Introduction

The growing presence of Pacific ecopoetry and environmental activism on the political stage worldwide is revelatory of the urgency and impact so‑called natural dis-asters have on the inhabitants of this region and shows the powers of poetry in a fight that is often presumed to be scientific only. Ecopoetry matters in a time of dis-aster, a term that Maurice Blanchot defined as a particular time in history when the trajectory of a star (ASTER) is DIS-rupted, plunging humanity in darkness: “le désastre signifie être séparé de l’étoile.”1 Seen through this lens, ecopoetry testifies against climate dis-asters which islanders experience first-hand with many of them forced to migrate to survive sea-level rise. Pacific ecopoetry also engages with, voices, and challenges fears that grow amidst “apocalyptic” climate catastrophes. Perhaps does it also comfort trauma-readers and encourages them to act.

This article is woven on a dialogue between Pacific and western ecocritical texts to examine the intertwinement between the environmental trauma, poetry, and climate science. In her groundbreaking book, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999), Linda Tuhiwai Smith (Ngāti Awa, Ngāti Porou) argues that “the term ‘research’ is inextricably linked to European imperialism and colonialism.”2 The history of science shows that research has often used Pacific peoples as objects of study, disregarding the value of their languages, cultures, and knowledge, thus contributing to the implementation of colonial ideologies. As a French scholar, I am tauiwi (a foreigner) in Aotearoa New Zealand and the views that I formulate on the literature produced in these isles come from the periphery. Western theories, when applied, will thus be adapted to the specific settler colonial context of Aotearoa New Zealand.

A settler colony since the implementation of the English version of the Treaty of Waitangi (6 February 1840), Aotearoa New Zealand is both part of the North and part of the Fourth World. Damon Salesa (Sāmoan New Zealander) notes how paradoxical this situation is as Aotearoa New Zealand continues to be constructed as a western nation when it is deeply embedded in Pacific history and geography: “New Zealand is a nation that exists on Pacific islands but does not, and perhaps cannot, see itself as a Pacific Island nation or its people as Pacific Islanders.”3 The Pacific zone is particularly impacted by climate changes.4 Wildfires, droughts, floods, landslides, sea-level rise, earthquakes, tsunami, cyclones, typhoons and so on, are on the rise, threatening ecosystems, social structures, and the very citizenship of some islanders, as in Tuvalu. Environmental trauma has not spared Aotearoa New Zealand either, and the situation is not new as, in the 1990s, the government was already listing endangered species in both fauna and flora.5 Despite national efforts of conservation to preserve endemic species such as kiwi, kākāpō, takahē, and kauri to name but a few, the situation is still fragile and continuously threatened by human activity.6

In her doctoral thesis, Imagining Ecologies: Traditions of Ecopoetry in Aotearoa New Zealand (2019), Janet Elizabeth Newman (Pākehā) notes that “[i]t is in this environment of ecological colonial violence that New Zealand ecopoetry in English has its genesis,”7 namely deforestation, the gradual extinction of native birds, and the introduction of non-native species upsetting the whole ecosystem. The corpus of ecopoetry is growing fast in Aotearoa New Zealand and in the Pacific to raise awareness on human-made ecological dis-asters. This article especially focuses on two poems: “Unity” by Selina Tusitala Marsh (Samoan, Tuvaluan, English, Scottish, and French New Zealander), composed for the 2016 Commonwealth Summit in Westminster Abbey, and “Poem for the Commonwealth, 2018” by Karlo Mila (Tongan, Palagi, and Sāmoan New Zealander). Using a transpacific approach, this article analyzes the way ecopoetry testifies to climate dis-asters in Aotearoa New Zealand. After studying how alterity and reciprocity are constructed, systemic abuse on nature and cultures from the Pacific will be charted, to eventually observe how environmental wounds can be tended with talanoa.

Alterity and Reciprocity

In their introduction to Ecocriticism and Indigenous Studies (2016), Joni Adamson and Salma Monani note that Indigenous authors challenge Eurocentric readings of their land and customs with “cosmovisions – conceptions of entangled human relations with more-than-human worlds.”8 For them, these cosmovisions emphasize values like reciprocity and kinship. As Māori and Pasifika cosmologies construct the land as sacred, any hierarchical and vertical reading of nature is disavowed, offering instead a metonymic approach to describe the relationship humans have with nature. In “Unity,” Selina Tusitala Marsh weaves her poem on the vā – a concept which, in Sāmoan philosophy, designates the relational space existing between people, animals, trees, rocks, and the sea – and the vā of her poem builds a path for the international community to repair the damage done to the earth. In “Tatauing the Post-Colonial Body” (1996), Albert Wendt (Sāmoan New Zealander) defined the vā as “the space between, the betweenness, not empty space, not space that separates but space that relates, that holds separate entities and things together in the Unity-that-is-All, the space that is context, giving meaning to things.”9 Wendt then adds a short list of Sāmoan words born out of the vā, including “vasa = ocean (va ‒ space; sa ‒ forbidden/sacred).”10

In the vā of Marsh’s poem, differences are accepted and acknowledged despite the upheavals that they generate. The chorus of the poem, “There’s a ‘U’ and an ‘I’ in unity / costs the earth and yet it’s free,”11 inscribes the poet’s ironic view on colonization, globalization, and the Capitalocene. Letters have become humans, “U” (you) and “I,” symbolizing the gap between Marsh as a Pasifika poet voicing the concerns of people from the Pacific in the face of climate change and her audience composed of international leaders, including the late Queen Elizabeth II as Head of the Commonwealth. Belonging to the same alphabet, thus to the same humanity, Pacific inhabitants – though long discarded as “noble savages,” “warriors,” as well as “exotic” and “erotic” beings there to decorate idyllic landscapes occupied by white settlers and tourists looking for leisure and fantasy – cannot be envisaged as isolated, excluded, and marginalized in their fight against climate change anymore as the environmental disorders Pacific Islanders have been experiencing are now shared with the member nations composing the Commonwealth, since climate balance is destabilized everywhere in the Capitalocene.

In “We Should Be Talking About the Capitalocene” (2023), Wendy Arons considers that the term “Capitalocene,” coined by Andreas Mann, has often been connected to an expansive use of fossil fuels related to the Industrial Revolution. Yet, she argues that the colonial impact must also be accounted for, especially in its exploitation of Indigenous peoples, their lands, and natural resources.12 The exploitation of Indigenous workforce was justified in the colonial discourse by the enforcement of racial and gender hierarchies which demeaned non-white and non-male humans and denied their humanity as well as their ability to think and feel. Selina Tusitala March uses the vā as a methodology that challenges and subverts this colonial inheritance affecting “the Unity-that-is-All.”13

She emphasizes the bonds existing between humans and non-humans in a series of comparisons: “the salt in the sea, like the salt in our blood like the dust of our bones, our final return to mud,”14 finding connections between humans and oceans otherwise denied by western classifications. With this comparison, she stresses how humans’ survival depends on oceans’ good health and how saving the environment serves human interests. This line rephrases the biblical words: “Ye are the salt of the earth”15 – a parable that Jesus is said to have delivered to his disciples to impress on them how to lead people to the kingdom of heaven. In Marsh’s variation of Christ’s parable, a dying ocean means the Apocalypse, as humans are fomenting their own genocide when they destroy the planet they live on. The lines, “what you do, affects me / what we do, affects the sea,”16 weave the North with the South, the colonial metropolis with its distant territories. Power imbalance resulting from colonization and epitomized in settler colonial societies thus needs to be redressed for the climate crisis to be solved.

In “Poem for the Commonwealth, 2018,” Karlo Mila represents a world in which people from the Pacific communicate with natural elements, as in stories of old. She personifies the ocean in her poem, yet the lady ocean’s message to humanity is now one of exasperation: “she would say, ENOUGH!”17 as she finds herself stuck amidst plastic waste – the result of fossil fuel industry and overconsumption. Plastic pollution in the Pacific Ocean is the last straw for Karlo Mila as it invades islands, stifling marine ecology, damaging coral reefs, and poisoning schools of fish, transforming land into an open-air garbage dump.18 The poet further signifies the climate urgency experienced in her region with the metaphor of the canary in the coal mine, whose sacrifice enables humans to find a way out before being asphyxiated underground.19 With this image associating Pacific Islanders with tiny, caged, sacrificial birds, Mila contests the colonial and capitalist ideology underlying political apathy with regards to environmental actions. Indeed, Linda Tuhiwai Smith recalls how Pasifika were long denied their humanity because Hegelian theories claimed that people who had no writing system had no History.20

To contest fake scientific assumptions underlying and justifying the colonial enterprise, Mila refers to the genealogy of mankind from a Tongan viewpoint, as whakapapa (genealogy, family history) is interwoven with the vā (spacetime). The concept of vā which can be found throughout the Pacific also has its own usage in Tonga. Karlo Mila and Maui Hudson (Te Whakatohea, Nga Ruahine, and Te Mahurehure) argue that, “As va is a culturally located concept, it necessitates that this va is guided by principles of balance, reciprocity and respect – although all is possible in the va.”21 Imagined as a “negotiated space,”22 the vā is inseparable from whakapapa as time and space are conceived in their togetherness, not as separate entities: “My people have always known / that we are all relatives, / common ancestors, / the same stardust / in all of our bones, / the rocks, the trees, the leaves.”23 In Tongan history, humans’ kinship with stars, plants, and minerals is asserted.

Tongan science is confirmed nowadays by contemporary western science. As Titaua Porcher-Wiart (Māʿohi, French) notes in “Imagining the Body in Pacific Francophone Literature” (2015), in Pacific cultures, “the body, in the collective imagination, is akin to a particle of the cosmos […] [which] appears as curiously akin to the very recent discoveries of modern cosmology.”24 Kinship is one of the founding principles of Pacific cultures. Refusing the western dichotomy between nature and culture propagated by Enlightenment philosophers, Pacific inhabitants offer ethical approaches to the climate crisis, highlighting bonds between humans, non-humans, and more-than-humans despite their differences. In her poem, Karlo Mila thus challenges the narrative of “progress” professed during colonization, presenting instead Indigenous epistemologies as safeguarding humanity from global warming’s apocalyptic damage which risks dis-ASTER-ing humans and non-humans from their interplanetary origins and more-than-human particles.

Charting Systemic Abuse on Nature and Cultures in the Pacific

In the “Introduction to Refiguring Disaster Temporalities” (2023), Chris Prentice (Pākehā) argues that “environmental disasters […] are inseparable from history and politics.”25 Sea-level rise in the Pacific results from global warming, itself the result of human activities polluting the atmosphere.26 Marsh’s poem stitches the slow violence endured by Pacific Islanders, at having had their cultures, customs, epistemologies, and languages repressed and sometimes suppressed by missionaries and colonists, with the gradual drowning of Pacific lands due to the Capitalocene. In Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), Rob Nixon explains that slow violence is “a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.”27 The temporal perspective he takes is a useful tool to observe chronic situations such as “domestic violence[,] posttraumatic stress and, in particular, environmental calamities.”28 In this context, Rob Nixon’s theory of slow violence seems an appropriate framework to analyze Marsh’s poetic construction, as she associates the fight against climate change with a fight for Indigenous peoples’ right to dignity: “My grandad’s from Tuvalu and to be specific it’s plop bang in the middle of the South Pacific […] / my ancestors were guided by sky and sea trails and way before Columbus even hoisted his sails!”29 In this passage, irony is used to measure the gap existing between Europeans’ (lack of) knowledge regarding the Pacific and Pacific Islanders’ modes of knowing the world.

In An Indigenous Ocean: Pacific Essays (2023), Damon Salesa argues that, although one third of our planet is labeled under the name “Pacific Ocean,” most world atlases and histories “marginalis[e], minimis[e] or occlud[e] Oceania to the point of actually having to fundamentally misrepresent the Earth.”30 Salesa explains how (mental) images representing the Pacific as a big blue stain – as though uninhabited and relegated to the background – have scientifically and historically been fashioned by two-dimensional maps drawing the world in a Eurocentric way. The imaginary fracture that these maps create on this region – as though an “East Pole” and a “West Pole” existed each on one side of the earth in the Pacific31 – seems to separate this part of the world from more important centers of power. It also erases lands deemed too tiny to be represented, and therefore erases peoples, cultures, languages, and knowledge from the map, constructing the Pacific as a blue desert, as a Mare Nullius. To oppose this western rewriting of Pacific history, Marsh recalls in her poem how, for the last 40,000 years, navigational skills and sky reading have enabled the different waves of migration and settlement across the Moana.32 The poet disclaims the myth of “discovery” (neo-)colonists perpetuate to this day – a decolonial theme also explored by Karlo Mila33 – and highlights instead the engineering prowess of her ancestors.

When Marsh weaves her poem with symmetrical patterns – with place-naming recalling how London exists both in the UK and in Kiribati34 – to offer empathy in lieu of colonial history, Karlo Mila portrays the British capital as “epicentre of epitaph, / epitome of empire35” – not as the navel of the world, but as a memory site for the dead of its former empire. Mila’s text asserts its trauma-telling objective, treading in the footsteps of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions set up in Australia under the name “Truth-Telling” (1991 ongoing) and in Aotearoa New Zealand (2018‑2024): “Truth be told, / it is the fear of future / that we most have in common.”36 Environmental trauma is inseparable from the colonial past. Mila preserves the “us” versus “them” dialectics, opposing Indigenous/colonized people to the leaders of the Commonwealth. Her poem is overtly political and addresses controversial issues like the content of history books, massacres, historical trauma, cultural assimilation, language loss, plastic pollution, sinking islands, and the fossil fuel industry.

Mila constructs her ethos as a spokesperson voicing Pacific Islanders’ climate realities: “I come to sing of sinking islands / in the South Pacific, / on the blue continent / where I come from.”37 Talking not of sinking ship but of sinking land and nations drowning, the poet calls the Pacific Ocean a continent per se, though made of seawater. The metaphor of “the blue continent” can be read as a metonymy of earth, itself often nicknamed “the blue planet.” From this perspective, Pacific Islanders become the epitome of humanity, the focus point of history, as they inhabit the widest territory in a 3D representation of the earth.

Subtly echoing the well-established definition Epeli Hauʿofa (Tongan and Fijian) crafted of this region as “a sea of islands” (1993),38 Karlo Mila’s “blue continent” encompasses a vast expanse of interconnected, multicultural, and multilingual lands, deeply embedded in a common history of migration waves and commercial exchanges. She praises “the uncommon wealth / of multi-world-views”39 present in her region and in the Commonwealth, to escape from monocultural, homogenous, and hegemonic narratives. Mila sings the heterogeneity and polyphony of her home-sea-land which Damon Salesa describes in these terms: “[t]he Indigenous Ocean itself is a vast compendium of […] stories, a compendium that reflects that it is drawn from the Ocean of (More Than) a Thousand Languages.”40 Her poem is a wake-up call for northern nations to hear Pacific Islanders and their own epistemologies: “let us harness our collective wisdoms: / diverse, different and divergent.”41 Ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and bio-diversities are presented as viable alternatives to a certain “helicopter” climate change discourse42 formulated by scientists from the West and which could run the risk of uniformizing the response humans can take in front of environmental disasters, using climate change science as one more colonizing and greenwashing rhetorical device.

Tending to Climate Wounds with Talanoa

Pacific Islanders are situated at the intersection of interpersonal, historical, cultural, intergenerational, and environmental traumas. In “Poem for the Commonwealth, 2018,” Karlo Mila testifies to the institutional abuse Indigenous children endured at school: “Almost completely silenced, / schooled out of us, / in lost languages / that were beaten / out of the mouths of children.”43 Residential schools in Canada, boarding schools forced upon the Stolen Generations in Australia, and institutionalization in Aotearoa New Zealand were all condemned by Truth and Reconciliation Commissions for having verbally, emotionally, physically, and often sexually abused Indigenous children taken away from their families and meaning-making social structures, with a view to acculturate them, censor their languages and knowledge, forcefully assimilate them, and steal their ancestral lands. Targeting isolated children via schooling and a systemic separation from their parents, families, and land have enabled settler states to weaken Indigenous social, cultural, and political structures.44 Yet, many Indigenous peoples have managed to preserve their customs, languages, arts, epistemologies, scientific knowledge and techniques despite numerous acts outlawing them.

Mila writes a eulogy of Indigeneity when she writes that, over the centuries, they have devised “intergenerational meditations / on what it means to be alive, / what it means to survive / in a certain set of conditions, / specific parameters of earth and sea and sky.”45 Already living in a “post-Native Apocalypse world” as Grace Dillon (Anishinaabe) would argue,46 Indigenous people are ready to live in a dystopic climate narrative. Mila expresses her faith in Pacific Islanders who, because they have survived so many upheavals following colonization, have the strength to face environmental traumas. Her poem thus unexpectedly ends on a hopeful note as she plans to rebuild a better and safer world where environmental injustice would have been solved, and equality would be the norm: “It may be the end of the world as we know it / but let us not fear / the remaking of another one.”47 The Apocalypse has already occurred in Mila’s poem and Indigenous epistemologies are its revelation, especially whakapapa, kinship, solidarity and aroha (“affection, sympathy, charity, compassion, love, empathy”48) which have the power to heal communities, natural resources, ancestors, and the land which they inhabit.

From this perspective, Earth itself becomes “a dream house / a great place to raise a family,”49 which includes the past, present, and future, human beings, their ancestors, animals, plants, minerals, stars, and deities. Recovery from ecological dis-asters takes the symbolic shape of a fale, a traditional communal Tongan house in Mila’s poem. This image of an ecological fale echoes the “fonofale model” devised by Fuimaono Karl Pulotu-Endemann (Sāmoan New Zealander) in 1984. Representing health as a fonofale enables patients to symbolically situate their family as the foundation stone of their wellbeing, their culture as the roof over their head, and the four pillars holding the house as their (1) physical, (2) mental, and (3) spiritual health, as well as (4) their gender identity, sexual orientation, age, social status, etc.50 The fonofale is also envisioned as being surrounded by a cocoon composed of the environment, time passing and history, as well as the context, which shows how porous and fluid the boundaries are between the fale/house of health/one’s body and the external world, including “natural” dis-asters.

Accounting for the impact of climatic events on one’s health, the fonofale model seems particularly relevant to analyze Karlo Mila’s protest poem. The optimism she shows at the end of her poem is not the kind of happy ending readers expect to find in a YA climate fiction. It stems from another source, cultural awareness, which acknowledges that one’s wellbeing as humans also depends on our conditions of life, climate catastrophes, social injustices, and historical legacy. As such, environmental traumas affecting the Pacific region can be tackled by its inhabitants and the international community, with collective stories offering support to witnesses while enticing the community to act and reconstruct meaning amidst chaos.

The fact that Mila first published her text on “adda,” the Commonwealth Foundation’s literary website whose aim is to connect writers and readers, is significant in this context. The poet invested the digital space to deliver her poem/speech to reach a vaster amount of readers across the world and have direct reactions from her audience. Timote Vaioleti (Tongan) explains the Tongan etymology of talanoa: tala (“to inform, tell, relate and command, as well as to ask or apply”51) and noa (“of any kind, ordinary, nothing in particular, purely imaginary or void”52). Mila indeed invests the 21st‑century version of a storytelling practice known throughout the Pacific as e‑talanoa. Lorna M. Probasco (Tongan American) suggests that “E‑talanoas are not a replacement for in‑person talanoas, but rather, by adapting and utilizing digital platforms to share and engage in talanoa, a world of learning for non-Pacific Islanders and Pacific Islanders alike is opened, particularly for those in the diaspora.”53 By publishing her poem on the Commonwealth literary website which receives comments from readers, Mila thus adapted talanoa to new technologies, engaging in an electronic version of “open, solution-oriented conversation”54 to entice the web community – notwithstanding their ethnicity and culture – to be the builders of the ecological fale/civilization.

Marsh’s “Unity” (2016), “Postcolonial Talk Back” (2018),55 and Mophead Tu (2021)56 all together could also be interpreted as instances and variations of talanoa. David and Kayt Robinson depict this rhetorical artform as “a traditional Pacific Island deliberation process that goes round in circles; it does not follow a straight line, aiming towards a final decision like many western processes. It involves a lot of repetition.”57 The fact that Marsh keeps coming back to the composition of “Unity” under various formats – a poem, a press article, and a graphic novel – shows that this story continuously shape-shifts to adapt to its audience. Indeed, talanoa is often used to solve conflicts, allowing space/vā for every viewpoint to be expressed, and accepting differences.58 When delivering “Unity” at Westminster Abbey, Marsh invited her spectators, mostly composed of politicians, to participate in an open discussion on environmental dis-asters, leading to further talks on means of actions and ways to protect the population and the land from sea-level rise and human-made pollution.

Her poem also interrogates the limits of politics in the fight against global warming and her perception of time in which the future occurs before the past can be confusing in a western, linear reading of time passing: “What we leave behind, matters to those who go before we face the future with our backs, sailing from shore to shore.”59 From a Pacific standpoint, her reference to migration waves (i.e. “sailing”) and to (is-)lands distanced from one another (i.e. “shore to shore”) contribute to representing life as a journey, a sea voyage, instead of “from womb to tomb.” Paola Della Valle also notes that “[t]he principle of walking backwards into the future is a basic axiom in Polynesian thinking, as expressed in the Māori proverb Ka mua, ka muri: ‘looking back in order to move forward’.”60 This transpacific insight envisioning time as circular and vast ocean space as interconnected challenges western notions of progress and of an apocalyptic ending, as it entices humans to act and change course in front of environmental trauma.

Talanoa therefore empowers Marsh with decolonizing people’s mindsets, whether children and young adults with her graphic novel, adults with the press article, and every age group with her poem, with a view to preserving islands from being submerged. Her response to colonial thinking is poetic, metaliterary, and non-fictional, weaving her counter-story into different formats to voice her concerns for her people and their lands while being heard from various standpoints and platforms – at home, at schools, in political committees, and on the internet, as her poem, performance, and article are freely accessible online – opening the conversation on “post”-colonialism and its consequences for Indigenous people in a time of “natural” dis-asters to a wider audience.

Conclusion

Climate change poetry from Aotearoa New Zealand, based on transpacific viewpoints emphasizing kinship with non-humans and more-than-humans, could be described as the cultural production of tangata o te moana nui a Kiwa. Karlo Mila and Selina Tusitala Marsh use ecopoetry as a political stage to convey several forms of environmental trauma that could be left unsaid and unheard otherwise. In this article, I could create a conversation between western ecocriticism as represented by dis-aster studies influenced by Maurice Blanchot’s philosophy, Rob Nixon’s theory of slow violence, and Wendy Arons’s understanding of the Capitalocene; and Pacific epistemologies which are useful tools to redress power imbalance and resolve conflicts resulting from colonization. The vā, whakapapa, talanoa, aroha, the “fonofale health model,” and “the sea of islands” are Indigenous methodologies from the Pacific which can prove valuable to understand the apocalyptic impact of climate change on Pacific lands, peoples, and customs, talk about it, and act accordingly to preserve biodiversity and cultural differences.