Just to say a bit about what I was doing in Kiribati, heres a note I wrote (after the Imodium kicked in) on the flights home, in part to give some background to a young local trainee journalist (Baua) whom we interviews and who interviews us on Wednesday night as the tide peaked high on South Tarawa. Troubled Waters is Sara Penrhyn-Joness project. Sara is a filmmaker, artist and scholar from Aberystwyth. Richard Gott is her ears; I am her pen; she is all our eyes. And this may be the start of my lyric essay, the work Im on the team to perform: If the land you live on is made of coral and it rises only six feet from the sea; if your home is a constellation of atolls, lovely in limbs, birthed in a sea as vast as it always was vast and growing no gentler; if your islands, though they may look like a scattered fleet of fishing boats, have not yet learned to float (like the laughter of your children, like your voices and your parents’ memories and the old ones’ stories, like your long coming to belong from elsewhere in this great ocean over hundreds of years); if your islands cannot yet fly like the fairy tern or the frigate bird or the crane—climate change is as bad as news gets to be. How do you practise belonging when the lands you belong to belong, themselves, to a sea rising around them? How do you cultivate hope when every idea you have of home is going under? How do you keep remembering when the future is swallowing the past: your shrines and holy places, your dead and all they have passed on to you from the play of the land and the sea here—of flying fish and sharks and winds and children and dance and how to dwell in wealth and peace and modesty and good humour? Where will your children live when they are as old as you? Where will their past live? The ancestors? The stories? Who will teach the young ones what is right when the coasts that schooled the elders are falling back into the sea? The night we left, storms to the north of Kiribati raised a swell in the swollen sea, and the king tide breached the sea wall at Besio. That has happened once before (in the nineties), maybe more over time; and the construction of the wall could be to blame, the way the causeway, an unwise but affordable way to link the port to the rest of the island, alters the tidal flows. This time, though, the sea flooded a maternity clinic newly finished. Most of Kiribati’s population are children, and these islands are children, geologically, and they cannot swim; they are islands blessed and accomplished with children; and here is the the sea which birthed them flooding the place where we have hoped to help the islanders give birth in heightened safety to their young. And how does such a predicament feel for three members of the cultures of the west responsible for the sea rise and all it may sweep away, three artists engaged with ecological issues: how does it feel to confront the impacts of sea-level rise, caused by lucky ones such as us on lives and cultures who had no say in what has befallen them What would be a fitting response? A useful one? What kind of hope can we find, what home can we offer, in our work, what good can we do, steeping ourselves is sea rise that is the price of our fortunate lives? These were questions we came to Kiribati to ask. But really we came to learn what a place in this predicament—if this is truly its predicament—wanted to teach us of itself and its people. For Kiribati, whatever its future, is an astonishing world, an elegant way of being, a poem. And none of us—not only the people who are what these islands also are, and what this sea has taught them to be—none of us anywhere can afford to lose what Kiribati knows and what it is. There are many on the eighteen occupied atolls of (the thirty-three islands of) Kiribati who are worried about climate change and sad about the damage it is already doing, and where her people will migrate to, carrying what they can of their culture with them when the time comes, and we may not be waiting so long. But most people are getting on with the present, which is hard and beautiful work enough, while it lasts. Some are more exercised by the overpopulation of Tarawa and how the cash economy and packaged goods and diasporas of plastic wrap are inundating traditional ways and places in Kiribati. We saw a king tide stop just short of sweeping across part of the island. We tasted fish. We ran up and down the road—and the world is one-street wide in Tarawa—that is remaking the Kiribati capital and wrapping the whole place in coral dust. We ate and drank coconuts and all manner of fish; we went to a wedding; we spent time in traditional villages; we danced (if that’s the word for it!); we picked up coral and looked at fishtraps; we walked on beaches and traveled by truck and motorbike and bus; we tasted rain, and we listened to creation stories told be the only old men who have the gift of telling them and we heard from elders the tales associated with certain shrines, we performed the rites we had to perform to receive welcome, we fell into a sense of community with these islands, which are the children of the world. And this trip was only a start. Still, it will allow us begin to make poems and films and sound recordings, artistic responses that seem to us more able (that journalistic or academic responses) to come to know a place in its predicament, and to do justice in art (of word and image and sound) to the genius of this place staring down its fate with grace. (Further background: Troubled Waters: heritage in times of accelerated climate change is a research project based in Wales. We are a small team of scholars and artists concerned with gathering qualitative data (expert and personal reflections on the impact of climate change and an impending future radically altered by it; and our own experience (together) of climate-change-affected coastal areas) and with rendering that data, some instances of what climate change feels like where rising seas meet storied landscapes, into artistic responses (collaborative film, sound, and poetic works) more adequate, we believe, than academic, journalistic, and bureaucratic texts to capture the inner life of climate change, its impacts on ways of knowing, on social, ethical and social and linguistic practices, on spiritual systems and traditional beliefs, on what place and home mean in people’s lives. The project brings together eco-humanities scholars and creative artists from Wales, England, and Australia, and involves close collaboration with many activists, thinkers, fieldworkers and other engaged coast-dwellers in our three sites. We are considering the effects of climate change on comparative sites in the UK (Cornwall and Wales) and in Kiribati. Our focus is on cultural heritage, so we are asking questions to better understand what heritage or heritage of loss might mean in the context of climate change. Although the severity of coastal erosion and other climate change impacts are far less extreme in the UK, we are also a shrinking island and experienced extreme and damaging weather events during the winter storms of 2014–15. We spent most of our time in Kiribati on South Tarawa, where over-population, westernisation, transition to a cash economy, pollution, and domestic violence ompound and conflate the impacts of rising sea levels and coastal erosion on life and culture; we visited and stayed on Abaiang and North Tarawa, where traditional cultures seem more tangibly to persist; we spoke with many members of the Kiribati community on those three islands, to many expat and local officers of government agencies, NGOs and universities, involved in road-building and policy development, teaching, helthcare, engineering, advocacy and water management. We interviewed President Tong Ieremia Tabai; cultural Oficer Natan Itonga; and former academic Teweiariki Teaero and many members of the community. We have also been guided by Claire Anterea (Kirican) and Pelenese Alofa*2. It is too early to announce any definitive conclusions from our research, but out initial impressions have suggested that the culture o Kiribati is very rich, and of central importance to its citizens. It is also impossible to truly consider the effects of climate change without considering what this means in cultural terms. What would it mean to the identity and life of the Kiribati citizen if the coconut tree is threatened, for instance? What would it mean to leave Kiribati and have be assimilated into another culture of a host-country in the future? How can we anticipate and prepare for a uncertain future, and how can culture suvrvive or support such transitions?
Posted on: Sat, 24 Jan 2015 22:21:22 +0000