Iep Jaltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter
2017; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 91; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/wlt.2017.0044
ISSN1945-8134
Autores Tópico(s)Canadian Identity and History
ResumoWriting the Real is a considered, intriguing , and often challenging look at contemporary French poetry and ultimately an exciting introduction to a vibrant scene that can seem barred to non-French speakers . The collection itself is a dialogue with poets, translators, and academics as well as an invitation to the English reader to take a seat at the table. Alison Williams Chapman University Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner. Iep Jaltok: Poems from a Marshallese Daughter. Tucson. University of Arizona Press. 2017. 82 pages. The lacunae in literary and cultural studies of the Pacific is here mended and woven into the fabric of the basket in Marshallese daughter Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner’s sea of poems. The poetic gendered, cultural, and political genealogy she provides is at once gentle, lamenting, and instructive as well as harsh, factual, and poignant, narrating the broadest of Marshallese stories, from innocent paradise to nuclear fallout zone. The collection is bookended by basket poems, iep jaltok representing the matrilineal lineage of the poet and from which the collection gets its title. The second basket acts perhaps as a memoir or epilogue to a precarious journey, “a lineage of sand / a reef of memory / your womb a sustainer,” with directions for the next generation of weavers. Indeed, the journey of the Marshallese has been precarious, suffering the pernicious radiation from US nuclear testing in the Pacific in the 1950s. “We mistook radioactive fall out for snow” that lodged in “Bianca’s 6 year old bones” and transformed paradise into white- hot sand. Jetñil-Kijiner’s narration of radiationrelated deaths in her community, and her necessary departure from the “hot” shores of home, reveal an inhospitable resettling on Hawaii as an environmental exile. “Lessons from Hawai’i” exposes an America littered with racism and the stigma of being the Micronesian “other” whose cultural specificity gets lost in the metanarrative of not belonging “here”: “You don’t look Micronesian / you’re much prettier!” These poems are raw and affecting and provide the reader with a vital inside view of a little-known story. Having inherited the fallout of nuclear testing (as cancers and environmental death), having been dispatched to a safer island home, having buried elders and young relatives, Jetñil-Kijiner draws the reader on to the next catastrophe—climate change. In “Two Degrees,” she shoots from the lip about what a temperature increase of two degrees will do, not just to the Marshallese but the world; it will wash the “crumbs” of the Pacific “off the table,” swallowed by rising seas of affluence, nuclear testing, melting icebergs, and the arrogance of some of the world’s people who have forgotten their source. “Maybe I’m / writing the tide towards / an equilibrium / willing the world / to find its balance.” Reminiscent of the late Paula Gunn Allen, a provocative, prophetic, poetic memoir and way forward. Shé Hawke University of Sydney João Gilberto Noll Atlantic Hotel Trans. Adam Morris Two Lines Press The narrator of Brazilian writer João Gilberto Noll’s Atlantic Hotel tears his way through Brazil, adopting personas and crafting backstories to suit whatever he sets his sights on, until his wandering and deception place him in a situation where he is unable to slink away. Leaping forward at a breakneck pace, the narrator’s chaotic journey, wrapped in uncertainty, carries readers along with him. Shani Mootoo Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab Akashic Books Jonathan Lewis-Adey’s mother left when he was nine, but when he finds his estranged parent again, he is surprised to find that the person he knew as his mother has become a man named Sydney. Set in the Trinidad of her upbringing, Shani Mootoo’s vivid writing explores the pain and confusion Jonathan experiences as a result of Sydney’s choices. Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 83 ...
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