My first awakening of the untold stories of Oceania was in a classroom at the University of the South Pacific, Fiji Islands. I recall the presenter saying, “You’re about to watch a story you don’t read about in high school, about your brothers and sisters from West Papua.” I’d never heard of this island, so it felt like a can of worms opened in front of me. The documentary was about their history under colonial rule and fight for liberation. They wanted nothing less than freedom, which came at the cost of violence, death, and mental slavery. By the end of it, I got out my pen and paper as I brushed aside a pool of salt water in my eyes, and wrote the first line to my poem: “Inap Yu Harem Mi?,” which means, “Can you hear me?” I called on Pacific Islanders to rise up for Papuans. This was the beginning of my journey of un-learning and re-learning Oceanian history.
As I peeled back the layers of our forgotten struggles, I came across the horrific story about “jellyfish babies.” They were born in the 1940s and 1950s, during the American nuclear testing program in the Marshall Islands and called “jellyfish babies” because they had no bones and transparent skin. Historically, it’s been described that if we combined all the nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands, it’s equivalent to dropping 1.6 Hiroshima atomic bombs every day for 12 years. You can imagine the magnitude of impact radioactivity has had on our children, the land, and the waitui (ocean). I learned a lot from Aahti and Aapo—the children who were displaced from their island in the Marshall Islands. Today I stand in solidarity with all the victims of the nuclear legacy worldwide in calling for the prohibition of nuclear weapons, support for victims, and environmental remediation.
These stories remind us about the history of unlimited power and weapons, and our commitment as custodians of the ocean to shape peace and redefine security for the future. My dream is to see these stories liberated and shared in classrooms.
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