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  • The Poetry of Climatic Witness: Slam Poets at United Nations Climate Summits
  • Sarah Dimick (bio)

On September 23, 2014, at the opening ceremony of the United Nations Climate Summit in New York City, the Marshallese spoken word poet Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner stood in front of an audience composed of more than one hundred world leaders and presidents—including the UN Secretary-General, the Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the President of the World Bank Group. She looked out across the assembled representatives, seated behind platinum titles engrained with the names of countries and institutions, and performed a poem addressed to her infant daughter, Matafele Peinam:

Men say that one daythat lagoon will devour you

They say it will gnaw at the shorelinechew at the roots of your breadfruit treesgulp down rows of your seawallsand crunch your island’s shattered bones

They say you, your daughterand your granddaughter, toowill wanderrootlesswith onlya passportto call home1 [End Page 558]

Jetñil-Kijiner’s delivery intensifies as she describes the lagoon’s rising waters, her voice gaining momentum and volume as the future gnaws and chews and gulps and crunches the Marshall Islands. This poem is ostensibly addressed to her daughter—it resembles the grimmest of anthropogenic fairy tales, children wandering through an insatiable, monstrous world—but it is also, circuitously, intended for the representatives gathered before her, the intergovernmental organization with the power to restrain or unleash the waters. Jetñil-Kijiner wrote “Dear Matafele Peinam” for this precise occasion—as an occasional poem, it is deliberately crafted for the audience before her—and her performance animates the climatic future, conjuring the nightmares of small island communities into the UN chambers.

In parsing this poem, Jetñil-Kijiner’s evocation of the environmental future—the lore of rising seas and intergenerational climate refugees that she imparts—might be understood in relation to environmental tropes and the rhetoric of climate justice. Or, since much of the force of this poem is generated through live performance— through Jetñil-Kijiner’s cadences, shifting facial expressions, and physical presence—it might be situated in relation to the rise of spoken word and slam poetry as literary practices.2 But the most compelling questions emerge when these two genealogies are parsed simultaneously, when anthropogenic climate change and slam poetry—which both gained traction in public consciousness during the late 1980s and became increasingly prevalent over the course of the next few decades—are understood in relation to each other. Which poetic and environmental commitments brought slam performance and climate activism into alignment? To what degree can poetic performance translate into representative advocacy for small island nations at a global climate summit? And perhaps most crucially, how is occasional poetry at the UN confronting a warming [End Page 559] and unjust world? How are these occasional performances structured to emphasize disparities within the climate crisis even as they call for a unified global response?

Jetñil-Kijiner’s performance at the UN Climate Summit in 2014 was groundbreaking, a poetic event that opened the floodgates and released a new wave of spoken word addressing the climate.3 In 2015, at the UN’s twenty-first annual Conference of the Parties, held in Paris and colloquially referred to as COP21, four other spoken word poets from Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, and their diasporas joined Jetñil-Kijiner, forming a poetic lineup akin to a slam team. As world leaders negotiated what would come to be known as the Paris Agreement—a pledge to limit the rise in global average temperature “to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels” (3)— these poets gathered through Spoken Word for the World, a global, multilingual poetry competition sponsored by the nongovernmental organization Global Call for Climate Action (GCCA). The Spoken Word for the World competition was premised on literature’s capacity to move an audience, to incite action in a way that mere data may not: “We don’t need another science lecture,” the GCCA argued in its call for submissions, “we need poetry.” The contest sought spoken word pieces foregrounding “the real life...

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