2 metres above sea level), and the ongoing health impacts from the U.S. military's mid-twentieth-century use of their country and its people as guinea pigs for nuclear testing (miscarriages bring forth "jelly babies/tiny beings with no bones/skin—red as tomatoes"; the young and the old die painful deaths from cancer). Yet at the same time she also celebrates Marshallese culture, and shows us the rich texture of life that the whole world would lose if the Marshallese lose their islands.
Not all of the poems work as well for me as did others—a defter touch would sometimes have served Jetn̄il-Kijiner better—but there's no doubting the passion which imbues all of them. Recommended.
Jetn̄il-Kijiner is frank about the very real dangers that her nation faces from climate change (the Marshall Islands are, on average, no more than 2 metres above sea level), and the ongoing health impacts from the U.S. military's mid-twentieth-century use of their country and its people as guinea pigs for nuclear testing (miscarriages bring forth "jelly babies/tiny beings with no bones/skin—red as tomatoes"; the young and the old die painful deaths from cancer). Yet at the same time she also celebrates Marshallese culture, and shows us the rich texture of life that the whole world would lose if the Marshallese lose their islands.
Not all of the poems work as well for me as did others—a defter touch would sometimes have served Jetn̄il-Kijiner better—but there's no doubting the passion which imbues all of them. Recommended.