kauw tsitsi (Nauru)

The poet and musician born and based in Nauru speaks about the island, history and the changes that affected the Nauren people, through writing and music as a way of sharing stories. Here a quote from the Trapped song: 

“Trapped in the weight of someone else’s wealth / Generations born on borrowed dust / Taught to survive, but never to trust / The soil remembers every cut / Every silence, every broken pact / Boats pass by, but they never stop / Eyes look through us, then quickly drop / Isolation wrapped in aid and law / A distant mercy that keeps us small. / We were more than a resource, more than a deal / More than numbers stamped in steel / This island breathed before the drills / Before progress learned how to kill.”

Kauw Tsitsi (Nauru, 1995) is a poet and musician born and based in Yaren, Nauru.