Sink or Swim
Stephanie Niu
Artist Statement: This poem includes events on Christmas Island, an isolated Australian territory in the Indian Ocean and the site of one of Australia’s largest immigrant detention centers. The island’s geographic isolation necessitates strict border controls for what biological materials can enter the island; outside species carried, often accidentally, within the island’s borders can imbalance endemic ecosystems and threaten biodiversity.
“Sink or Swim” borrows its title from the name given to English-as-a-second-language (ESL) education in the United States in the 1960s. Until the 1968 Bilingual Education Act, English education largely consisted of an immersion “sink or swim” approach where students who struggled were largely left behind. The use of the ocean as a preventative barrier extends beyond metaphor. In 2010, a boat called the SIEV-221 carrying asylum seekers from Iraq and Iran crashed against the rocky cliffs of Christmas Island in high swells. Fifty people on board died.
For ESL (English as a second language) learners in the United States, and for the 50 asylum seekers who died in the sinking of the SIEV-221 off the coast of Christmas Island in 2010.
Or: English immersion. When the white teacher
paddles ahead with words like algebra and oceanic
current and silk road and igneous formation
and American revolution, you begin.
The boat is small and it’s monsoon season. If you cannot swim,
grasp onto something, like a language. Here is a life jacket
blown back against the cliff. You fall into the ocean.
You are covered in diesel. Black smoke flows
from the only remaining engine. Watch to see
who are the strong swimmers. Before the storm
breaks the boat’s nose against the rock
and the sea becomes a soup of shattered wood.
And your siblings sink. And the shore is a jagged
mouth yawning with ropes you cannot reach.
This is your education. Watch the government say:
this is why they should go back home.
Stephanie Niu is a poet from Marietta, Georgia and the author of She Has Dreamt Again of Water (Diode Editions, 2022). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Copper Nickel, Waxwing, Ecotone, The Georgia Review, and Southeast Review, as well as scientific collaborations including the 11th Annual St. Louis River Summit. She lives in New York City. Find her online at https://stephanieniu.com/poetry or on Twitter/Instagram as @niusteph.