BRANDON SOM Reviews
from Unincorporated Territory: [gumá] by Craig
Santos Perez
(Omnidawn Publishing, Richmond,
CA, 2012)
[First published in The Asian American
Literary Review, Spring 2014, Co-Editors
Lawrence-Minh Bui Davis and Gerald Maa]
Craig Santos Perez’s from
Unincorporated Territory: [gumá] is the third installment of Perez’s long
poem composed of serial poems all beginning with word from (or the Chamorro equivalent ginen) and stressing the fraught and often violent experience of an
excerpted existence—one that is
appropriated, fragmented, exiled, and diasporic. Titled with the Chamorro word
for “home,” [gumá] focuses on issues
revolving around home, migration, and homecoming, charting the native and
diasporic presence, what scholar Elizabeth DeLoughrey has termed the “roots and
routes,” of native Islander experience. Perez does this work by documenting the
long history of colonialism and foreign militarism on Guam while also writing a
narrative of his own travels away from and returning to the island. In doing
so, Perez draws upon his two previous collections within the longer project from Unincorporated Territory. If his
first book [hacha] focused on mapping
where the poet is from—the poet’s roots—and his second [saina] focused on native seacraft and
so native sea routes, [gumá] uses both map and craft to bring
the poet “home.”
Of course such a return is never easy or even completely possible, and
Perez’s text complicates any notion of origin. In one passage of [gumá], we find Perez returning to Guam,
where he was born but left with his family at age fifteen. Presenting his
passport and papers, Perez is met with a customs officer who “inspects” Perez
as if he doesn’t belong. By contrast, Perez pauses to reflect on a moment “a few years later” when the poet would
arrive in San Francisco and find a Chamorro customs officer who exclaims, “Hafa Adai, you’re from Guam!” (53).
Indeed, as Perez reports, the Chamorro diaspora has increased decade after
decade, so by 2010 estimates, “more of [us] live off-island than on-island”
(40). What might this mean for representing home? Is home still home, if the
majority of peoples native to that home do not live there anymore?
Moreover, how can one begin to reclaim a home that has been
appropriated, colonized, and militarized by foreign powers? For centuries Guam
has been under foreign rule, beginning with the Spanish in the 17th century,
the U.S. in the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, and the Japanese during World
War II. Currently classified as an “unincorporated territory,” Guam remains a
colony of the U.S., and over one third of its land is reserved for U.S.
military use. The control of lands by U.S. military parallels the large numbers
of Guamanians enlisted in the U.S. armed forces. As Perez reports, military
recruiters always meet and exceed their quota on Guam, enlisting Chamorro men
and women to fight for and defend a nation that currently holds their own
native homeland as a colonial possession.
In part, the difficulty of telling where the poet is from is an issue of recognition and
representation. In his Preface to his first book, Perez reflects on the
challenge of locating Guam:
On some maps, Guam doesn’t exist; I point
to an empty space in the
Pacific and say, “I’m from here.” On some
maps, Guam is a small,
unnamed island; I say, “I’m from this
unnamed place.” On some maps,
Guam is named “Guam, U.S.A.” I say, I’m
from a territory of the United
States.” On some maps, Guam is named,
simply, “Guam”;
I say, “I am from ‘Guam’” ([hacha] 7).
Including a colonial history of Guam while emphasizing the close
relationship between language and colonial rule, Perez’s project focuses on
before-ness and derivation. Pointing to various maps, Perez demonstrates the
ambiguous existence of his homeland and his own subjectivity. Moreover, he
introduces how that ambiguous subjectivity is connected to U.S. empire and its
possession of the island as an “unincorporated territory.”
Here in [gumá], in a series
titled “(sub)aerial roots,” Perez provides further evidence of the erasure of
Guam in Pacific mapping by turning to the writings of his mother, Helen Perez.
In her book, Bittersweet Memories, she
reflects on growing up in Virginia, where she was asked by her grade school
teacher to point to where she was from on a classroom map. Unable to find her
native island, the young girl must finally ask, “Please help me find Guam”
(18). Incorporating this passage from his mother’s writings, Perez finds
coordinates by way of collaboration or coordinating with other writings.
Indeed, throughout from Unincorporated
Territory, Perez’s primary mode
of writing is citation. And frequently, Perez cites native and matriarchic
traditions in order to reinscribe the colonizing and masculine discourses that
have defined and delimited the Pacific and its peoples.
While remapping colonial erasures to establish visual presence, Perez’s
project also works to counter colonizing silence by providing a forum for
native voices. In [gumá], the series
“fatal impact statements” collects the various comments made by the people of
Guam as part of the Department of Navy’s Draft Environmental Impact Statement
(DEIS), prepared in 2009 in order to assess the effects of a proposed U.S.
military buildup on Guam. According to Perez, “The community had 90 days to
read, decipher, and comment” on a document that was some 11,000 pages long
(60). In a note on process, Perez tells us the procedure he used to produce
this series:
—I read
Volume Ten of the Final Environmental
Impact
Statement, which contains nearly all the 10,000
comments
that people submitted in response to the DEIS
during
the official 90-day comment period
—I copy
and paste phrases, sentences, words, passages
from the
comments of the people
—Sometimes
others comment on the comment
—Sometimes
I (45)
While the DEIS comments had a 2,500 character limit and ninety-day time
limit, the conversation on Facebook (and the conversation that might occur in
response to publication of Perez’s book) expands the discussion without
limits—extending it on- and off-island and incorporating a larger transpacific
community. The poem also suggests that poets, despite many popular conceptions
of them as solitary and inaccessible, can, and often do, play very social—and
social media-savvy—roles within and beyond the poetry world. Moreover, the
series shows that diaspora does not mean diffused agency; there is still the
possibility of assembly, of coming together.
Indeed, assembly is central to Perez’s formal practices and evident in [gumá]’s exploration of the Chamorro
architectural latte stones. As Perez
reports, the latte is a stone structure composed of a column and capstone and
was a prevalent foundation within Chamorro architecture. Perez evokes the
columnar structure throughout [gumá],
whether in the wider prose format that is right and left justified or within
the shorter, one-to-two-beat lines in the series “tidelands” and “sounding lines.”
Here, Perez assembles a latte-like structure in verse and connects the native
architecture with the physical body. Moreover, he builds the structure by way
of translation:
i haligi
a pillar
i tasa
a
capstone
i tataotao
a body (14)
More than its grammatical function within the Chamorro language, the
lowercase “i” here serves as a visual representation of the latte, both its
pillar and capstone. And one begins to see that this communal symbol and
commons-making structure undergirds Perez’s own poetic self, suggesting that
the lyric “i” is a construction of a larger social and cultural presence. Like
the Chamorro seacraft featured in Perez’s previous book [saina], the latte stones were destroyed under Spanish colonialism.
In [gumá]’s “(sub)aerial roots,”
Perez reports that TASA—the same group responsible for building the outrigger
canoe, the Saina, in 2007—have resurrected a latte with intention of
constructing a boat house. Here again we see the central theme of [gumá]—a foundation that might lead to
homecoming and that might provide an alter/native presence to the U.S. military
“buildup” on Guam.
If the latte provides Perez with a form for [gumá], the Chamorro practice of “throw-net” fishing provides Perez
with method—a process that interweaves texts, bringing together multiple voices
and sources. The reader is left with the task of choosing how to read the
braiding strands. In fact, the braided italic words serve many different
rhetorical functions throughout the poems—as translation, as appositive, as
interjection, as knowing aside, as spiritual call and response. Also many of
the italic lines come from Perez’s earlier books, so it is as if the texts were
textiles—each line possessing the potential to be reused and rewoven within any
given (or ginen) poem.
In “Ta(ya)la,” a series started in Perez’s first book, the poet
explicitly explores the poem as visual and sonic netting. Ta(la)ya means “throw net” and describes the Chamorro tradition of
seine fishing. In this series, Perez’s grandfather shares the tradition of net
weaving and net fishing with his grandson while reflecting on the history of
colonization on Guam under both Japanese and U.S. empires. Perez’s grandfather
was fifteen years old (the same age Perez was when he left the island) when
Japan bombed both Guam and Hawaii on December 8, 1941. Under Japanese control,
Perez’s grandfather was conscripted into forced labor, building airstrips and
“machine gun encampments” (33). He would later go on, “like so many others of
his generation,” Perez tells us, to enlist in the U.S. military. Here, Perez’s
line—both woven verse and cast net—serves to connect and document both Japanese
and U.S. military imperialisms.
Perhaps the most powerful demonstration and indictment of U.S.
militarism and empire in this series is Perez’s listing of fallen U.S.
soldiers, from both Iraq and Afghanistan wars, who were native to
unincorporated areas. Perez uses another line—the strikethrough—to draw through
and over the specifics of age, origin, and how the soldier died. What we are
left with are the soldiers’ names. The strikethrough line demonstrates the
social, political, and physical erasure of these soldiers while simultaneously
gathering and documenting the individual stories of the fallen soldiers.
Indeed, the strikethrough line on the page is a visual net that weaves together
the tragic loss of these soldiers while also demonstrating their ambiguous
status in relation to the nation they died for—a status that is incorporated
and unincorporated, included and not-included.
(32)
In this same series, weaving his own story, Perez is conscious that his
path as poet and academic could have turned out very differently: “I was 17
years old when the recruiter of trespass
of theft visited [our] house in California. I was 21 years old when the US
invaded Afghanistan. I was 23 years old when the US invaded Iraq.” Reading
this, we quickly understand that if recruited at seventeen, Perez’s own name
might have also appeared among the fallen dead. While some may find it
sentimental to suggest that poetry saved Perez’s life, one cannot argue with
the fact that Perez writes poetry with an urgency and conviction to set about
the changes that might save other lives.
Reading [gumá], one thinks of
William Carlos Williams’ often quoted line, “It is difficult to get the news
from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there.”
Turning to the book’s endnotes, we find that many of Perez’s sources are online
news stories, suggesting that, for Perez, it is not so difficult to get poems
from the news. Indeed, “what is found” in Perez’s poetry is an accounting—one
that revises colonial discourse while reinscribing indigenous traditions and
practices. In this sense, making it “new”—to use another famous adage of poetic
modernism—is necessarily “to sing / forward…to / sing past” (15).
Assembling such a song, [gumá]
expands the notion of home by testifying to a far-reaching indigenous presence,
contributing to the longer project from
Unincorporated Territory by continuing, with vigilance, to attend to a
“lack,” as well as a blindness, within both current news and contemporary
poetry.
*****
Brandon Som is the
author of the poetry collection The Tribute Horse, published
by Nightboat Books. He lives in Los Angeles, where he teaches at the University
of Southern California.
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