Reading Craig Santos Perez’s “from Unincorporated Territory: Hacha”

“We had gone far away, I got used to being elsewhere, the unnamed.  So I insist: to write is to take a running start on untangling the blanks.”

-Marie Étienne, from King of  Hundred Horsemen: poems (translated by Marilyn Hacker)

In his book, from Unincorporated Territory (Tinfish Press, 2008), Perez asks the reader to follow him on a journey from his native Guam. It’s an endeavor that is less about getting from one limit to another, but pursuing multiple limits at the same time, resulting in a poetics that stands quite on its own stylistically, formally and linguistically. Think web, not line.  The way he approaches his content – history, memory, family, the place(s) and un-place the colonized subjectivity occupies simultaneously as s/he struggles for self-definition (destination? disguise? figure of speech?) – reminds me somewhat of Nathaniel Mackey’s work (Whatsaid Serif, Splay Anthem) but more naked, more tenuous, as it were.

[I would love to quote extensively from the book to illustrate statements I make about it, but I will do so only minimally due to formatting constraints which would require me to either master advanced html in 24 hours (not feasible) or mangle Perez's lines (not desirable)].

Less the sense of something-in-construction or moving-toward, but rather a-coming-undoneness that is equally rich and textured because it hinges on the jagged juxtaposition of missing and found parts. For me, the primary gestural experience of the text is that of untangling an enormous knot of silence – sound by approaching sound, not unlike the way you feel the train coming before you hear it because something in the pulse of the air has changed.  Even more powerful because each poem circulates around one or more Chamorro words, which are sometimes translated, sometimes not.  English eddies around these words like waves to an island; the island that is heartache and rebel, beloved and stranger at the same time.   An unraveling which does not necessarily reveal – a potent political stance in itself, which I relate to as a subject from an island overrun by tourists who demand the land and people to strip themselves open, to be consumed, in order to survive.

Throughout the book, Perez consistently breaches English with the use of quotations, rendering it questionable and self-questioning.  In Perez’s diction, English is made mendicant and migrant: because the quotation marks are used both to indicate dialogue (e.g. citing a speaker outside of the narrator that is usually a family member) and to problematize certain words or phrases, one effect I truly appreciate is that English appears displaced, amputated, inauthentic and yet, burdened with the weight of a narrative it is not equipped to tell. For instance:

from Tidelands 

this

chained ground-”does not constitute a

navigational hazard” but delves

“one witness”-”of different flags”

 

[cha'guan]

 

in dull ashes shining

~

[cha'guan : grass]

~

I love also that Perez breaks tradition with the format of one singular poem after another; rather the vast majority are organized as parts of recurrent themes/titles:  ”from Tidelands,” “from Aerial Roots,” “from Ta(La)Ya,” “from Stations of Crossing,” “from Lisiensan Ga’lago,” and ”from Descending Plumeria,” which are not serialized or numbered, but returned to.  I think of them as currents, each carrying its own stream of consciousness and its own distinct features, which the poet dips in and out of, crosses over, braids.  Yet each poem maintains its distinction because the features that identify it as part of a larger current are still molded to fit its unique voice.  Where disorientation occurs, it feels planned because of the meticulous discipline and detail which accompany the positioning of each word and white space.  As a reader I never felt settled for a moment: just enough context is available to guide the direction of my associations, just enough plain language to rest on, like sandbars before the plunge.

Reading Hacha is like hearing echoes of something primal and binding in an underwater cave, something I don’t yet know but recognize.  It contains my fury – gives it a place to swim - from generations of colonization, persecution, displacement; from being else and elsewhere.  As a reader, I am asked to lay it out and inspect it, closely, to map the routes.  There is a precision, an unflinching-ness in Perez’s witnessing that I suspect comes from an acceptance of what has happened – to our homelands, to our people.  Not acceptance in the sense of swallowing the poisonous root one is choking on, but acceptance as the conscious integration of the shards of history – its dead dogs and villages turned to firewood, its spears and potent herbs – into the skin we wear when we write.

“my job was to preserve things i wasn’t willing to build” (in a later section of “from Ta(La)Ya”) – fuck the distinction between political and non-political poets: as children of colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, racism, hetero-patriarchy, we all contend with this basic imperative in our work, especially when we are working in English.  There is no escape in Hacha, no recovery.  Becoming visible, becoming a name or a place that is spoken and understood, guarantees no seat at the table.  Our presence might undress the emperor (and for but a moment), but it also exposes our wounds to the world.  Which perhaps is why the only un-repeating section of the book is the one that begins it, “from Achiote” -

“”mata’pang” used to mean “proud and brave”     used to mean “alert eyes” – he led the rebellion against the spanish before he was captured and killed -

now it means “silly” or “rude” or “misbehaved” or “uncivil”

[achiote was used to stop bleeding.  was used as an antivenom for snake bites.  was used to heal wounds]“