When You Come From Water

      “Atlas” by Terisa Siagatonu

      If you open up any atlas

      and take a look at a map of the world,

      almost every single one of them

      slices the Pacific Ocean in half.

      To the human eye,

      every map centers all the land masses on Earth

      creating the illusion

      that water can handle the butchering

      and be pushed to the edges

      of the world.

      As if the Pacific Ocean isn’t the largest body

      living today, beating the loudest heart,

      the reason why land has a pulse in the first place.

      The audacity one must have to create a visual so

     violent as to assume that no one comes

      from water so no one will care

      what you do with it

      and yet,

      people came from land,

      are still coming from land,

      and look what was done to them.

      When people ask me where I’m from,

      they don’t believe me when I say water.

      So instead, I tell them that home is a machete

      and that I belong to places

      that don’t belong to themselves anymore,

      broken and butchered places that have made me

      a hyphen of a woman:

      a Samoan-American that carries the weight of both

      colonizer and colonized,

      both blade and blood.

      California                          stolen.

      Samoa                                        sliced in half                                          stolen.

      California, nestled on the western coast of the most powerful

      country on this planet.

      Samoa, an island so microscopic on a map, it’s no wonder

      people doubt its existence.

      California, a state of emergency away from having the drought

      rid it of all its water.

      Samoa, a state of emergency away from becoming a saltwater cemetery

      if the sea level doesn’t stop rising.

      When people ask me where I’m from,

      what they want is to hear me speak of land,

      what they want is to know where I go once I leave here,

      the privilege that comes with assuming that home

      is just a destination, and not the panic.

      Not the constant migration that the panic gives birth to.

      What is it like? To know that home is something

      that’s waiting for you to return to it?

      What does it mean to belong to something that isn’t sinking?

      What does it mean to belong to what is causing the flood?

      So many of us come from water

      but when you come from water

      no one believes you.

      Colonization keeps laughing.

      Global warming is grinning

      at all your grief.

      How you mourn the loss of a home

      that isn’t even gone yet.

      That no one believes you’re from.

      How everyone is beginning

      to hear more about your island

      but only in the context of

      vacations and honeymoons,

      football and military life,

      exotic women exotic fruit exotic beaches

      but never asks about the rest of its body.

      The water.

      The islands breathing in it.

      The reason why they’re sinking.

      No one visualizes islands in the Pacific

      as actually being there.

      You explain and explain and clarify

      and correct their incorrect pronunciation

      and explain

      until they remember just how vast your ocean is,

      how microscopic your islands look in it,

      how easy it is to miss when looking

      on a map of the world.

      Excuses people make

      for why they didn’t see it

      before.

      Source: Poetry (April 2018)

Special thanks to my wife, Annie Nash, for bringing this poem, this remarkable poet, to my attention.

Peter Adam Nash