1Craig Santos Perez is an Indigenous poet, scholar and activist from Guåhan (Guam), Micronesia’s largest island. Guåhan is an unincorporated territory (not a state) of the United States of America. Residents of Guåhan are American citizens by birth, but with restricted voting rights – notably, they cannot participate in presidential elections. Its Indigenous people, the CHamoru (Chamorro), originally sailed from Austronesia and settled the island around 4,000 years ago. A CHamoru himself, Perez is the author of from unincorporated territory, a much-acclaimed series of visual poetry (2008-2017).

2He is also the author and performer of very broadly broadcasted (notably through YouTube) “Praise Song for Oceania” (2016a), another piece of visual poetry through which, with the help of Hawaiian filmmaker Justyn Kaʻolonā Ah Chong, he embraces today’s new technologies and contributes to a new literary genre: the video-eco-poem. Perez thus moves in the wake of Marshallese poet Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, whose first video-eco-poems, “Tell Them” and “History Project” (2012) propelled her to world fame as “a poet in the wider climate activist/pacific poets/pacific scholars/nuclear activism circles” (Jetñil-Kijiner, 2025). As demonstrated by many authoritative academics (Lai, 2011; Hsu, 2012; Schlund-Vials, 2014; Heim, 2015; Martinez, 2018; Jansen, 2019; Reyes, 2019; Knighton, 2019; Batista, 2021; Rausche, 2023; Bloomfield, 2024; Maurer, 2024) Perez’s poetics also speak worldwide about climate change, environmental justice, poetic resistance, Indigenous cultural resurgence and activism.

3This paper proposes to examine “Praise Song for Oceania”, paying particular attention to the way it navigates boundaries in relation to one of today’s most pressing issues: planetary change – i.e. human-induced climate, biological and societal changes on a planetary scale.

4I recognise my positionality as a global citizen of French origin living in French-colonised Ma’ohi Nui (French Polynesia), and as an academic involved in Pacific Studies at the University of French Polynesia: for twenty-six years I have been conducting research as an outsider attempting to create long-term collaborations that may honour Indigenous Pacific communities, in order to express my deep respect and gratitude for their cordiality and shared knowledge.

5Building upon the works of predominantly Indigenous scholars in postcolonial, decolonial and environmental humanities, and elaborating on the analyses of “Praise Song for Oceania” by Maurer (2018) and Kaito (2020), I propose a structural close-reading of this video-eco-poem. My purpose is to demonstrate that it deconstructs the political, epistemic and ontological boundaries put in place by the Global North, and constructs instead a global “response-able” (Haraway, 2014) relation to the Ocean, acknowledging “the indivisible connection [of] all people to the life that comes from water” (Lythberg & Hikuroa, 2020: 373).

6The video-eco-poem falls into three movements, and is framed by an introduction and a conclusion. I’ll focus on these three movements, examining Perez’s visual and acoustic narrative strategies, including non-diegetic sounds (Perez’s oratorical voice-over) as well as diegetic sounds (logically existing sounds within a scene), foregrounding the way these visual and acoustic elements problematise boundaries as central eco-political-poetic metaphor. I’ll first explore the boundaries between those who may and those who may not be held historically responsible for planetary change. I’ll then argue that Perez reaches beyond those boundaries to present a holistic eco-theology based on syncretised Oceanian and Christian spirituality. Finally, I’ll look into Perez’s proposal to erase boundaries so that we may all be response-able towards the Ocean. This choice of a postcolonial multimodal structural close-reading itself challenges the “disciplinary boundaries” and “compartmentalization” which have long prevailed in imperialist and colonialist research codes in Oceania (Smith, 2012 : 70-1, 8; Bernstein, 1975).

Boundaries: those who may and those who may not be held historically responsible for planetary change

7First, I’d like to specify that, throughout the poem, Perez’s voice-over delivers prayers and praise directly to the Ocean, whom he addresses as “you” – which postulates that the Ocean is a living entity, presumably with their own agency. This challenges the mainstream epistemological “environmentalist” boundaries according to which only humans have agency. And indeed, through a long non-diegetic anaphora on the word “Praise”, the song’s first movement celebrates the Ocean’s resilience to harmful human impacts. At the same time, it sources historical human responsibility for these damages. This is carried out through diegetic and non-diegetic sounds, and a series of matte shots – a filming technique that optically combines separate shots into one print. Throughout this first movement, a series of various close-up shots “combine” with a continuous aerial view of the Ocean – although, in this specific context, “compete” may be a better word.

8First, Perez puts the historical responsibility for planetary change on the Western conquerors and colonisers who impose their political and military boundaries onto the Pacific Ocean. A close-up on a huge U.S. Navy warship competes with the aerial view of the Ocean, while the poet’s accusatory voice, “the violence of those who claim dominion over you”, is nearly drowned by the diegetic sound of the ship’s siren (photo 1). This visual narrative strategy symbolises the dramatic expansion of U.S. naval forces in Oceania, and their planetary impacts. Indeed, although militarism is the most oil exhaustive activity on the planet, the Pentagon is exempted from international carbon emission legislation (DeLoughrey, 2019a: 23). At the same time, the acoustic narrative strategy showcases the silencing of Indigenous Oceanian voices, a process which started with the very first European contacts.

9The next close-ups, on eighteenth-century maps of the Pacific inscribed with Latin names, recall that these first Europeans, so-called “Discoverers”, seeing no land mass equivalent to their own, declared Oceania terra and aqua nullius – irrespective of the “Sea of Islands” (Hau‘ofa, 2008) and their inhabitants. Perez holds them historically responsible for paving the way to imperialism and its aftermath. His non-diegetic denunciation of “[those] who divide you into latitudes and longitudes” is made to the diegetic sound of frantic pencil strokes on paper. Longitudes and latitudes are concepts which the British finalised in the eighteenth-century, setting down imaginary ‘lines’ (a parastasis, or repetition of the same idea in a different way, of ‘boundaries’) and – together with other Western imperialist powers – national boundaries onto an Ocean which, to its native peoples, was not a space for separation but for connection (Hau‘ofa, 2008).

10Since these first contacts, Oceanian voices have often been silenced, and people and homelands “changed dramatically as a result of … colonialism” (Perez, 2021: 12). In the twentieth century, championing capitalist policies in the context of the Cold War, the U.S.A, France and the United Kingdom carried out extensive nuclear testing in Oceania, with fatal consequences to the Islanders and their homelands (Firth, 1987). In the twenty-first century, this silencing/erasing is still at work (DeLoughrey, 2019b; Maurer, 2024), as rising sea levels threaten to submerge low-lying Pacific islands, while the historically responsible Global North watches “the canary in the climate change mine” without taking significant action (Farbotko, 2010).

11The poem’s next non-diegetic lines, “Those who scar your middle passages”, refer to the triangular slave-trade that was plied across the Atlantic Ocean for two and a half centuries. Not only did it cause the death of millions; it generated “a new relation to the world and to the other” (“un rapport au monde et un mode de relation à l’autre” [emphasis in original]) (Ferdinand, 2019: 92) which results in the current “crime against the Earth and its conditions of life” (“crime contre la Terre et ses conditions de vie”) (ibid., 109). Perez’s poem therefore reaches beyond Oceania to embrace all the areas that have been subjected to the Global North’s ontological, racial, social, economic and political boundaries, which Perez’s anthology of CHamoru poetry denounces as “ecological imperialism” (Perez, 2021: 71). Ecological imperialism is indeed one of the root causes of planetary change: it is a globalised way of life which over-exploits nonhuman and human resources so as to bring material profit to a wealthy minority. The overexploitation of the Ocean’s resources and of the proletariat is exposed in the video-eco-poem’s next spoken line, “trawling boats taking from your collapsing depths”, and in its companion footage. Its close-ups reduce humans to mechanical parts in the machinery of industrial overfishing: the heads of the chain workers are out of frame, while their bodies can hardly be discerned, due to the fast motion footage. This epitomises a global, dehumanised labour force bereft of their own agency. The only clear focus in this footage is on orange plastic crates that are being filled with dead fish (photo 2). Ocean and humans are thus shown to be depleted of their sustainable conditions for life.

12Environmental scientists and scholars have coined various words to designate the contemporary era of planetary change. They vary according to the historical responsibilities taken into account. “Anthropocene”, the one most commonly used, points at human responsibility at large. But Perez challenges it because, like most Indigenous members of the annually-recurring Conferences of the Parties (cop), he highlights that planetary change has been caused, not by all humans (“anthropos”), but mainly by the capitalist Global North. Roughly speaking, the wealthy 20% of the world’s population have been responsible for 80% of planetary change since 1850 (Barrau, 2019). The first part of the poem’s first movement therefore targets the “Capitalocene” (Haraway, 2015), as well as the “Anglocene” (ibid.) (that is to say U.S. and British imperialist powers) and therefore stresses the role of the United Kingdom and the United States in spreading capitalism and in disproportionately contributing to global carbon emissions. In embracing the Atlantic Ocean, Perez also targets the “Plantationocene” (ibid.), a manifestation of ecological imperialism. In summary, the first part of this first movement unequivocally holds the Global North historically responsible for planetary change.

13Intriguingly enough, however, from the second third of the poem’s first movement, Perez’s voice-over stops pointing at the responsibilities of the Global North only. His subsequent enunciation of human impacts on the Ocean uses a small word that makes a great difference: the possessive “our” – “our sewage and radioactive waste … our pollutants and plastics… our heavy metals and greenhouse gases… our nuclear arms and naval bodies… our deafening sonars and lustful tourism… our invasive drilling and deep-sea mining …” From then on, Perez therefore endorses a global human responsibility for planetary change. Although a native of Oceania, one of the least historically responsible regions and one of the most severely impacted by climate change and radioactive aftermath, he makes the extremely arresting choice to include Oceanians in this global responsibility. Although from an island where daily life is subsumed by boundaries – Guåhan not a state; voting rights restricted; a third of the island occupied by the U.S. Navy and “Chamorus looking through fences at the lands of their ancestors” (Perez, 2021: 60; Borja-Kicho’cho’ & Hoppe-Cruz, 2010) – he chooses not to perpetuate these dividing policies. Although fully engaged in the decolonial struggles that are rife in Oceania, Perez posits that the stakes of planetary change are so high that they need to be prioritised, by all and sundry (Perez, 2023).

14I claim that the poet’s ontological choice is sublime. Not in the sense of the “apocalyptic sublime” which expresses a mixture of repulsion and fascination for the end of the world (Paley & Frye, 1986). But sublime both in the everyday sense of the word (i.e. of great excellence and beauty), and in the etymological sense. This word comes from the Latin “sub” (‘up from under’) and “limen, liminis” (“limit”, another parastasis of the word “boundary”). The final part of the poem’s first movement indeed pushes borders up and ultimately e-limin-ates (from the Latin “ex-limine”) the Anthropocene / Anglocene / Capitalocene / Plantationocene bounds commonly erected by environmental scientists and scholars.

15The poet’s positionality itself is sublime. A CHamoru writing in Hawai‘i, he chooses not to root the video-eco-poem in any specific locality. Even the end credits do not indicate where the film was shot. Just as he advocates the negation of boundaries, Perez seems to speak to and for the whole of Oceania, and possibly the whole of humanity.

16This movement even questions the boundaries between humans and nonhumans, specific to mainstream hierarchical ontologies which situate humans at the top. Toward the end of the poem’s first movement, a breaker is seen, in reverse-motion, to trickle up a cliff instead of down, and this water “unnaturally going up is reminiscent of the unnatural human-induced rising sea levels” (Maurer, 2018). By turning gravity upside down, Perez nudges us to “similarly adopt a topsy-turvy attitude, and to consider the world from upside-down, from another than human perspective” (Maurer, 2018). Through a lapse-dissolve, we are taken down, indeed, to an underwater close-up on starving bleached corals (photo 3). They are waving their branches as if sending an S.O.S, and a diegetic heart monitor ticks down the dying heartbeats of these aquatic nonhuman counterparts.

17The bleached corals are blatantly anthropomorphised, which, as argued by scholars like Bruno Latour (2015) and Amitav Ghosh (2016), is only logical, since humans have anthropised the nonhuman world to such an extent that it has turned anthropomorphic: so-called natural disasters are, in fact, cases of metamorphosed “nature” “retroacting” against humans – like the aptly-named “Frankenstorm”, for instance (Latour, 2015: 80). To Perez and to Oceanians, however, the Ocean’s anthropic agency has always been there (Huang, 2013: 122). His addressing the Ocean as “you” indeed resonates with a well-known ancestral Whanganui aphorism in Te Reo (Maori language): “Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au – I am the river and the river is me” (Tahuparae in Wilson, 2010). Both these Indigenous Oceanian discourses illustrate the interconnectedness – and indeed, kinship-based relationship – between people, waterways and sea: “A human person does not stand alone, but shares with other animate and, in the Western sense, ‘inanimate’ beings, a relationship based on a shared ‘essence’ of life” (Smith, 2012 [1999]: 77).

18For a comprehensive representation of planetary change, Perez therefore cracks apart the boundaries between species that have been erected by ecological imperialism; an advocate of decolonial ecology, he calls for an alternative, more inclusive way of inhabiting the planet.

Beyond boundaries: an alter-Native eco-theology

19After the first movement’s series of relentless human attacks on the Ocean, the middle part of the poem brings welcome visual relief. It manifestly decentres ontologies, and introduces an alternative worldview, in the shape of holistic Oceanian eco-theology. This is delivered through a long non-diegetic anaphora on “Please forgive”.

20This movement stands out for its singular filming strategy: it focuses on one visual subject, in one continuous slow motion, with one continuous diegetic sound. This sharply contrasts with the previous movement’s competing matte shots and clashing sounds, as well as with today’s fast-paced, over-mechanised, over-competitive and over-stressed global society. It compels us to slow down and truly relate to what the poem is now offering us.

21What it offers is a prolonged close-up, at ground-level, on the bare legs and feet and, in the second half of this second movement, also on the bare arms and hands, of a woman walking on a beach toward the water’s edge (photo 4). This is done to the continuous diegetic sound of her slow, deep and peaceful breathing in harmony with the muffled roar of the Ocean.

22What it does not offer, however, is the means to fully perceive this woman’s identity. Her brown skin tone may suggest that the poem’s focus shifts away from the Global North, and recentres on the Global South and more particularly Oceania, as implied by the poem’s title. In this way, it contraposes the Global North’s invisibilisation of racialised women in general, and of Oceanian women in particular. Since first contacts, the Western male gaze has indeed reduced Polynesian women to sexual commodities (Edmond, 1997; Trask, 1993; Largeaud-Ortega, 2022) and ignored non-Polynesian Oceanian women (Teaiwa, 1999: 253-254). In contrast, this prolonged close-up seems to honour “the power of women and the matrilineal customs of ancestral CHamoru culture” (Perez, 2021: 55) which holds that women must be given “the ultimate respect” because “land and heritage are given and traced through” them (Kuper, 2014: 12). Even in traditionally patriarchal Oceanian societies – like some “iwi” (tribes) in Aotearoa-New Zealand – women command ultimate respect, on the grounds that the original female element is the source of all genealogical lineages (Sadler, 2018). The poem’s unidentifiable woman in close contact with primal elements may epitomise all Oceanian women – and Perez pays tribute to them.

23Last but not least, because this woman’s legs, feet, arms and hands are bare, they give us no information on her socio-economic status either. In all those respects, what the poem does not show actually speaks volume. Foregrounding an Indigenous woman and withholding information on ethnicity and social class powerfully advocates a world free of Western patriarchal modes of hierarchy. To buttress this argument, I’ll compare the focus on this woman’s feet and hands, with the first movement’s focus on the proletarian sea workers’ bodies. In both instances, the characters’ heads are out of frame. Yet, while the metaphorical beheading in the first movement spells oppression, in the second movement, it liberates from “the restrictions of colonialism and… from neo-colonial forms of globalization” (DeLoughrey & Handley, 2011: 3). In the first movement, the off-ground fragmented bodies incarnate global social inequalities, political discriminations, and slaughtered ecosystems. In the second movement, the figure’s feet and hands, connected to sand and sea, reach beyond the Global divide as “a marker of relationality” (Mueller, 2022: 147). While the first movement epitomises “dismemberment”, i.e. “splitting of the self”, the second one “re-members” as it “puts the traumatised pieces of the self back together again” with land and sea (Klein, 2024).

24Importantly too, throughout the poem’s second movement, the close-up at ground level abates human hubris. Human hubris is precisely what has led humans into believing that they are superior to all, and can over-exploit nonhuman and human resources, destroy the planet’s biodiversity and modify its atmosphere, with no consequences to themselves. This ground level shooting, instead, expresses humility. The poem’s second movement therefore intersects racial, gender and socio-economic justice with climate change. The Indigenous woman’s evanescent footprints on the wet sand contrast with the carbon footprint of most global activities, which are geared to “impact Earth’s climate and sea level for hundreds of thousands of years” (Archer, 2016 [2009], back cover). In the same way, her bare legs and feet contrast with the non-diegetic references to armoured “naval bodies” and “cabling veins”. And the diegetic sound of her peaceful breathing contrasts with the non-diegetic “acidic breath” of the Ocean.

25In the second half of this second movement, the woman has reached the sea’s edge. This part opens with the lines “Praise your capacity for mercy”. Then starts a long anaphora on “Please”, where the voice-over addresses prayers to the Ocean so that the Ocean may protect us – and not the other way round, as is often hubristically claimed.

26As these prayers are addressed to the Ocean, the woman bends down to the sea and her hands and arms become visible. Her body therefore shapes like a metaphorical bow. This might be reminiscent of the Biblical rainbow, token of a covenant that “the waters will no more become a flood to destroy” (Genesis 9: 12). The whole poem’s phraseology is indeed typically Christian, and its very title, “Praise Song for Oceania”, resembles Pope Francis’ encyclical’s, Laudato si’ (“Praise be to you”), published the year before Perez’s poem. Both texts might be perceived as calls for an “‘ecological conversion’, whereby the effects of their encounter with Jesus Christ become evident in their relationship with the world around them” (Pope Francis, 2015: §217). Although an early instrument of colonisation, the Christian faith has long been fully appropriated and Indigenised by Oceanians (Wendt, 1999: 411), especially in Guåhan (Guam) where the first Spanish mission was established as early as 1668. Perez’s voice-over imploring the Ocean for “Please… just one more fish” could therefore be a plea for a contemporary Holy Eucharist, or miraculous multiplication of loaves and fishes.

27Yet, obviously enough, the poem’s eco-theology also conveys back to autochthonous Oceanian cosmologies. The “fish” Perez asks for also refers to “te ika” – “fish” in proto-Polynesian – a prominent feature in Oceanian foundational narratives. To quote just a few, the Māori name for Aotearoa (New Zealand)’s “North Island” is “Te Ika a Maui” (“Maui’s Fish”), a testament to the fact that the island, originally a giant fish, was hooked up by founding semi-god Maui. Likewise, the island of Tahiti in Ma’ohi Nui (French Polynesia) is said to emanate from a legendary fish located in Ra’iatea, also known as Havai’i, the mythical island of origins (Saura, 2020). And Guåhan (Guam) was once nearly devoured by a giant fish, until a group of young women wove their hair into a net, caught the monstrous fish and saved the island (Perez, 2021: 53-4; Bevacqua et al., 2016). Borrowing from Perez’s examination of “CHamoru ecopoetics”, I will say that his poem here again re-members Oceanians, it reconnects them to the Ocean and to their sacred creation stories, and it honours Oceanian ancestors (Perez, 2021: 44; Walker, 2008, 92; Hobsbawm & Ranger, 2012).

28Instead of boundaries, the poem’s eco-theology therefore implements James Clifford’s “articulation theory”, according to which Indigenous identities and cultures have shaped themselves by connecting “inner” elements with “exterior” forms “in processes of selective, syncretic transformation” (Clifford, 2001: 473). This call for a holistic bond to the Ocean moves in the wake of Oceanian “contextual theology” such as developed by Tongan theologist Sione ‘Amanaki Havea, whose concept of “coconut theology” – arguably “the most distinctive formulation of Pacific theology” (Palu, 2002: 35) – likewise joins Christian theology and Pacific identity (Tomlinson, 2020: 66). Perez’s call also resonates with Ghosh’s argument that religious affiliations should be at the forefront of the struggle against planetary change:

“Climate change represents, in its very nature, an unresolvable problem for modern nations in terms of their biopolitical mission and the practices of governance that are associated with it… [Religious mass organisations, in contrast,] possess the ability to mobilize people in far greater numbers than any others… they transcend nation-states, and they all acknowledge intergenerational, long-term responsibilities.” (Ghosh, 2016: 159-161)

29This holistic bond is vividly illustrated in the second movement’s last long close-ups on the Indigenous woman’s feet and hands. When her hands come in contact with the water’s surface, there is no symbol of greed and exploitation: just touching and connecting with the Ocean (photo 5). This footage suggests a mutual unction, in the sense of both a treatment and a religious rite. In this holistic attitude, her hands join, not palm to palm as in many religious practices worldwide, but palms to sea. And when her ankles and wrists are girdled with silvery flowing water, it seems that the shackles of slavery and of global thought enunciated in the poem’s first movement, are now being washed away. The poem’s second movement closes with these spoken lines: “Please spare our low-lying islands and atolls / Please spare our coastal villages and cities / Please let us cross safely to a land without war”. Their companion footage shows a wave receding, which allows the woman’s hands to gently land on the sand. This whole sequence gives the impression that sea levels are no longer rising, but receding. It intimates that there is hope for reconciliation between Ocean and humans.

No boundaries: our “response-abilities” for the Ocean

30Hope is precisely what the third movement of the poem celebrates, from its opening line: “Praise your capacity for hope”. This last movement urges us to launch into action. This call is delivered through a long non-diegetic anaphora on “Praise”, which resumes the first movement’s same anaphora, but with a major difference. This time, the focus is on “response-abilities”. And it showcases a diversity of human activities that aim at, not harming, but caring for the Ocean.

31As in the first movement also, the filming technique is a succession of matte shots with close-ups on the Ocean and on human activities, overlapping each other, but here again with a significant difference: the separate shots are seen to “combine” instead of “compete”. The same sense of what I would call an ‘Ocean-human teamwork’, applies in the soundtrack: throughout this third movement, the muffled diegetic roar of the Ocean mixes with the muffled diegetic shouts of activists and demonstrators.

32Another significant difference between the first and third movements lies in the editing strategy, regarding the pace at which shots of human activities follow one another. The first movement illustrates the way humans have been modifying the Earth’s system for “an immensity of deep future time” (Archer, 2016 [2009]: xi). The current climate is not going to return to normal in any human-scale foreseeable future. Accordingly, the pace in the poem’s first movement is slow, in tune with these deep future prospects. In the third movement, however, the pace is remarkably fast. This sets the beat for immediate reaction. Humanity’s time window is shrinking by the hour, as emphasised by the successive Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (ipcc)’s reports: “We are at a crossroads”… “It’s now or never, if we want to limit global warming to 1.5°C (2.7°F)” (ipcc, Chair Hoesung Lee, 2022), “Limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) is still possible, but only if we act immediately” (ipcc, Chair Hoesung Lee, 2023). In Perez’s poem, this sense of urgency is expressed by a whirlwind of activities flashing up on the screen, somewhat in the manner of emergency flashing lights.

33The poem’s third movement not only urges us to act at once; it also urges us to act on all fronts. It therefore displays a very large array of miscellaneous human activities, ranging from the civil and political, to the scientific and cultural. This kaleidoscopic narrative strategy reverberates Indigenous scholars’ persistent calls to re-present scientific and scholarly discourse in a way that includes and illuminates Indigenous worldviews (Wehi, Beggs & McAllister, 2019; Kurashima, Jeremiah & Ticktin, 2017).

34The first footage shows various kinds of activists. Crowds of demonstrators are seen marching in the middle of tropical urban streets, waving flags and bills – one of them reads “We stand sacred”, an echo of the CHamoru activist group “Our Islands Are Sacred”’s rallying claims – to their diegetic shouts and hoots. This urges us to engage in collective “response-abilities”, which corroborates Ghosh’s statement that planetary change is “self-evidently a problem of the global commons, requiring collective action … to find a way out of the individualizing imaginary in which we are trapped” (Ghosh, 2016: 132).

35The protestors marching on land soon lapse-dissolve into activists sailing on the Ocean, so people on land and Ocean are seen moving together, making common progress. The voice-over enumerates the names of ships that have become iconic in the implementation of collective “response-abilities”, like Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior and Arctic Sunrise and the Polynesian double-hulled voyaging canoe Hokuleʻa. This narrative process highlights that there should be no boundaries between activists on land and on sea. Neither should there be any boundaries between geographical north and south / Global North and Global South, nor between past activism and present activism: Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior ship operated in the South Pacific in the 1970s-80s against nuclear testing in Ma’ohi Nui (French Polynesia), while the Arctic Sunrise sailed in international waters in the Russian Exclusive Economic Zone in protest against drilling for oil in the Artic in 2013 (three years before Perez’s poem).

36The reference to Hokuleʻa further contributes to link together land and sea activists, since the Oceanian navigators of this voyaging canoe “stand sacred”, too, as heirs to the ancestral sacred art of long-distance navigation. Through an exclusive use of traditional navigation techniques that were transmitted from ordained expert to ordained expert, Hokuleʻa has been demonstrating, since 1975, that original Oceanian navigators did not just “drift” through the Ocean (Heyerdahl, 1950), but purposefully sailed across and settled the whole Pacific. This non-diegetic reference to Hokuleʻa resonates with other non-diegetic references, to “radical seafarers and native navigators… activist kayaks and canoes”, and with the footage of Oceanian figures standing upright on the decks of double-hulled voyaging canoes. One of these erect Oceanian characters is facing the open Ocean. The camera travels up their body from feet to head, making them look majestic and in harmony with the Ocean. As in a case of “The Empire writes back” (Ashcroft et al., 2002 [1989]), this footage and non-diegetic lines counterbalance the footage and non-diegetic lines that open the poem’s first movement: they counteract the thundering U.S. Navy warship, the maps with Latin names and “longitudes and latitudes”, and the metaphorically truncated bodies of chain workers. Now the full bodies of Oceanian navigators stand upright and proud in their reactivated traditional vessels. Present-day double-hulled voyaging canoes re-member the Pacific peoples: their ancestors were the true Discoverers of the Pacific Ocean (Hau’ofa, 2008; Perez, 2021: ch. 3). Their maps did not speak of boundaries, but of bonds to stars, currents, marine wildlife and cloud formations (Teriierooiterai, 2018). Since the late 2000s, Hokuleʻa has been circumnavigating the planet, conveying a “One Ocean, One People” message to the whole world, and spreading the example of a sustainable relation to the Ocean. The footage in the third movement of Perez’s poem foregrounds that Indigenous Oceanians are able to show humanity how to navigate planetary change.

37Like the first movement, the third one reaches beyond the Pacific Ocean, to include all Oceans and water surfaces. It embraces all kinds of activists and activities worldwide. The spoken line “Praise your sacred water walkers” refers to the Great Lakes in Canada and the United States of America. Since the early 2000s, Indigenous women of the Anishinaabe Nation in the Mississauga Territory (Peterborough, Ontario) have been reactivating a ceremonial tradition of sacred walks around these lakes. Their aim is “to remind people of their connection to water and encourage [them] to preserve it… ensuring there is clean water for future generations” (Beeds, 09/04/2015). Their motto, “Every step is a prayer”, resonates with every spoken line in Perez’s poem. The voices of these Indigenous women join with Perez’s own Indigenous voice: together they accommodate a broad set of Pan-Indigenous perspectives on the ways to navigate planetary change.

38The poem’s last movement also erases boundaries between traditional and modern technologies. Non-diegetic references to high-technology and state-of-the-art scientific research, like “aquanauts and hydrolabs… pharmacopeia of new antibiotics”, mingle with references to originally Indigenous traditional practices like “sanctuaries and no take zones”, inspired by the “rāhui”, an age-long Oceanian “tāpu” (taboo) declared on areas or resources for planned management. These lines’ companion footage displays ethnically diverse people engaged in scientific activities – like a scuba diver in high-tech shell suit – as well as in ancestral Oceanian cultural activities – like paddling and surfriding (now mostly leisure activities on a global scale). This conjunction of the ancestral and the modern is epitomised in the footage of an Indigenous figurehead sitting next to solar panels on the deck of a ship or canoe, sailing on the open sea (figure 6).

39Last but not least, this third movement confirms that there are no boundaries between humans and nonhumans either, since shots of human activities are interspersed with shots of marine wildlife, like a sea turtle swimming in transparent water or a dolphin breaking the sea surface. Non-diegetic sounds about “wave and tidal energy… capacity for echo location” combine with the diegetic sounds of a wave gushing through a blower hole, or a dolphin song. This recalls Dipesh Chakrabarty’s fundamental distinction between the concepts of “sustainability” and “habitability”. Sustainability is a political anthropocentric concept firmly rooted in the history of “the global thought”, which serves as “a mantra of green capitalism” (Chakrabarty, 2022: 81). Habitability, on the other hand, references “life – complex, multicellular life, in general – and what makes that, not humans alone, sustainable…, what makes a planet friendly to the continuous existence of complex life” (Chakrabarty, 2022: 83). By listing nonhuman activities alongside human ones, Perez’s poem engages in planetary habitability. With this end in view, it seems quite logical that, in his poem’s last movement, Perez should once again make a very arresting use of possessive adjectives. He attributes all the activities performed by humans to the Ocean: “Praise your aquanauts and hydrolabs… your pharmacopeia of new antibiotics… your Ocean conservancies and surfrider foundations… your whale hunting and shark finning bans”. This axiomatic shift marks the end of human hubris: humans are now at the service of the Ocean.

40At the end of this third movement, however, the possessive “your” mingles with “our”. This occurs after Perez addresses the Ocean in various Oceanian vernacular names: “tasi and kai and tai and moana nui and vasa and tahi and wai tui and wonsolwara”, which speak to “the connection between Indigenous language and ecological biodiversity” (Perez, 2021: 50; Reea & Rochette, 2022). From then on, the mingling of “your” and “our” resonates with the inclusive nature of personal pronouns and possessive adjectives in Oceanian languages, where “you” + “we” makes a specific “we” (different to “she/he/them” + “we”). We are reminded of Hau‘ofa’s celebrated title, “We are the Ocean” – although in Perez’s poem, this statement applies not only to Oceanians but to all, humans and nonhumans.

41I will now examine one last kind of boundaries: the aesthetic boundaries of literature. While urging us to act on all fronts, Perez himself acts on the literary one by “expanding the canon of literature” (Maurer, 2018). In “The Pacific Written Tradition”, an article published the same year as his video-eco-poem, Perez challenges the historical domination of the written word:

“the next time someone tells you islanders were illiterate, teach them about our visual literacies, about how we still read and write the intertextual sacredness of all things. And always remember: if you can write the ocean we will never be silenced.” (Perez, 2016b)

42In both article and video-eco-poem, he “redefines the boundaries between oral performance, literature and visual arts” (Maurer, 2018). On the one hand, the poem’s visual expression “reclaims the visual roots of Pacific literature”, such as were traditionally expressed through symbols in architecture, landscape, markings on the human body, pottery, painted tapa and tattooing, weaving, petrogliphy, rock painting, wood carving, “lavalava” or sennit lashings, and Rapa Nui “rongorongo” (symbols on wooden tablets) (Teaiwa, 2010), as well as cartography, spiral art, flower art, carving, canoe design, and performance arts and dance (Perez, 2021: 33).

43On the other hand, given the “relentless linking of Pacific literature to oral tradition” (Teaiwa, 2010: 733), the poem’s oral quality evokes the “kåntan chamorrita”, a longstanding tradition of CHamoru “call-and-response, extemporaneous, communal oral poetry” (Perez, 2021: 131). Indeed, its non-diegetic and diegetic sounds intertwine to create what Perez’s anthology calls – speaking of CHamoru poets Melvin Won Pat-Borja, Kie Susuico, Fanai Castro and Jovan Tamayo – “a sonic landscape that replicates a call-and-response narration” (Perez, 2021: 143, emphasis mine).

44Last but not least, just as the “kåntan chamorrita” has “survived within the CHamoru recitation of the rosary, contemporary CHamoru music, and CHamoru poetry”, here, its modern variant uses the Internet for its own purposes of navigating planetary change. The video-eco-poem continues the “kåntan chamorrita”’s “practice of borrowing and adapting foreign influence”, while activating its “deeply rooted strategies of appropriation and resistance to colonial hegemony” (Clement, 2011: 287-8). Its visual and oral qualities therefore perpetuate the pan-Oceanian ancestral transmission of knowledge, while its “short format and democratically shareable form… can speak to and reach a new globalized audience” (Maurer, 2018).

45Within this Global community, again similarly to the “kåntan chamorrita”, Perez’s poem may spark impromptu competing and/or communing voices calls-and-responses, such as the spur-of-the-moment “like” and “dislike” responses that are common practice on YouTube; but it can also “challenge all participants to listen and think critically” (Castro, 2014), confirming the essential quality of Oceanian communal poetic forms as vessels to intergenerational transmission of worldviews.

46This ability to sing “both forwards and backwards” (Flores, 2001: 22) to a planetary audience is brought to the fore, in the poem’s third movement, by an arresting “mise en abyme”. The spoken line “Praise your #oceanoptimism and #hopespots”, combines with the diegetic sound of typing on a computer keyboard, and (I am deliberately juxtaposing subordinate clauses to highlight the footage’s multiple layers) with a close-up on a woman’s eyes that are seen through her eye-glasses that are reflecting Ocean images that are flashing up on her computer screen (photo 7). These manifold reflections are thus literally ‘eye-catching’, which allows them to send us a strong signal: they are a reflection of our own selves as we are watching “Praise Song for Oceania”. And they compellingly show that the multiplied screens are a space where the Ocean and all of us – poets, activists, scientists and viewers worldwide – can act collectively.

47This mise en abyme indeed persuasively symbolises the Internet’s propagating power. “#OceanOptimism” has reached over 60 million viewers since its inception in 2014, and has “inspired an international outpouring of marine conservation success stories” (Ocean Optimism, 2023). Likewise, “#hopespots” is a social media initiative which, in 2020, had identified 50 Marine Protected Areas since its inception in 2008 (Hope Spot, 2020). This mise en abyme is therefore a hopeful mirror image of the entire video-eco-poem and its ability to virtually circle a boundary-free globe. “Praise Song for Oceania” has actually been circulating the globe very broadly: in 2021, it had reached 187K views on YouTube.

48To conclude this examination of the poem’s literary genre, I’ll say that, by joining together written words, images, orality and modern technologies, Perez vibrantly contradicts the narrative of the dying isolated tropical island; he challenges the “salvage environmentalism genre” which most climate documentaries have been trading on (DeLoughrey, 2019b:185). His video-eco-poem powerfully asserts itself as a groundbreaking Indigenous Oceanian poetical and political tool to inform, inspire, engage and rally people on a global scale.

Conclusion

49“Praise Song for Oceania” helps to think anew about boundaries. Unlike planetary change films that bracket out empire, capitalism, militarism and carbon colonialism (DeLoughrey, 2019b: 188), it points to the boundaries erected by the Global North’s centres of epistemic and political power, and denounces their historical responsibilities for planetary change. It then sub-lim-ates / e-limin-ates those boundaries, urging for the endorsement of a global human responsibility. The video-eco-poem next shifts from this relentless display of human attacks on the Ocean, to a prolonged close-up on an Oceanian woman’s bare feet and hands, illuminating her holistic relation to the Ocean. In this central part, the poem’s eco-theology foregrounds the need to restore a spiritual bond to the Ocean, a bond that existed in Oceania from time immemorial and is now articulated with Christian spirituality. Through a sustained slow-motion footage at ground level, Perez also advocates human humility in order to implement a new way of inhabiting the planet, where Western hierarchical boundaries between social classes, genders, races, cultures and species, would be neutralised. In its last part, the video-eco-poem gathers considerable speed to convey a sense of the urgency to act. Its swift juxtaposition of multiple actions by collective activists, scientific experts as well as by nonhumans, calls for planetary cooperation in order to build a responsible stewardship that may implement global “response-abilities”. All the while, the poem’s last part foregrounds the leading role Indigenous people can play in navigating planetary change. An emerging genre in literature, this Indigenous Oceanian video-eco-poem brings together oral poetry, sounds and images, traditional and modern technologies, making an appropriative use of the worldwide powers of the web. Its intricate interplay between all these narrative strategies offers new imaginaries for the future, and allows us to “conceptualize … efforts to protect, preserve, and revitalize the fragile environment” (Perez, 2021: 71). In all those respects, Perez’s video-eco-poem resonates with the hope expressed by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Chair Hoesung Lee: “There are policies… that are proving effective. If these are scaled up and applied more widely and equitably, they can support deep emissions reductions” (ipcc, 2022), “if we act now, we can still secure a liveable sustainable future for all” (ibid., 2023). It supports the hope that “The Ocean in us” (Hau‘ofa, 2008) may continue to sustain the existence of complex life on Earth.