North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace, 2014, c2013. 443 pp. (B&W photos.) US$13.99, paper. ISBN 978-1489509062.
Although “the best of both worlds” is a commonplace expression, I rarely encounter anyone or anything that truly encapsulates the best of two worlds. Darlene Keju, whose life and work this book chronicles, surely did. She embodied the best of both Marshall Islands and Western/European cultural life.
“Labour of love” is another cliché, but in this case, we really do find both terms of the equation in abundance. Ms. Keju’s life was shaped by hard, valuable labour overflowing with love, and her husband’s telling of her story is infused with warm, respectful, and sorrowful love. At the same time, however, I sense an undercurrent of white-hot rage in a man who must have learned a great deal from his wife about masking his emotions. Keju won her spurs battling American attempts to cover up the effects of the radiation that spread across her homeland’s islands in the wake of the sixty-seven atmospheric nuclear tests the US military conducted on Bikini and Eniwetok atolls. Years later, like so many of her family members and fellow islanders, she succumbed to cancer. Many people are brought down by cancer, to be sure, but given the incredible (and I employ that word quite literally) dosages she was exposed to as a child on her home atoll of Wotje, there is every reason to think that that radiation had a very direct impact on her.
Keju herself might have preferred me to dwell on the remarkable resiliency of the young people she worked with as a public health leader in the islands, but before I leave this matter of the Marshalls’ nuclear tragedy, I feel obliged to do more than merely allude to American attempts to paint her testimony as unbelievable. Fred Zeder, the American ambassador charged with finalizing the compacts of free association between the decolonizing Micronesian states and the US government, accused Keju of “the most nauseating example of bizarre propaganda I have ever seen” (372). Drawing on official reports finally declassified after more than a half century, however, Johnson documents American disregard for the Marshalls people that quite clearly amounts to crimes against humanity, and confirms every charge that Keju levelled. Adding insult to injury is of course another cliché, but Keju refused to be silenced by the American’s gratuitous insults.
What is more remarkable, though, was her ability to couple a tenacious insistence that the US provide properly for its victims with the gentle respect typical of her own culture as she promoted health awareness and education to the people of the Marshalls. She drew on years of schooling in Hawai‘i and on the Hawai‘ian sovereignty movement’s example. “After Darlene’s pride as a Pacific islanders was awakened in the late 1970s, she used her island cultural skills in combination with her modern school-learned knowledge as a force for change in her home islands” (381).
Her early childhood on Wotje Atoll and her young adult experiences in Honolulu were bridged by years living in a third setting, Ebeye, the speck of coral that Kwajalein Atoll’s people were exiled to when their island was converted into a missile testing range. The US Army practiced an extreme form of the segregation common in postwar America on Kwajalein, and Ebeye in those days could be likened to a township under South African apartheid. Keju’s outspokenness—“Don’t ever whisper,” she exhorted the young people she trained—was put to work trying to improve the rapidly deteriorating quality of life on Kwajalein and Majuro, combining her experiences in American schools with the low-key, deeply respectful social relations characteristic of her people. Using song and drama and working especially with young people, she used methods she learned at the University of Hawai‘i public health school with great success to redirect their energies. In the Youth to Youth in Health program she created, the people she trained promoted family planning and producers’ cooperatives and battled substance abuse and sexually transmitted diseases.
Keju liked to insist that people Tuak bwe elimajno (literally, walk through the rough currents to get from one island to the next, but also translated as “face your challenges”) (9). On Pohnpei, a Micronesian island lying to the west of the Marshalls, people sometimes exhort one another to Alu nan nta (which literally translates as “Walk in blood,” and refers to walking across coral reefs till one’s feet are bloodied). I have heard this misunderstood to mean the same as the English phrase “wade in blood,” but Keju’s translation expresses the sentiment in a much more effective tone.
This is not meant to be a scholarly work, but Johnson is a journalist, and his understanding of what we call human interest reflects, I think, the best of what C.W. Mills termed the “sociological imagination,” that is, the intersection of individual human stories with the larger sweep of social history. It is effective, compelling, moving, and absolutely honest.
One of the more remarkable facets of life in these islands is the way in which local cultures emphasize kindness, generosity, and quiet respect. Survival there demands the highest degree of resilience, and over millennia islanders have learned that these qualities allow them to get the best out of their underlying toughness. I have known many Micronesians who possess this combination of character traits, but Darlene Keju possessed them to a degree matched in my personal acquaintance only by Tosiwo Nakayama, the Federated States of Micronesia’s first president. Each showed how the ability to face challenges could bring about huge changes, while drawing on a rock-like commitment to gentle persuasion, as the Quakers have been known to call it. The best of both worlds, indeed.
Glenn Petersen
City University of New York, New York, USA
pp. 749-750