Cloud, Cloud

Siobhon Rumurang

In Egypt, at the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27), a South Pacific leader asks the world to bear witness to the death of his homeland. He is speaking from a screen. In a full suit, flanked by the flags of his country and the UN, he stands behind a lectern on the shore of a nondescript island. His voice carries over the sounds of water on sand, wind through palm trees, and tropic birdsong. He says his islands are sinking. Rising sea levels will swallow Tuvalu whole in a matter of decades. The world has not acted quickly enough since his last speech at COP26. International law determines that a country is legitimized by its physical reality. Tuvalu shrinks. Tuvalu watches king tides erode their statehood.

Addressing the international stage—including the imperial core of industrial and military giants complicit in the climate crisis—Foreign Minister Simon Kofe delivers his people’s final plan for relocation. We have no choice but to become the world’s first digital nation. They will move online. They will somehow upload 3,000 years of history, language, art, culture, stories, people, memories, places, sounds, to the metaverse.

The video is a three minute speech and a slow reveal. It’s a re-creation of Kofe’s recorded message for COP 26 the year before: a lectern and flags set outside, a close-up shot of his bust that pulls back as he speaks. That time, Kofe was revealed to be standing in knee-deep seawater. We are sinking, he said. We cannot wait any longer. A provocative staging, a nation and her ambassador partly submerged. This time, Kofe has remained on the beach and there’s a distinct surreality to his background. You are to believe he’s speaking from the same place as before—the last remnants of Tuvalu’s first casualty in the climate crisis—a small, disappearing island called Te Afualiku. But instead of rising seawater, the camera pulls back to reveal a simulation: Kofe is not in Tuvalu’s islands at all. Instead, he looks out from Te Afualiku’s digital twin. He speaks from a future homeland—an illusion which quickly gives itself away by the tell-tale sheen of video game graphics, palm tree leaves that cast shadows but lack texture. The uncanny flatness of Gaussian blurred skin and sand, an image that falters as it widens toward the pixelated edge. White birds and coral rock wink in and out of existence, a daytime scene is set against a contradictory black sky that is not a sky at all but a data void, loading…loading. It is the first digital rendering of Tuvalu’s family of islands. A reanimated corpse—swallowed by water, rebirthed online. It is the place where Tuvalu has been made to hear its last rites.

The video was a collaboration between the Government of Tuvalu and The Monkeys—part of Accenture Song, and therefore Accenture [ACN), the gargantuan tech company whose employee count is roughly the entire population of Seattle. Its global virality after COP27 belongs to ACN, whose client projects range from national climate advocacy to Bitcoin Super Bowl ads. ACN’s self-proclaimed goal is to help the world’s leading businesses and governments “build their digital core.” They believe in the promise of technology, that the digital future is as real and vital as the deteriorating present. When faced with the question of an island’s drowning, they proposed a sovereignty that goes beyond homeland—untethered, invulnerable. A 200 billion dollar company offers a powerful dream: if reality fails, the immaterial plane will redefine its tenets. In the future, statehood is forever.

Tuvalu’s digital-nation launch would reach some 2.1 billion people globally. I watched it on TikTok that week.

I had just come home from a public hearing: a new resolution to halt U.S. military construction of a live-fire training range. Some 6.7 million rounds of lead ammunition to be fired annually above Guam’s main water source. The resolution was our latest protective attempt in a years-long battle to prevent our islands from becoming mass testing grounds. We’d been here before—our third time in the legislature that year. I hadn’t expected people to show up. They came in a crowd: a young girl in purple overalls holding a painted sign, two old men in dusty polos sporting veteran hats, a row of college students in matching shirts, four senatorial candidates for next year’s election, a pair of moms and their squirmy babies, cultural dancers in traditional regalia. It was a big day. It was a long day. It felt like every big, long day we had organized over the past decade of military buildup activities.

We pled our case for three and a half hours. We itemized our death: 338 acres of bulldozed limestone forest. 260 football fields of our oldest trees and natural filtration systems, gone. Impending lead contamination. 79 ancestral sites impacted. Bones unearthed. Bones boxed and stored in filing cabinets. Re-death. Reburial. We appealed to life: 1.7 million gallons of Guam’s water drawn per day from that single aquifer. We took turns testifying. We held signs. We cited studies. A recurring song and dance performed on the worn edge of old frontlines—our litany for the surviving.

I said my piece and went home in a daze. How much longer of this, do we think. 27 WhatsApp notifications from three different community groupchats. Pictures from the roadside wave where my mouth is somehow open in every single shot. YouTube link to the Guam Legislature recorded livestream of the hearing. Poll for the best day to meet next month to discuss base-building strategies. A clip of the young girl in purple who made the room cry. I tapped to expand the video. I remember her as a child, following her mom to Chamoru language classes with her rainbow assortment of sparkly gel pens. She tells the senators that she’s been coming to these hearings since she was a toddler. She’s graduating high school soon. She doesn’t know if she’ll have children of her own but she hopes she can tell them that she tried. She chokes up when she talks about the land, about a future, better Guam. The room is silent. I still can’t tell if we were all crying for the same reasons. I wish I hadn’t heard her testify. It made me morose. No one tells you how long you’re supposed to keep doing this when you start. The future is a wall.

I muted WhatsApp and scrolled TikTok instead. I saw a video with a Tuvalu flag emoji in the caption and immediately liked it before it could play. I watched as you watch all Pacific news when the world doesn’t pay your region any attention—in solidarity. Then the camera pulled back. And I listened in stunned silence to Kofe’s words playing over a badly rendered VR scene: The world has not acted, so we in the Pacific have had to act . . . we’ll move them to the cloud.

I couldn’t stomach it. The thought of any of our islands reduced to a crude Facebook Sims project with Halo graphics made me ill. I watched it anyway. Because Tuvalu asked. And in the many Pacific sagas of mass dispossession, we are rarely allowed the dignity of last rites. The glitchy birds, the shiny trees, the black sky. Kofe said in his UN speech what we never really get to say in the courtrooms where we beg for help—that mostly, it’s too late. On the international stage and in legislative hearings, the rules are simple: you don’t air grievances without presenting solutions. Any acknowledgment of permanent loss must be accompanied by a meticulous breakdown of advocacy plans, mitigation, and compromise. This is how you’re asked to turn existential mourning into political momentum. In the strategic landscapes of grant-funded projects, the benevolent hands of federal programs, philanthropy orgs, and national museums will throw millions of dollars toward the campaigns of native revitalization—but they do not fund vigils. They have a vested interest in the process of resurrection. No one seems to know what the plan is if none of this shit works out.

The tonal expectation in the goals-outcomes-outputs model of project planning for Indigenous creation has struck as a mass muffling. It resists declarations of catastrophic loss. Gestures at dystopia like Kofe’s undead nation are an ideological liability, a contagious defeatism that kills movements and meaningful base-building. Humanities councils, national coalitions, global initiatives—the great problem solvers of the world offer the dispossessed mile-long applications for assistance that all hinge on the fantasy of our immutable restoration: if you can tell us how you’re dying and how you’ll fix it, then we’ll help you.

The Tuvalu launch of Te Afualiku’s digital twin, then, is a blunt unfixing. As Kofe speaks from a doomed future, he calls into question the deceptive optimism of climate movements that have run out of time. If you won’t accept an invitation to our funerals, then you will deal with our reanimated corpse. If you refuse to hear that it’s too late, we will speak to you from where you have sentenced us: the polity of memory.

In Tokyo, at a live show in a dim bar, artists from Okinawa and Guam sing to each other about an old homeland. The crowded room is thick with attentive quiet, lit in tungsten yellow. The wooden walls are a mosaic of linocut posters and rebel iconography haphazardly tacked over every inch of visible space. A painted underwater scene with a mother and child dugong that says NO BASE! An anthropomorphic cat character aims his slingshot at a sky full of helicopters. OSPREY OUT, NO NUKES, SAVE TAKAE. The rolled corner of a silhouetted Che Guevara portrait droops from the ceiling. Some thirty anti-war resisters and serious jazz fans have sardined their way into this upper room that is part izakaya, part pocket-meeting space. Music in English, Japanese, and Chamoru is performed with minimal translation. I’ve come because my sister and her husband are one of the guest bands, Microchild, and we wanted an excuse to visit our friends in Asagaya.

Mostly though, I’ve come for Mizuki—a clever translator and artist who’s been organizing in the Okinawan demilitarization movement for over a decade. She’s friends with the bar owner, the singer from Takae who’s wearing a very cool hat, the pretty belly dancer who performs during the week, the table of old ladies sitting close to the stage, and us—the visitors from Guam. Mizuki knows everyone. She wears a neat bob and smiles with her whole face. She drinks all of us under the table despite being 4’11 and never seems to suffer from hangover. I first met her in Guam, where most people encounter Japanese visitors as tourists—but Mizuki is not a tourist. She’s a resistance leader whose faction consists of highly-organized Japanese grandmas and grandpas who all remember the war. Once a year they visit Guam in little groups to build support across our community movements. Mizuki calls the trips de-tours. When she speaks about Guam she often says I love you and I’m sorry.

Chamorus in Japan can be a confounding spectacle. The entangled history is brutal and sad like everyone else’s in the Pacific theater during WWII. Japan paraded their war crimes across many islands. We were raised by the occupied generation whose landscapes shifted beneath them: villages carpet-bombed, jungles flattened, roads widened. Every day on my way to work, I drive across a river that trails a valley where Chamorus in labor camps were tortured, raped, and beheaded by Japanese imperial soldiers. Then the war ended, some survived, an empire rehabilitated their image, and my grandparents who were there for it all raised kids whose kids love anime. Time passed anyway.

I look across the room and Mizuki beams at me with a watery smile. Soragoro, the Okinawan man, sings Aguas de Marco in his native tongue. A stick, a stone, a sliver of glass. He offers a traditional song from Takae in northern Okinawa, where helipads threaten to destroy his home. He says culture is resistance. He sings and tap-dances and smiles in one sustained lilt. He could be a Yanbaru forest bird. He could be summer rain. Microchild follows his act and performs songs off their Chamoru album, Sengsong Mapagåhes (trans. ‘cloud village’). Eclectic sounds of jazz and soft rock frame vocal laments like the title track and Remember Me—songs that speak of a great vanishing, of a cloud that cannot be seen but whose rain can be heard. A melodica, a sax, a guitar. The trio moves from crooning restraint to lifting crescendos and the room rises and falls with them. I take as many videos as I can. My mom back home is texting me for the play by play. I forget to order something to eat, and matching Mizuki drink for drink makes me warm and dizzy. The show concludes with a spontaneous duet by Soragoro and Microchild performing Blue Moon, parrying the same melody back and forth in Japanese then Chamoru—harmonious in tone, dissonant in language, jazz in execution. The night slips into a pleasant buzz as my foggy knowledge of the original song lyrics in English floats to the surface. Something about a moon that saw us dreaming—alone, then together.

Our walk back to the hotel takes five goodbyes: one in the bar, one at the top of the stairs, one at the bottom of the stairs, one out the window, and one shouted down the street before we turn the corner and out of Mizuki’s sight. The cold has sobered me up enough to follow my sister in a straight line. She gestures widely to her husband, and I think of my grandma. Shannon has a way of benignly pointing at things as we pass them that reminds me of those hands—my grandma walking by a cafe sign and reading it aloud with no intent to expound on whether or not we should further investigate the place or if she’s been there before or if she’s in the mood for a hot beverage. A sort of general, constant acknowledgement of our surroundings. I wonder if our being here makes her ghost a little sad. Tokyo turns my mind into a river. I trail each memory upstream, through the long and tired years.

Sixteen summers before this one: I’m in my grandma’s living room. She’s telling my aunt about a valley. Japanese soldiers. A slow march to a wide clearing. The soldiers are hostile and on-edge. Something is coming. A girl falls in the road and doesn’t get up, an uncle is cut down in the mud. My aunt is asking about a song my grandma struggles to recall. At night they couldn’t be loud. The lyrics remain unclear. They sang in whispers and slept in rows. Crowded bodies murmuring like cicadas. Five summers before this one: I’m marching in Japan with Mizuki. Thousands gather in Hiroshima for the August anniversary. I speak with nuclear survivors here for the World Conference Against A&H Bombs, the soft voice of a translator in my earpiece. An old man describes a river of bodies. Melted skin. Red and red and red. After the public hearings, earlier in the year: my feet are warmed through my shoes as I stand on hot concrete and read a memorial plaque above a glass-covered pit. I’m in Tinian, a sister island north of Guam, at an overgrown airfield. I’m standing where the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were loaded into the bellies of B-29s and sent off to level a city. The memories blur, my vision swims. The heat of nested summers. I don’t know if I’m remembering it all correctly. I follow my thoughts like receding water until I exit in a cloud.

My sister turns around and tells me she’s hungry. Her husband is navigating us to an udon spot and she’s laughing with too many teeth at a joke I didn’t catch. We’re absolutely sauced. She begins to hum very loudly, a little badly. A group of nice strangers applaud her as they overtake us on the narrow alley path. I try and fail to place the melody.

 

Blue moon, you saw me standing alone.

Blue moon, now I’m no longer alone.

In Yona, the road cuts through a valley and I’m still fifteen minutes late to work. I’ve gauged it all wrong again. Woke up early enough to get ready slowly, went slower still. One minute lost scanning the fridge for a nonexistent apple. Three minutes lost listening to the rain. Five minutes lost trying to decide if the rain is bad enough for an umbrella or if a jacket will suffice. Two minutes lost sitting in the car deciding which station will upset me the least. Four minutes lost checking the office group chat to see if work will cancel for inclement weather, even though we never cancel. I’m stuck behind a school bus for predictable reasons. Traffic crawls up the hill near Pago Bay. A pond-sized puddle will soon be a flood warning.

I piecemeal the news through radio static. Operations have begun at the northwest field live-fire training range. It is an uncharacteristically rainy January. Camp Blaz’s completion initiates the multiyear relocation of 5,000 U.S. Marines to Guam. High-surf warning for Boat Basin and Rick’s Reef. Stars and Stripes reports that the plan to move the Marines off Okinawa was born out of massive protests following the 1995 rape of a 12-year-old Okinawan girl by two Marines and a sailor. A developing system 100 miles south of Guam brings heavy showers. Locals demanded the closure of Marine Corps Air Station Futenma due to safety concerns in a densely packed urban area and sought a smaller U.S. military footprint there. 2023 was the second highest year of rainfall ever for Guam since NOAA began recording in 1945. Post-Typhoon Mawar, scientists claim we can expect an increase of extreme weather in the Pacific as climate conditions worsen.

I’m beginning to second-guess the net benefit of morning news. Water drips through the torn seal of my passenger window, sloshes inside the back left door, pools at my feet. Something up the road has halted traffic altogether. I can’t see further than the car in front of me and this too, feels familiar. We idle and I wait for a sign. Nothing moves here but the rain. Where are any of us supposed to go?

 

We in the Pacific have had to act

We’ll move them to

The cloud

//

Sa’ malingu yu’, malingu yu’

(because i have vanished, vanished)

Sengsong Mapagåhes

(cloud village)

Sengsong Mapagåhes

(cloud village)

—Kofe // Microchild