"History Project," by Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner (2012)
Author: Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner
Jetnil-Kijiner, Kathy. “Poem: History Project.” Kijiner, 3 Feb. 2014, jkijiner.wordpress.com/2011/04/13/history-project/.
History Project
at fifteen
I decide
to do my history project on nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands
time to learn my own history, I decide
I weave through book after
article after
website
all on how the US military once used
my island home
for nuclear testing
I sift through political jargon
tables of nuclear weapons with names
like Operation Bravo
Crossroads
and Ivy
quotes from generals like
90,000 people are out there.
Who
cares?
I’m not mad at all
really
I already knew all of this
I glance at a photograph
of a boy, peeled skin arms legs suspended
a puppet
next to a lab coat, lost
in his clipboard
I read first hand accounts of what we call
jelly babies
tiny beings with no bones
skin – red tomatoes
the miscarriages gone unspoken
the broken translations
I never told my husband
I thought it was my fault
I thought
there must be something wrong
inside me
I flip through snapshots of American marines and nurses
branded white with bloated grins
sucking beers and tossing beach balls
along our
shores
and my islander ancestors
crosslegged before a general
listening to his
fairy tale
bout how it’s
“or the good of mankind
to hand over our islands
let them blast
radioactive energy
into our lazy limbed coconut trees
our sagging breadfruit trees
our busy fishes that sparkle
like new sun
into our coral reefs
brilliant
as an aurora borealis woven
beneath a glassy sea
God will thank you
they told us
yea
as if God Himself ordained
those powdered flakes
to drift onto our skin our hair our eyes
to seep into our bones
we mistook radioactive fallout
for snow
God will thank you they told us
like God just been
waiting
for my people
to vomit
vomit
vomit
all of humanity’s sins
onto impeccable white shores gleaming
like the cross
burned
into our
open
scarred palms
At one point in my research I stumble
along a photograph
of goats
tied to American ships
bored and munching on tubs of grass
At the bottom a caption read
Goats and pigs were left on naval ships as test subjects.
Thousands
of letters flew in from America
protesting
animal abuse.
At 15
I want radioactive energy megatons of tnt a fancy degree
anything and everything I could ever need to send ripples
of death
through a people
who puts goats
before human beings
so their skin
can shrivel
beneath the glare of hospital room lights
three generations later
as they watch their grandfather their aunty their cousin’s life drip
across that same black screen
knots of knuckles tied to steel beds
cold and absent of any breath
but I’m only
15
So I finish my project
graph my people’s death by cancer and canned food diabetes
on flow charts
in 3D
gluestick my ancestors’ voice
onto a posterboard I bought from office max
staple tables screaming
the millions of dollars stuffed
into our mouths
generation after generation after generation
and at the top I spraypainted in bold stenciled yellow
FOR THE GOOD OF MANKIND
and entered it in the school district wide competition called
history day
My parents were quietly proud
and so was my teacher
and when the three balding white judges finally came around to my project
one of them looked at it and said
Yea…
but it wasn’t really
for the good of mankind, though
was it?
And I lost.
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