Eco-poesia nel Pacifico, ieri e oggi: il nucleare e i cambiamenti climatici in Hone Tuwhare e Kathy Jetñil -Kijiner

Oceania has always been considered an enormous extension of sea sprinkled with a myriad of tiny islands: a faraway and scarcely inhabited region on the margins of the world, of little importance in the geo-political scenario. However, the Pacific was considered a strategic area for the great imperial powers of the 19th century, which annexed most of it. Today many insular states are still paying the consequences of the colonizers’ military supremacy and, more generally, of the industrialised Western countries’ environmental policies. First, some of theirs atolls were chosen as sites for nuclear testing by the French and US governments. Second, the sea-level rise is threatening numerous low islands, as a consequence of global warming and the melting of polar ice. Following the tradition of oral songs typical of that region, a generation of young poets has emerged to convey a “poetics of resistance”, through the social media and the web, and give a higher degree of visibility to their issues. Among them, the Marshallese “spoken word artist” Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner is probably the best known. Before her, the authoritative voice of the great Maori poet Hone Tuwhare had already anticipated the dangers of nuclear energy for the environment.