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Title: Discontiguous States of America: The Paradox of Unincorporation in Craig Santos Perez’s Poetics of Chamorro Guam

Journal Issue: Journal of Transnational American Studies, 3(2)

Author: Lai, Paul, St. Catherine University

Publication Date: 2011

Permalink: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/02f4v8m3

Author Bio: Graduate student, Master's program in Library and Information Science

Keywords: Craig Santos Perez, Guam, Indigenous, Chamorro, Empire, Imperialism, Transnational, American Studies

Local Identifier: acgcc_jtas_11622

Abstract: Eclipsed by other islands incorporated into the United States after the Spanish-American War of 1898, Guam has nevertheless played a crucial role in the development of the American Pacific as a strategic military site. Like other territories of the United States, Guam’s ambiguous legal status and the presence of native peoples, cultures, and histories signal the paradox of unincorporated territories that troubles the issues of belonging and identification as “American.” This essay takes up poet-scholar Craig Santos Perez’s work to assert the primacy of Indigenous Chamorro histories, languages, and cultures in understanding the island’s place in and out of the American Empire. Perez’s experimental, decolonial poetics fracture narratives of America as a benevolent force in the Pacific; of English as the only relevant language of the Mariana Islands and America; of Spanish and Catholic domination as a relic of the past; of environmental transformations wrought by the intimacies of empire; and of simplistic accounts of assimilation or resistance to militarization and colonialism. Furthermore, by foregrounding “Discontiguous States of America” as an organizing trope for comparative understanding of unincorporated territories in the Caribbean and Pacific, American Indian reservation spaces on the continent, and the outlying states of Alaska and Hawai‘i, this essay argues that transnational American Studies must look within its territorial possessions to Indigenous sovereignty claims as well as outside to global flows in order to offer a truly critical, transnational American Studies.

eScholarship provides open access, scholarly publishing services to the University of California and delivers a dynamic research platform to scholars worldwide.

Copyright Information: Copyright 2011 by the article author(s). All rights reserved.

Discontiguous States of America:

The Paradox of Unincorporation in

Craig Santos Perez’s Poetics of

Chamorro Guam

PAUL LAI

Guam had nothing to do with the causes and little to do

with the conduct of the Spanish-American War.

Nonetheless, the war was an epochal turning point in the

history of the Mariana Islands.

—Robert F. Rogers, Destiny’s Landfall1

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.’”

—Craig Santos Perez, from Unincorporated Territory2

Despite historian Robert F. Rogers’s claim that Guam and the Mariana Islands

archipelago of which it is a part were not central to the conflict of the Spanish-

American War, the continuing presence of this island within the territorial reach of

the United States of America raises questions about the legacy of the year 1898 for

the Pacific region. The distinctive cultural identity of Guam and its Indigenous

Chamorro inhabitants today—mediated by centuries of Spanish imperial rule and

Catholicism as well as brief but violent moments of Japanese colonization and

military occupation—cannot be understood without examination of the influence of

US military and civilian control over the last century. Guam’s presence within the

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American political terrain troubles the logic of an American hemisphere since the

great expanse of the Pacific Ocean separates the island from North America’s west

coast. Indeed, Guam’s motto, “Where America’s Day Begins,” ironically reminds us

that many Americans do not recognize Guam as a territory of the Union and that

Guam is almost always absent on maps of the United States. The vexed status of

Guam within the nation provocatively questions the ability or relevance of “American

Studies” as an intellectual project to comprehend it. This essay, then, queries how

transnational American Studies can consider the lands of Guam and other

unincorporated territories—all technically intra- rather than trans-national spaces—

without reinscribing them as subordinate to or dependent on the United States and

other industrialized nations.

Combating the erasure of Guam, poet-scholar Craig Santos Perez enacts an

alternative political and cultural imaginary for Guam, its people, and the Chamorro

language in his ongoing collage of long poems, from Unincorporated Territory. The

second epigraph’s progression of locating and naming home identifies a narrative

trajectory sketched by Perez from absence through determination via American

control and on to “simply” being (from) Guam. These states of place and belonging

situate Perez and Guam in varying relationships to the United States—at times (and

often simultaneously) irrelevant, dependent, interwoven, and in tension. The process

of reading and interpreting his poems reveals the complicated histories of Guam and

engages the reader in rethinking the paradoxical status of the island that is within yet

without the United States. In the preface to the first volume of his poetic project,

Perez writes, “These poems are an attempt to begin re-territorializing the Chamorro

language in relation to my own body, by way of the page.” 3 The poems themselves,

routed through Perez’s body and the pages of the books, become manifestations of

different kinds of territories imagined for Chamorros, where “re-territorialization”

signifies the radical transformation of circuits that link bodies, lands, and words to

create new forms of embodiment.

This essay thinks along with Perez to consider his poetic tactics of

decolonization and demilitarization for Guam and the Chamorro people. 4 In addition

to explorations of languages and word play, Perez highlights critiques of US

militarization, a cartographic reading of words on the page, and environmental

metaphors of colonization as elements of re-territorialization. Throughout, his poetry

uncovers how colonial languages and worldviews have been imposed on islanders

and how Chamorros have both maintained Indigenous practices and incorporated

foreign influences. In short, Perez’s poetry documents what Anishinaabe writer

Gerald Vizenor has described as “native survivance.” Perez reaches for a Chamorro

present and future that is enmeshed in its history of colonization yet open to the

independence and sovereignty of the Chamorro people. He refuses to choose just

one identity—either an assimilated American or a transhistorical, ancient Chamorro

one—because his contemporary Chamorro body has been constituted from and

transected by a range of influences, both Indigenous and foreign.

Journal of Transnational American Studies, 3(2) (2011)

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In American history, 1898 marks an important and decisive year for the

instantiation of direct United States control over territories outside the North

American continent. It is a signal year for understanding trans-hemispheric, trans-

continental, trans-regional America—a conception of the nation-state that exceeds

the geographical boundaries of the continent’s east and west coasts and even the

regional logic of hemispheric proximity. While contemporary US relations with some

of the former spoils of the Spanish-American War are now fruitful grounds for

transnational and neocolonial analyses because there are officially distinct nation-

states under consideration, the territories that remain a part of the United States

require a critical analysis that also takes into account the explicitly colonial status of

these extra-continental spaces. 5 Additionally, the continuing absence of Guam in

conceptualizations of the Asia-Pacific, the Pacific Rim, the American Lake, or Asian

Pacific Islanders (where Native Hawaiians often dominate the discussion) belies the

importance of the island for the American military in the Pacific. Engaging Perez’s

poetic vision allows a corrective to such absenting.

One way to approach this analysis is to reframe the issues at hand. I offer the

neologism “discontiguous” to bring together a range of contradictory ideas

occasioned by the presence of many territories within, but not constitutive of, the

United States. That is, how can we think of these territories that are considered to be

part of the nation, but are not seen to be spaces that define the national land,

culture, or identity? “Discontiguous” plays off of the descriptive phrase “contiguous

United States,” commonly referring to the lower forty-eight states in the middle of

the North American continent, which seemingly form a solid and uninterrupted

expanse. Replacing “United” with “Discontiguous,” the phrase “Discontiguous

States of America” reminds us of the imperial topography of the United States,

highlighting Native American reservation spaces within the boundaries of the

contiguous states, offshore territories in the Caribbean and Pacific Oceans (including

Guantánamo Bay, Cuba), and the two outlying states of Alaska and Hawaiʻi. The shift

to consider discontinuities rather than connections thus supplements existing work

in translocal studies that tend to examine those connections between distant spaces

outside the rubric of nation-states. The complicated and contradictory layering of

sovereignty, power, and cultural history in these discontiguous states calls for more

analysis of alternative formations of America and American Studies. At the heart of

this formulation is a challenge to the sovereignty of the United States, especially as

sole or ultimate arbiter of cultural and legal values.

The discontiguous quality of Native reservations and unincorporated

territories suggests a discontinuous logic of unity, one in which leaps of logic are

necessary to create a semblance of wholeness. Indeed, the fact that the various

unincorporated territories outside the continental United States have substantially

different relationships with the federal government is evidence of a breakdown in

the logic of territorial possession. The gaps between these territories and the nation-

state as a whole create a paradox of what composes the body of the United States—

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what is part of the nation-state and what is outside of it, or what is inside yet not a

part. The Office of Insular Affairs in the Department of the Interior, which administers

Guam and other off-shore territories, takes pains to use terminology that carefully

avoids any suggestion of colonialism. 6 The Office defines an “insular area” as a

“jurisdiction that is neither a part of one of the several States nor a Federal district. ” 7

The term “insular” refers to island spaces but also suggests “inside,” a paradoxical

naming of these “outside,” extra-continental sites.

Furthermore, the Office defines an “unincorporated territory” as a “United

States insular area in which the United States Congress has determined that only

selected parts of the United States Constitution apply.” 8 These territories are

opposed to “incorporated ones” that form a part of the United States, thus pointing

to the understanding that “unincorporated territories” are not a part of the nation-

state. Embedded in the federal government’s naming of these unincorporated

territories, then, is the (il)logic of uneven Constitutional protections as well as the

paradoxical quality of unincorporation. Such territories have been incorporated into

the control of the US government and designated as belonging to the nation, yet

they remain unincorporated. If the emergence of the idea of nationalism relied on a

particular (and then-new) relation between Europe and its New World colonies, as

Benedict Anderson has argued, then the United States has created a different kind of

“imagined community” in its relationship to Guam and its other extra-continental

possessions. 9 This new nationalist feeling ambivalently claims connections with the

people and spaces of unincorporation, willing to accept Chamorro soldiers into the

American army, for instance, but unwilling to allow Chamorro peoples to define their

(American) identities.

With the transfer of power from the Spanish to the Americans after the 1898

war, the political, cultural, and colonial status of Guam diverged sharply from that of

the rest of the Mariana Islands. 10

Guam was placed under the US Naval

Administration with an appointed governor, militarizing the island from the

beginning of its association with the United States. In the initial years following this

shift in ownership, a heated debate in the nation arose over how to treat these

possessions. The legacy of these discussions was the creation of a new territorial

status, in between a sovereign, independent nation and a colonial possession.

Christina Duffy Burnett and Burke Marshall explain some of the Supreme Court

decisions that decided the matter, “The Insular Cases, decided between 1901 and

1922, invented and developed the idea of unincorporated territorial status in order to

enable the United States to acquire and govern its new ‘possessions’ without

promising them either statehood or independence.” 11

The differentiation between

what it meant for the United States to acquire territory by treaty from other nations

and what it meant to incorporate a territory, meaning to administer the Constitution

fully, created a space for treating unincorporated territories as domestic spaces if

desired—particularly for revenue purposes in duties and tariffs—but also allowed the

US Congress to withhold other rights and citizenship from the residents of those

Journal of Transnational American Studies, 3(2) (2011)

4

territories as necessary. The importance of trade in determining the political and legal

status of these lands and peoples must not be overlooked. The resulting patchwork

of relations between the US government and its various island territories is decidedly

discontiguous.

Furthermore, Brook Thomas argues that the Insular Cases “document how the

country—or at least the Supreme Court speaking for the country—moved from a

model of the United States held together as a compact of contracting entities to a

corporate model of the nation-state.” 12

These cases, he contends, were crucial to the

nation’s thinking of itself as a united, singular whole rather than as a federation of

states that were each ultimately autonomous. In this way, the unincorporated

territories led the nation to think of itself (its contiguous self, that is) as a body—a

corpus—in ways that expelled the islands from the nation’s body. Thomas explores

the “metaphor of incorporation” as a key consequence of the Supreme Court rulings,

and as a concept that allowed the nation to think differently about its body versus its

possessions. Contrary to the interpretation forwarded by most literary and cultural

studies scholars of United States imperialism, he argues, 1898 signals a rupture in the

previous logic of territorial acquisition. 13

Overseas imperialism is not simply an

extension of westward continental expansion but a new perspective that allowed for

unincorporation as opposed to the two choices of incorporation or colonial control.

In a literal sense, Perez’s poetic project from Unincorporated Territory

represents poetry coming out of such unincorporation. In figurative senses, Perez

emphasizes the paradoxical status of belonging that characterizes Chamorros in the

world. The unincorporated territory is a space where uneven Constitutional

protections challenge notions of equality and individualism espoused by the United

States. Ultimately, Perez’s re-territorializing looks beyond the United States as the

overarching power that defines Guam and indeed even beyond the concept of the

island as a territory limited just to land area. Echoing the work of influential Tongan

scholar and activist Epeli Hau’ofa, Perez’s poetry imagines a larger oceanic world for

Guam. As Hau’ofa writes, “The world of our ancestors was a large sea full of places to

explore, to make their homes in, to breed generations of seafarers like themselves.

People raised in this environment were at home with the sea. They played in it as

soon as they could walk steadily, they worked in it, they fought in it. They developed

great skills for navigating their waters—as well as the spirit to traverse even the few

large gaps that separated their island groups.” 14

This pan-Pacific world, which

Hau’ofa suggested should be called “Oceania” rather than “Pacific Islands” to

emphasize the ocean itself as part of the world, is the basis for a decolonizing project

for all Indigenous peoples of the Pacific. Perez’s poetics tells this story of Guam as a

dynamic, Indigenous narrative—one that resists erasure and domination.

Textual, Linguistic, and Orthographic Experimentation

This next section considers more explicitly the poetic nature of Perez’s decolonial

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imaginary and how such attention to language is crucial for understanding

“Discontiguous States of America.” The essay then turns to more pointed

examinations of three key topics in Perez’s critique of American Guam: US

militarization, cartographic knowledge, and environmental metaphors as colonial

critique. I was introduced to Craig Santos Perez’s work when he read from his first

book, from Unincorporated Territory [Hacha], published by TinFish Press, at the Loft

Literary Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota on May 22, 2009, at an Indigenous Poetry

Reading event coinciding with the Native American and Indigenous Studies

Association (NAISA) conference in town. 15

In addition to his poetry and scholarly

research in comparative ethnic studies, Perez is a co-founder with Jennifer Reimer of

Achiote Press, a publishing project that “represents the unrepresentable,

transnational, migratory, and adaptive. Achiote Press asks what it means to bear

witness, to use adaptation as resistance, to cross borders, to map ourselves onto a

dislocated world, to speak in exile, and to suffer diasporic hunger.” 16

He has also

blogged at the Poetry Foundation web site as well as on his own site. 17

Like many

poets engaged in contemporary cultural critique, Perez sees his writing as a way to

transform how Chamorros move in the world and how they are perceived,

particularly by the people and government of the United States.

Literary critic Rob Wilson has discussed experimental texts from the Pacific

that “have these strange markings of writerly experimentation and textual play

(postmodernism, brand A) as well as the concerns of belonging to and expressing a

distinct, particularized, and limited model of identity, affiliated voice, sentiments of

nationhood, and (post)colonial heritage (postmodernism, brand B, as it were).” 18

Identifying the poetic impulses nurtured by TinFish, a small publisher of experimental

poetry from the Pacific, Wilson explains how TinFish’s founding editor, Susan Schultz,

understands the two postmodernisms: “This stance, claiming to express a

postcolonial kind of postmodernity, would urge of writing in the Pacific those

aggravated concerns to recapture strong claims to cultural, cultural-national, and

subaltern ethnic identity; to reclaim some indigenous nation as seen under

global/local superpower threat; and to express, more generally, some situated

coalition of local writing forces and energies, a kind of place-based imagination of

belonging to some specific locality, liminal zone, and counternation as entangled in a

distinctive, if nervously ambivalent, colonial history.” 19

As a book published by

TinFish, Perez’s first volume from his opus enacts all these qualities of postmodern

and postcolonial writing, offering a poetics that is challenging in its experimental

novelty but ultimately densely layered with theoretical, historical, and political

critiques of unincorporated territories.

At the macro-level, Perez explains of his poetry, “My multi-book project, from

unincorporated territory, [is] formed through my study of the ‘long poem’: Pound’s

Cantos, Williams’ Paterson, H.D.’s Trilogy, Zukofsky’s ‘A,’ and Olson’s Maximus. I loved

how these books were able to attain a breadth and depth of vision and voice. So I

began to imagine each book from my own project as a book-length excerpt of a

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larger project.” 20

Thus, the title from Unincorporated Territory is an overarching one

for his poetic project as a whole. Each volume of the project bears that title followed

by a subtitle in brackets. The first volume is [Hacha] and the second [Saina]. “Hacha”

is Chamorro for “one,” designating the first volume. “Saina,” however, does not

mean “two” but refers instead to “parents elders spirits ancestors.” 21

Paying homage

to Chamorro elders, Perez maintains continuity across generations in the

preservation of Chamorro culture and language. The diversion from the expected

naming of the second volume with “Hugua,” the Chamorro word for “two,”

reinforces Perez’s challenge to a linear progression of ideas.

In the Preface to his first book, [Hacha], Perez lays out the project that he

undertakes with an overview of Guam’s history and definitions of key terms in the

construction of Guam as a territory of the United States. The expository and

analytical mode of the Preface provides the keys to understanding the experimental

lines that follow. In describing Guam, he brings together the many disparate

influences on its contemporary state, from various colonial forces to the movement

of tectonic plates that created volcanic arcs and oceanic trenches in the Pacific. He

offers definitions and etymologies of words like “territory” and “excerpt,” drawing

startling new meanings from them. Of territory, commonly understand as “land

under the jurisdiction of a town, state, etc.,” Perez suggests a sideways step to a

similar-sounding word: “Alternately, the original Latin word suggests derivation from

terrere: ‘to frighten’ (see terrible); thus territorium would mean ‘a place from which

people are warned off.’” 22

By collapsing the origins of “terror” and “territory,” he

combines their meanings to offer an argument about Guam as a place from which

people are warned off—whether it is the Chamorro or US military personnel is

unclear. The affect of fright, however, lingers to structure considerations of all

territories, unincorporated or not.

Within each volume of from Unincorporated Territory, Perez weaves together

pieces of various long poems such as “from Tidelands” and “from Ta(la)ya.” Perez

explains, “One difference between my project and other ‘long poems’ is that my long

poem will always contain the ‘from,’ always eluding the closure of completion.” 23

He

insists on the open-ended and never-finished quality of his poetry. He offers partial

pieces of a larger, never-fully knowable whole. This work-in-progress quality of

Perez’s poetry mirrors the status of Guam as a place still in the midst of

transformations and contestations, without a final act towards which a teleological

narrative unfolds. 24

Always coming from rather than being, the poems are co-

extensive with Perez’s poetic vision and thus never fully containable in a volume of

words. In addition to their fragmentary quality, Perez also notes that he challenges a

linear unfolding of these interwoven excerpts, emphasizing a recursive and multi-

layered knowledge that refuses a straightforward argument. Rather than collecting

all excerpts from one poem in a solid, contiguous sequence of pages, the poet

disperses them in a way that creates new meanings in the juxtaposition of different

sections or the interruption of an excerpt by another poem.

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The intertwining structure of the poems is echoed thematically in the poem

dedicated to Perez’s grandfather, “from Ta(la)ya.” The talaya is a throw net; “ta” by

itself means “our”; “la’la” means “water”; and “taya” means “empty.” 25

The

collapsing and interweaving of these words into the title of the poem mirrors the

way the poem weaves together narratives of Spanish conquest, American military

occupation, Japanese colonization, and Indigenous survivance. Of this last narrative

theme, the poet’s Chamorro grandfather recounts his life in Agana, the capital city of

Guam; the poem then notes in bracketed asides, “[in spanish Agaña]” and “[In 1998,

the legislature officially changed the name of the capital city—Agana—to the Chamorro

name—Hagatña].” 26

This change in names is the result of cultural contestation on the

ground, pushes and pulls against the assertion of Chamorro language in the public

space. The figure of the grandfather, who has persisted despite the changing of

colonial control over the course of his life, grounds the poem’s weaving of histories.

In the poem, the talaya, or throw net, embodies the transmission of Indigenous

practices as the grandfather recounts learning to hunt for fish with these nets during

the Japanese occupation. In a startling conflation, he likens the prisoners of war to

the fish being caught: “the size of the mesh is determined by the fish you are

hunting: smaller mesh for the manahak and a larger / mesh for the ti’ao he says ‘the

prisoners called the mesh eyes / remember that’ to change your eyes depending on

the thing hunted.” 27

The grandfather takes on the role of the hunter, using the mesh

of the talaya to see different things he hunts. The eyes as organs of sight become

both the vehicle for knowledge (to perceive is to know) but also the basis for self-

identification. The “I,” in this regard, emerges in the curious reference to “prisoners”

who call the mesh “eyes,” a subtle reference to the possibility that the grandfather

was once a prisoner (of war). Later in the poem, the grandfather recites numbers in

the Japanese language, an act that reminds us of Japanese colonial rule that

enforced a Japanese educational system. It is an activity that places him in the role of

a prisoner or colonial subject. 28

While most of the poems in from Unincorporated Territory do not follow

established poetic forms, many are modeled after other narrative forms. One such

example is “from Stations of Crossing,” dealing with voices of resistance structured

around the Stations of the Cross in Catholic churches. These stations, arrayed along

the walls of the church, portray various stages of Christ’s crucifixion as paintings or

sculptures, offering separate physical spaces for supplicants to meditate on each

step of Christ’s sacrifice. The stations structure prayer as a physical journey taken

along with Christ, encoding a shifting relationship between the supplicant’s body and

the narrative. Each section of Perez’s poem must likewise be read as a separate

station, and the reader must embark on a physical journey along with the figures

depicted in the poem. While there are conventionally fourteen Stations of the Cross,

ending with Christ laid to rest in a tomb, Perez’s “from Stations of Crossing” only

offers thirteen stations, again suggesting a sense of open-endedness where the final

station is yet to be written. Additionally, Perez constructs this poem by borrowing

Journal of Transnational American Studies, 3(2) (2011)

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sonnet end-words from Claude McKay’s Harlem Shadows, a practice he attributes to

Aaron Shurin’s Involuntary Lyrics. Basing the poems of each station on another poet’s

sonnets adds yet another layer of determination for his words—the point

acknowledged here is that there is no creation ex nihilo for Perez; he is always

already enmeshed in words and traditions that signify, multiply and contradict, and

what he as a poet must do is to create new possibilities from those existing signifiers.

The enfolding of Chamorro and Catholic aspects of Perez’s beliefs in this and

other poems might seem contradictory to some, but Perez’s work demonstrates how

many Chamorro peoples are both Catholic in faith and Chamorro in heritage. Perez

writes in his notes “on Stations of Crossing”: “These poems emerged from two texts

of resistance literature: the Gospel According to Matthew and Chief Hurao’s 1671

speech. . . . The ‘he’ in this poem is a brace of their [Jesus and Hurao’s] imagined

voices.” 29

The intertwining of these two leaders’ voices of vastly different and

perhaps opposing traditions forces Perez to negotiate the concepts of resistance and

dominance in complex ways. Hurao, after all, is known primarily for his resistance to

Spanish and Catholic missionary colonization; he died in battle against these forces.

Interestingly, this use of Catholic narrative structure to meld Catholic and Indigenous

rhetoric has a precursor in Vicente Diaz’s essay, “Pious Sites: Chamorro Culture

Between Spanish Catholicism and American Liberal Individualism,” which follows the

sections and structure of the Catholic mass in examining the legacy of Chamorro

political leadership in Guam. 30

In a more radically dispersed fashion, the poem “from Tidelands” appears in a

three-page sequence at the end of the first section of the book; reappears in the

third section, alternating pages with “from Aerial Roots”; surfaces in section four in

between stanzas six and seven of “from Stations of Crossing” as an interlude; and

then again emerges at the end of the volume on alternating pages with “from

Descending Plumeria.” Thus, “from Tidelands” at points mimics the ebb and flow of

the tide in tidelands, where its words represent the water that washes over the land

of the other poems. 31

Within the poem itself, also, two pages in particular appear to

be duplicates but with words missing from the latter version, as if the tide had come

in and then left, taking away some words that were part of the shore. The first page

begins, “taut / ‘shadows almost’ visible be- / low the dispersal of ‘forms-swathe’ this /

small touch ‘no maps sown’ to hallow / / [tano].” The second subtly effaces and

transforms parts of this stanza as: “taut / ‘shadows’ visible / the dispersal of ‘forms’

this / ‘no maps sown’ to hollow / / [ ].” 32

The second page’s dropped words further

fracture the already fragmented syntax of the first page.

The brackets surrounding the Chamorro word tano mark it out from the

English words surrounding it. In many of the other poems, brackets function similarly

to suggest a volatile relationship between colonial and Indigenous languages. At

times, these brackets simply isolate or imprison Chamorro words, as in the quoted

lines above; at other times, the brackets offer Chamorro words followed by their

translations in English. The Chamorro word “[tano]” on the first page, for example, is

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defined at the bottom of the page: “[tano : land, soil, earth, ground].” Italicized, the

second instance of the bracketed Chamorro word is further marked out from the text

as a footnote. In the almost-replicated second page, the disappearance of “tano”

from the brackets that enclose it on the first page suggests an absent land or home,

one designated only by the brackets that delineate its boundaries on the page. Such

a bracketing parallels the way Chamorros’ control over their land disappears under

colonialism, left as only a hollow shell of its former self.

As demonstrated by his use of brackets and blank spaces, Perez’s poetry

importantly functions at a visual level in the orthography of words and negative

spaces of the page. He also uses punctuation marks as visual elements on the page

beyond their mechanical function. His poems “from Lisiensan Ga’lago” and “from

Tidelands” make liberal use of tildes (~): marks that separate words as hyphens do

but also mimetically represent the ocean waves that are an important aspect of

islanders’ worldview. The push and pull of ocean waves, determined by the moon

and celestial forces beyond human control, makes tides an apt metaphor for

understanding Guam in a fundamentally different scale and perspective. As Perez

explains, the tilde also holds other meanings in specialized discourses. For linguists,

the tilde signals a shift in pronunciation while for mathematicians it suggests an

equivalence between terms on either side. 33

In addition to the tilde, the placement of

words on the page creates an image of waves in a two-dimensional painting of the

ocean. For example, the opening foray into poetry of [Hacha] begins after the

Preface and epigraphs with “from Lisiensan Ga’lago,” a poem that floats different

names and spellings for Guam such a “goaam,” “goam,” “islas de las velas latinas,”

and “guajan.”

At the level of the text, Perez’s work enacts a kind of critical re-envisioning of

the power of language and the possibility of meaning-making on the page. Cultural

critique and history blend in his highly provocative poetics, transforming words and

the printed page into vehicles for tracing the messiness of cultural contact, political

force, and linguistic melding. Perez brings Chamorro words into (and slightly out of)

the lines of his poems, “re-territorializing” the power of language and imperialism to

control the possibilities of identities and politics. At times, the Chamorro words

appear in brackets, set off from the rest of the poems. At other times, the words are

italicized, following the common orthographic convention for marking out foreign

words. At yet other times, though, the Chamorro words butt up against English

words without warning or visual differentiation, pushing for a recognition of the

sovereign status of Chamorro in relation to (American) English. As Perez explains,

“The non-English words in this collection are Chamorro (also spelled Chamoru), the

name of both the native language and the native people of Guahan. The colonial

school system on Guam, when I grew up there, did not teach written Chamorro in the

schools, a consequence of Americanization and a sustained desire to eradicate the

native language. In the ocean of English words, the Chamorro words in this collection

remain insular, struggling to emerge within their own ‘excerpted space.’” 34

The

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oceans, islands, and excerpted space all function at both literal, metaphorical, and

visual levels, suggesting the relationship of Guam to the United States as it is situated

in the Pacific. Furthermore, English translations for Chamorro words sometimes

follow them immediately on the line; sometimes later on the page (as in a footnote);

and sometimes on entirely different pages and in different poems. Such an uneven

treatment of the translations makes the task of reading Perez’s poetry elusive and

requires readers to move back and forth across the pages, seeking connections and

translations across various poems.

In his comparative study of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and other liminal

spaces of American control—what he calls “American Tropics”—Allan Punzalan Isaac

writes that “the American Tropics turns upon ‘America’ to demonstrate how America

not only is itself a trope but continually gyrates and generates tropes about itself to

underscore its identity or difference against its perceived others.” 35

This play on

words—tropics in geographical terms as well as tropes in literary ones—allows Isaac

to focus on the way language produces the convoluted understandings of insular

territories’ in-between status as part of America’s narrative of itself. Perez, writing

from the perspective of one such insular territory, emphasizes languages—

Chamorro, English, Spanish, and Japanese—as the basis for understanding and

revolutionizing Guam’s status. More than simply marking the loss of Chamorro

language under colonial rule, though, Perez emphasizes a more complex linguistic

space for Chamorro culture. Rather than simply considering assimilation to a colonial

language as a process of cultural loss, where the only form of resistance is to revert

to a transhistorical Indigenous Chamorro, Perez instead examines layers of

languages, including the differential power relations and histories between them, as

a way of forwarding critiques about US control of Guam. While Perez’s formal

experimentation resonates broadly with his decolonial imaginary, he also offers more

pointed commentary about the situation of Guam as a US territory. The remaining

sections of this essay point out just a few of the many complex and interconnected

topics addressed in his poetic project.

Perez’s Critique of US Militarization

After “unincorporation” into the United States at the end of the nineteenth century,

Guam remained under US military rule for the next half century despite active

petitioning by Chamorros for more self-governance or independence. 36

In 1941, the

Japanese imperial army, while infamously bombing the US military base at Pearl

Harbor in Hawaiʻi, also attacked and seized control of Guam from its own bases in the

northern Mariana Islands. The Japanese subjugated the Chamorros, placing them in

war camps as prisoners and occupying the island as a military zone. In 1944, the

American re-capture of Guam and wresting of the northern Marianas from Japanese

control was bloody, a “liberation as apocalypse.” 37

And importantly, though often

unmentioned, the northern island of Tinian then played a large role in the ending of

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WWII; the B-29 bombers that dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagaski

departed from Tinian’s North Field, which was also the staging ground for practice

runs of the bombings. This long history of US militarization surfaces repeatedly in

Perez’s poetry, particularly in his grandparents’ memories and as actual footnotes to

poems recounting family stories.

As mentioned earlier, the first poem excerpted in the book is “from Lisiensan

Ga’lago”; the poem begins with an exercise of naming and renaming the island of

Guam and emerges repeatedly throughout the book, interspersed between pages of

other poems. Importantly, the title phrase “lisiensan ga’lago” is what the Chamorros

called the strips of cloth they had to wear as identification under Japanese military

rule in WWII. The words mean “dog tag,” a fitting precursor to the American era

when many Chamorros join the US military and wear dog tags in that capacity. 38

By

subsuming poetic lines concerned with the naming of Guam under a phrase

associated with war, Perez emphasizes the importance of militarization for the

construction of island identity. As feminist scholar Cynthia Enloe explains,

“Militarization is a step-by-step process by which a person or a thing gradually comes

to be controlled by the military or comes to depend for its well-being on militaristic

ideas. The more militarization transforms an individual or a society, the more that

individual or society comes to imagine military needs and militaristic presumptions to

be not only valuable but also normal. Militarization, that is, involves cultural as well as

institutional, ideological, and economic transformations.” 39

Guam and Chamorro life

have been infused with militaristic ideas, creating a political and social culture that

relies on the US military, and Perez’s poetry seeks to challenge such common-sense

understandings of life with the military.

With the rise of the Cold War following WWII, Guam became a more valuable

possession for the nation than it had ever been. Historians Paul Carano and Pedro C.

Sanchez write, “Guam, America’s farthermost outpost of the Pacific Ocean, is an

unincorporated territory of the United States. As such, it is one of America’s most

important bastions of defense. A glance at a map of the Pacific area shows how

strategically Guam is located with reference to Japan, the Philippines, Australia, and

the mainland of Asia.” 40

Without a doubt, the militarization of Guam is perhaps the

single biggest issue for the island, especially when understood as more than

contesting the presence of physical bases and personnel that take up much of the

island. The same is true in other parts of the Pacific as well as in Asia, and it is not only

the US military but Japanese and other nations in the past and present that have

militarized the space. 41

In his groundbreaking essay, “The Exceptional Life and Death of a Chamorro

Soldier: Tracing the Militarization of Desire in Guam, USA,” Michael Lujan Bevacqua

characterizes “the banal ambiguity of Guam’s political existence,” as a sign of

empire’s coming or quiet passage. 42

Bevacqua describes militarized Guam as banal

because it is considered commonplace and unremarkable. The status of Guamanians

as US citizens without the full guarantees of the Constitution makes the island an

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ambiguous political space. Guam’s residents, for example, have no representatives in

the US Congress and thus no official voice. Yet, Chamorros and others are

encouraged to join the military and do so in large numbers, far more per capita than

any other region of the United States or any other ethnic group. Bevacqua focuses

on the figure of the Chamorro soldier as a shade-like figure, neither living nor dead, in

the ambiguous space of American belonging in order to forward the cause of

Chamorro self-determination.

With President George W. Bush’s declaration of a War on Terror, the US

military has increased its military presence in the Pacific as well as in the Middle East

since September 11, 2001. Recently, while questioning Admiral Robert Willard at the

House Armed Services Committee hearing on March 25, 2010, the US Representative

from Georgia, Hank Johnson, wryly remarked of proposals to increase the number of

US military personnel on the island, “Yes. My fear is that the whole island will

become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize.” 43

He asked about the

size of the island to emphasize its smallness and noted concerns about possible

adverse effects on the environment as a result of military buildup in such an insular

space.

Rather than simply providing argumentative statements against US

militarization directly, Perez brings up this issue in his poems by offering deictic lines

and pages. This approach forces readers to look beyond the pages of the book as

well as between the pages, disrupting a straightforward narrative through the pages

and encouraging recursive and repeated readings of the poems. The poem “from

Lisiensan Ga’lago,” for example, presents an enigmatic page composed of a box with

a grid of nine words, eight of which are struck through:

ocean hanom light

tano bread niyok

breath attadok peace

Superimposed on the box in large, bold print is the number-question, “8000?*” And

below the box and number is a request to “please visit” three web sites that are then

listed below by URL. 44

Upon visiting the sites, the page of poetry becomes more

clearly about militarization. The URLs point to a petition to the United Nations to

voice concerns about the military buildup on Guam after September 11, 2001; a blog

titled “Peace and Justice for Guam and the Pacific” dedicated to the decolonization

of Guam; and another blog devoted to news about Guam. 45

The petition mentions

“8000” as the estimated number of US Marines scheduled for transfer to the island,

and buried in a later poem “from Descending Plumeria,” the same number pops up in

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a footnote, seemingly detached from the text on that page: “[*8,000 Marines and

their dependents will be transferred to Guam from Okinawa by 2014 through a joint

effort of the United States and Japan.]” 46

This page thus densely weaves text in ways

that rely on outside contexts for meaning. The reader must become a detective,

tracing flows of meaning from the words on the page to other pages in the book as

well as web sites on the Internet.

In the final poem contained in the first volume of Perez’s poetic project, “from

Descending Plumeria” (which alternates pages with “from Tidelands”), this concern

with critiquing US militarization emerges in footnotes that offer a parallel narrative to

the poetic lines on the top half of the pages. The poem in fact begins with a drawn

map of Guam, labeled with the names of all the US military bases. 47

The narrative of

the poem concerns Renee, a cousin who died in a motorcycle accident in San

Francisco, and memories of a typhoon whose name the poet has forgotten but which

was nevertheless “mapped and monitored.” 48

Yet, these footnotes instead trace the

history of US military occupation of the island and the accidental importation of

brown tree snakes that decimated the native avian life of Guam. These stories of

death, of the destructive power of the natural world, and of transnational (trans-

hemispheric) travel suggest the dangerous consequences of ignoring the complex

connections between familial, national, military, and environmental histories.

Along with militarization, the development of Guam in terms of commerce

and environmental protection has reflected its ambiguous status as an

unincorporated territory. 49

Of note is the huge presence of Japanese capital and

tourism in the more recent development of Guam’s beaches, shifting the island

towards a service-based economy. Though the people of Guam hold widely

conflicting opinions about whether or not the island should remain a possession of

the United States (and if so in what way), a growing portion of the Chamorro

population has actively sought to re-establish Chamorro sovereignty. Delegations of

Chamorro activists have testified for years before the United Nations Special Political

and Decolonization Committee, bypassing the US government, in claims for

independence.

Craig Santos Perez himself has traveled to the committee to provide

testimony, and he reproduces the text of that testimony as footnotes to the sections

of his second book, from Unincorporated Territory [Saina], with lines striking out the

text: “my name is craig santos perez and i’m a poet and native son of guam. i

represent the guahan indigenous collective, a grassroots organization committed to

keeping chamoru culture alive thru public education and artistic expression.” 50

His

placement of the testimony in footnotes, shunted to the bottom of the page, as well

as under the strikethrough text comments on the erasure of such activist work in the

imaginary of the US public at large. The erasure is never complete, though, leaving a

palimpsest-like trace of what has been covered. This kind of orthographic

experimentation as structural commentary is typical of Perez’s decolonial poetics. 51

Interestingly, Chamorro scholar Bevacqua employs the strikethrough in a similar

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manner, crossing out the “USA” in the title of his essay as well a word in the phrase

“U.S. colonized subject.” 52

The former instance suggests removal of the United

States from association with “Guam,” the word which comes before it. The latter

pushes on the meanings of “subject”—as an active agent or as a verb meaning to put

under one’s control—to point out the paradox of a colonized subject who has no

self-determination under colonial rule. The resonance between Bevacqua and Perez’s

use of the strikethrough suggests a possible citational nod from Perez to Bevacqua

or a shared understanding of how written language often functions to cover over as

well as articulate voices.

Perez’s Cartographic Knowledge

In from Unincorporated Territory, Perez also plays with maps, questioning their

omnipresence in monographs about the islands of Oceania. As the second epigraph

of this essay points out, maps are a significant way to identify one’s country or place

of origin, and the maps in turn identify how one’s home becomes legible to others.

Indeed, first contact between Europeans and Guam initiated the cartographic re-

creation of Guam. In 1521, while Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan was en

route to the Molucca spice islands on behalf of the Spanish kingdom, he stumbled

upon Guam in the Mariana Islands. As his galleons sailed toward the islands, the

Indigenous Chamorros came out on proas—Micronesian outrigger canoes with a

triangular lateen sail. The ocean currents carved out the route Magellan took across

the Pacific, guiding him between the islands of Guam and Rota through a channel

called la Bocana by the Spanish. Magellan’s journey and maps helped establish trade

routes for later ships to navigate their journeys across the Pacific via la Bocana. This

way-station status of the island was a major reason that the Spanish claimed it a few

decades later, and it became an important stopping point for ships traveling between

the Spanish colonies of New Spain and the Philippines.

Maps and their legends visually show how places are positioned with respect

to each other from a bird’s-eye-view that assumes an omniscient and disinterested

position. In fact, however, as cultural geographers have argued, maps encode

histories and politics into the texture of their pages and are far from offering a

perfect representation of the world. The vast spaces of the Pacific Ocean, as

traversed by European explorers, seemed full of emptiness, and the creation of maps

allowed future explorers to navigate the waters safely and confidently. Before

European contact, the Chamorros and other Micronesian seafaring people relied on

other means of navigation, but post-contact, of course, Chamorros could not help

but see the world differently through the maps of Western navigation. Indeed,

Western maps have become an especially significant way for making sense of

Oceania in a post-contact world. Margaret Jolly writes, “Indigenous and foreign

representations of the place and its peoples are now not so much separate visions as

they are ‘double visions,’ in the sense of both stereoscopy and blurred edges. Foreign

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knowledges of the Pacific have both used and aspired to eclipse indigenous

knowledges.” 53

This stereoscopic view is what Perez offers in his considerations of

maps transformed into poems with the typographic help of the book designer.

In his maps, Perez centers Guam in relation to other spaces of the Pacific Rim,

which usually occupy the center of representation. He uses the canvas of the page to

create geopolitical maps anchored by words rather than lines designating boundaries

or dots identifying cities. These map poems comment on historical, political, and

cultural relationships more succinctly than narrated prose. Three such maps variously

trace the tradewind-facilitated routes of the region, the geographical movements of

the Japanese and Allied forces in WWII, and the connections made by airports that

are designated by their three-letter codes. 54

In parsing these map poems, the reader

must grapple with how words create different spaces and relationships in the same

geographical locations. A map labeled with the tradewinds in the Pacific, for

example, explain why the small island of Guam, rather than other islands in the

Pacific, became such an important nodal point in the Spanish Empire. The map

poems, in their emphasis on words rather than lines or dots, also suggest the

importance of conceptual relationships between the identified/named boundaries

and sites. The trade wind map, for example, carries with it a particular narrative of

imperial trade history in its designation of relationships between spaces in the Pacific.

These relationships are different—though not necessarily mutually exclusive—from

the ones traced in the map of three-letter airport codes.

In a slightly different manner, the poem “from Lisiensan Ga’lago” takes on the

visual look of maps by suggesting how the placement of words on the page creates

map-like meaning. In a series of three contiguous pages, the poem offers italicized

Chamorro words and non-italicized English words spread out across the page like

waves or islands of an archipelago. On each of the three pages is a box like a legend

on a map. Understood as a legend, then, these boxes contain the keys to

understanding the symbols (or words) on the map. For example, the first page offers

translations of Chamorro words as the key: “fino ‘haya : native words.” 55

The second

page contains just an empty box, suggesting a missing key that frustrates attempts

to make sense of the words on the page. 56

And the third page again offers

translations but with the direction of the lines rotated counter-clockwise by forty-five

degrees. This sideways-quality of the legend box encourages a rotating of the page

as a whole to re-view the map presented at a different angle. Additionally, the

translations offered are incomplete—some Chamorro words have a blank space

following the colon, suggesting an incompleteness to the project of cross-cultural

translation.

Perez’s Environmental Metaphors of Colonial Critique

An element of many Indigenous struggles is concern for the integrity of the

environment, and from Unincorporated Territory also offers examinations of how

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colonialism has transformed Guam’s natural world. Perez’s environmental narrative

emerges primarily in snippets throughout the poetic text like mountains rising out of

the seabed, each protuberant piece offering glimpses of a vaster narrative

submerged in time. In the preface of his first book, Perez describes the geological

forces that created the island: “Guam belongs to a string of volcanic arcs and oceanic

trenches that encircle the Pacific Basin, containing over 50 submarine volcanic

edifices and 11 major subaerial volcanoes. The Marianas Trench, located near the

Marianas archipelago, is the deepest part of the earth’s surface. The trench, shaped

like a semi-circle, was formed by a process of subduction that caused an uplift and

union of two underwater volcanoes.” 57

This geological description anchors the

historical and environmental referents that follow, reminding readers of alternative

scales and time frames that might shift understandings of the place of Guam in the

world.

Environmental devastation in the Pacific wrought by US military occupation

since the first half of the twentieth century has greatly concerned Indigenous

activists and scholars. In “from Descending Plumeria,” Perez narrates in footnotes

the story of the brown tree snake, a non-native reptile likely imported by military

planes after World War II: “The first brown tree snakes reached the war torn island as

cargo ship stowaways.” 58

This snake notoriously has caused the extinction of much of

the native bird life. For scientists, the consequences of the accidental introduction of

this snake into the insular ecosystem are an important lesson in the delicate

equilibrium of micro-habitats. The snake stands in for the destructive forces at large

that globalization and transnational flows cause on Guam. As chronicled in the book

And No Birds Sing: The Story of an Ecological Disaster in a Tropical Paradise, it took

years for ecologists and biologists to figure out why the native bird population of the

island was going extinct. 59

The eerie quiet of the island’s forests by the late 1970s

forced preservationists to act quickly to identify the cause of the bird deaths. Disease

and habitat destruction were at the top of the list of suspects initially, but after long

years of research—both experimental and journalistic—biologist Julie Savidge

demonstrated that the brown tree snake with its highly adaptable eating habits was

to blame.

Perez, however, also emphasizes the obverse of this bleak view of

transnational flows in the object of the achiote plant (Bixa orellana, in it scientific

nomenclature; lipstick tree in colloquial terms). The achiote stands in for

transcontinental forces that enable and transform Indigenous life, emphasizing a

non-static identity and culture. As noted earlier with respect to Achiote Press, Perez

gravitates towards the figure of this plant as an especially rich symbol of Indigenous

(Chamorro) resistance. At the start of the poem “from Achiote,” Perez explains in a

prose preface, “the achiote plant is indigenous to central and south america and the

carribean. it was transported across the pacific to southeast asia by the spanish

colonialists.” 60

In fact, “achiote” is derived from the Nahuatl word for the plant,

“achiotl,” pointing to the Mesoamerican origin of the name. In a brief historical

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account, he connects the Americas to the Pacific and Southeast Asia via Spanish

colonialism and the achiote plant. While people were central to the transcontinental,

transregional movement of this plant, its presence in the lives and cultures of

indigenous peoples on both sides of the Pacific and in the islands of the Pacific is a

significant testament to the ways that ecosystems intertwine in the wake of

colonialism. On the right side of the same page is a long column of other names for

the achiote in different languages and spellings—achiote, achiotec, achiotl, achote,

annatto, urucu, beninoki, bija, eroya, jafara, kasujmba-kelling, kham thai, onoto,

oreleanstrauch, oruco-axiote, rocou, roucou, ruku, roucouyer, unane, uruku, urucum,

rucu-uva. This proliferation of names for a single object highlights the cross-cultural

movement and use of the plant. Also on the same opening page of the poem is a line

drawing of the plant to provide a visual representation of the plant named in such

disparate ways.

Moving on from the brief history of the plant in Spanish colonialism, Perez

offers some comments about how the Mayans of the Americas used the achiote—

”as a food spice and dye, as body paint for war and rituals, and as pigments for arts,

crafts, and murals.” He adds that “the leaves, roots, and bark have been utilized for

their medicinal qualities.” 61

These ethnographic comments about Mayan use of the

plant resonate with later explorations of Chamorro uses of the plant in the poem,

offering an Indigenous, transcontinental connection.

The final paragraph of the introductory page in the poem makes another shift,

stating, “you can find achiote powder in the ethnic foods aisle of some grocery

stores.” 62

The move from history to ethnography to consumer culture traces the

movement of the achiote around the world and through different societies. The

statement seems somewhat incongruous, though, beginning with the second person

pronoun “you” that calls the reader out directly and creates a relationship between

the reader and the long history of the plant. In a contemporary moment, the plant

exists not as a living entity but as powder packaged and marketed as “ethnic.” The

assumed subject position of the reader, then, is someone not in Guam or another

place where achiote plants are common. The designation of “ethnic” also distances

the achiote and its Indigenous consumers from a mainstream society on the mainland

United States.

The poem “from Achiote” consists of alternating sections about the speaker’s

grandmother showing him how to use the achiote and a historical narrative about

Father Sanvitores, the Jesuit missionary credited with bringing Catholicism to Guam.

The arrival of Jesuit priest Diego Luis de Sanvitores in 1662 marked a turning point in

Spanish control over Guam. In addition to giving the archipelago its current name to

honor Queen Mariana of Austria, Father Sanvitores became the foremost missionary

figure for the island, beatified in 1985 by the Vatican for his work in baptizing and

converting the first generation of Chamorro Catholics. Though welcomed by some of

the island’s leaders, called chamorri, Sanvitores found fierce opposition in others, and

Chamorros today often have an ambivalent understanding of him as both savior and

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conqueror. 63

The most well-known oppositional figure is Mata’pang, a chamorri

whom Sanvitores had earlier baptized and nursed when he was injured in a fight. But

after the priest baptized Mata’pang’s baby daughter against his wishes, the chamorri

killed Sanvitores. Mata’pang is later resurrected as an important figure of Chamorro

cultural resistance. Like many other colonized peoples, the Chamorros experienced a

huge population decline in the years after colonization, with many dying from

warfare, disease, and social disintegration, especially following Father Sanvitores’s

work when the Spanish embarked on a more concerted campaign to colonize the

island. 64

In “from Achiote,” the grandmother embodies Chamorro cultural practices

and Indigenous uses of the achiote, and the contrast between grandmother and

grandson reflects a loss of cultural identity and assimilation to white American

culture on the part of the grandson: “and when I rubbed my stained hands on my

face and threw stones at the sky my grandmother called me ‘mata’pang.’” 65

On the

one hand, this exchange might be between any grandmother and grandson where

the grandmother is chiding an unruly boy. On the other hand, the word “mata’pang,”

as defined two pages later, suggests a Chamoru-specific waywardness. Perez writes,

“‘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 ‘crude’ or ‘misbehaved’ or ‘uncivil.’” 66

This transformation in the meaning of the word mirrors the shift in power

from Chamorro natives to Spanish colonists, from the values of the Chamorro

worldview to those of the new Catholicism. In the brief recounting of Father

Sanvitores’s influence on Guam, Perez highlights the moment when he baptizes Chief

Mata’pang’s newborn daughter against his wishes. This forced conversion to the new

religion holds a conflicted place in contemporary Chamorro identity as many people

try to balance Catholic faith with Chamorro cultural traditions and language.

Ultimately, Perez’s poem about the achiote plant underscores a non-static

understanding of Chamorro culture and a transregional understanding of

ecosystems. While flora and fauna on islands are generally shielded from interactions

with non-native species, the imperial travels of Spain and the United States have

contributed to the transformation of Guam’s ecosystem in both productive and

destructive ways.

Conclusion

While Perez’s poetry may be difficult to grasp upon initial encounter, it offers up

seemingly endless and fruitful avenues for critical exploration upon repeated

readings. Indeed, Perez’s project requires the reader to return again and again to the

text, to flip back and forth between pages of the poems to make connections once

overlooked. The sleuthing required to make sense of Perez’s work is indicative of the

kind of relationship embodied by Perez in his project of re-territorializing Chamorro

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language by way of his body and the page. It is a process of re-scripting the

relationships and meanings between people, language, places, nations, and histories.

In his useful phrase, “an ever-emergent empire,” Victor Bascara notes that US

imperialism, though erased under the sign of American Exceptionalism, is in fact ever

present in the archives of American culture and politics. He writes, “The year 1898 is

then a particularly conspicuous manifestation of what came before and what would

follow in increasingly occluded ways. Considering the well-established inability of an

imperial conception of America to take root in dominant understandings of American

culture, it is therefore understandable that the subtle and unexpected manifestations

of empire would occupy the attention of revisionist scholars.” 67

Challenging the

forgetting or refusal of empire, then, seems a Sisyphean project as US imperialism

continually recedes from mainstream acknowledgement. For Bascara, however,

Asian American cultural politics at the end of the twentieth century bears the traces

of empire in a way that disrupts the always receding character of empire’s traces. In

addition to recounting the history of Guam and its entrance into the sphere of

American influence, this essay has taken up Perez’s poetry as an archive that

spotlights empire’s traces. In its attention to re-territorializing language, land, and

bodies, Perez’s decolonial poetics challenges an American military empire often

effaced in the popular imaginary, connecting it to longer histories of the Spanish

Empire and Catholic missionary work.

The cultural politics and history of Chamorros in Guam, as examined in Perez’s

poetry, offer a specific counterpoint to dominant versions of transnational flows in

its foregrounding of Indigeneity. In their introduction to a special issue of The

Contemporary Pacific focused on “Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the Edge,”

Vicente M. Diaz and J. Kehaulani Kauanui write, “We want to emphasize in our

ongoing discussion of native studies in the Pacific, the interrelational and contextual

character of roots and routes. These are not intrinsically oppositional; if our roots are

strong, deep, grounded, it may be precisely for their dynamic abilities to keep pace

with the variable forces of change. And then again, many have not.” 68

Perez’s work

plays with both roots and routes. Rather than simply claiming the Indigenous as the

opposite of transnational flows, Perez writes of Guam as an “articulated site of

indigeneity”—what anthropologist James Clifford defines as the refusal to choose

one of two supposedly opposing notions of Indigenous politics: either Indigeneity as

“essentially about primordial, transhistorical attachments” or as a “‘postmodern’

identity politics.” 69

What an understanding of articulated sites allows is a sense of

active Indigenous participation in modernity and in transnational connections. This

participation, however, comes without completely detaching Indigenous cultural

practices from a people or place. It allows for a diasporic or transnational mode of

critique that does not elide Indigenous presence while depending on it for claims of

belonging. 70

As discussed above, Perez’s interest in the achiote plant, native to the

Americas but brought to the Pacific Islands by Spanish conquistadors, best illustrates

these webs of interrelationships that are enabled by imperialism but also create

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alternative links between Indigenous peoples around the world.

It is not surprising that much critical scholarship on Guam to date has come

from Chamorro and other Pacific Islander scholars from the island. Their perspectives

seem to emerge from jarringly different epistemological locations than those that

continental United States scholars might inhabit, a fact that Filipino/Pohnpeian

scholar Vicente Diaz has examined in depth in his discussion of the (im)possibility of

Pacific Islander studies under the rubric of Asian American or Asian Pacific American

Studies. 71

However, if transnational American Studies as a practice of interrogating

the critical terms that define the United States and American culture is to continue

productively in its endeavors to re-constitute imperial America in other terms, the

sovereignty of Indigenous Pacific Islanders must be a central concern. Constituting

American Studies in innovative, comparative ways also helps to reveal the erasures of

American empire. The Discontiguous States of America, like the American Tropics,

reconceptualizes the problematics of transnational American Studies in ways that

insist on the importance of the unincorporated territories to the national imaginary,

as well as questions US control of those territories. The challenge of Discontiguous

States of America is to follow through with what sovereignty activists like Perez

advocate. The self-determination of Indigenous peoples in unincorporated territories

may not be simple independence, at least in the immediate future; but once

achieved, it will finally offer an actual trans-national relationship between Guam and

the United States.

Notes

1 Robert F. Rogers, Destiny’s Landfall: A History of Guam (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi

Press, 1995), 108.

2 Craig Santos Perez, “Preface,” from Unincorporated Territory [Hacha] (Kane’ohe, HI:

TinFish Press, 2008), 7.

3 Ibid., 12.

4 The spellings of the names for Guam and the Chamorro are weighted with the history of

colonialism. Rogers writes, “One of Legazpi’s [the Spanish conquistador who claimed

Guam for Spain in 1565] legacies in the Marianas was the first recorded use of names that

were antecedents of what would evolve into the word Guam. Documents of the Legazpi

expedition refer variously to Goaam, Goam, and Guan as the name of the island in the

language of the Chamorros. By the early eighteenth century, the name had evolved into

Guana and Guahan. In his authoritative 1806 history of early voyages in the Pacific, James

Burney consistently used Guahan as the island’s name. In the 1870s and 1880s, the

Spanish governors used the similar title Guajan. Finally, the Americans would officially

designate the island as Guam in 1908, over 300 years after Legazpi’s landfall” (14). Perez

himself uses various names for the island, attentive to the multiple histories attendant

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with each designation. He seems to prefer “Guahan” as a name, but for consistency and

by convention, I will use “Guam” throughout except when quoting others or discussing

issues of naming.

5 Other such colonial territories include Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands in the

Caribbean Sea and the Northern Mariana Islands, American Samoa, and the Republic of

the Marshall Islands in the Pacific Ocean, among others.

6 Interestingly, in addition to divisions concerned with land/ocean/environmental

matters, the Department of the Interior also houses the Bureau of Indian Affairs that

deals with Native American tribes on the continent.

7 “Definitions of Insular Area Political Organizations,” Office of Insular Affairs,

Department of the Interior web site, January 11, 2007,

http://www.doi.gov/oia/Islandpages/political_types.htm, accessed August 10, 2010.

8 Ibid.

9 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of

Nationalism, revised edition (London: Verso, 1991). It is also worth noting that Anderson’s

thesis centered on the production of nationalist feeling via capitalism and mass print

culture. To that extent, the textual mediation of nationalism has always depended on

shared language, a point that I emphasize in reading Craig Santos Perez’s poetry.

10 While ceding Guam to the United States in the Treaty of Paris of 1899, Spain sold the

other islands—including the inhabited islands Rota, Saipan, and Tinian—to Germany.

Japan invaded those islands during World War I and retained possession of them after

the war. In the years between WWI and 1944, then, Japan instituted Japanese language

and cultural transformations on the islands while using the land for sugar crops. While

Spain had greatly limited travel between islands during its reign, traffic between the

northern Mariana Islands and Guam effectively ceased under split Japanese and

American rule. Japan’s imperial designs extended to Guam during WWII when Japan

invaded and captured the southernmost island. After Japan’s defeat, while Guam

reverted to American Navy rule, the other islands were placed under a United Nations

trust territory, which meant that the United States gained access to those islands for

military use. In 1975, the residents of the Northern Mariana Islands voted to continue

association with the United States in the form of a commonwealth covenant, a status it

currently maintains. Vanessa Warheit’s documentary film The Insular Empire: America in

the Mariana Islands (Horse Opera Productions, 2010), chronicles the different experiences

of Chamorros in the Northern Mariana Islands, versus on Guam, through the stories of

four influential leaders of varying perspectives about independence or continued

association with America.

11 Christina Duffy Burnett and Burke Marshall, “Between the Foreign and the Domestic:

The Doctrine of Territorial Incorporation, Invented and Reinvented,” Foreign in a

Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico, American Expansion, and the Constitution, Burnett and

Journal of Transnational American Studies, 3(2) (2011)

22

Marshall, editors (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 2.

12 Brooks Thomas, “A Constitution Led by the Flag: The Insular Cases and the Metaphor of

Incorporation,” in Burnett and Marshall, 84.

13 Thomas, 83. For an account of continuities between continental expansion and empire,

see Bartholomew H. Sparrow, The Insular Cases and the Emergence of American Empire

(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006).

14 Epeli Hau’ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” We Are the Ocean: Selected Works (University of

Hawaiʻi Press, 2008), 32. Originally published in A New Oceania: Rediscovering Our Sea of

Islands, edited by Eric Waddell, Vijay Naidu, and Epeli Hau’ofa (Suva: School of Social and

Economic Development, University of the South Pacific), 1993. One of the main points

forwarded by Hau’ofa is the need for the people of Oceania to regain control of defining

their own world, to wrest such control from foreigners. Thus, Margaret Jolly writes, “As

Tongan scholar Epeli Hau’ofa has suggested (1994), outsiders’ representations of the

Pacific matter not just because of their geopolitical and discursive hegemony but

because Islanders have, in part, come to see themselves through the Outlanders’ lenses”

(509).

15 The Loft Literary Center is a nonprofit arts organization dedicated to fostering reading

and writing cultures in Minnesota. Their web site is at http://www.loft.org. NAISA is a

young professional association dedicated to supporting research, cultural work, and

activism in the academic fields of Native studies. Their web site is at

http://www.naisa.org. I emphasize this context of my encounter with Perez’s work to

mark an institutional and academic space where Perez’s work becomes visible.

16 The founding editors explain on the web site for Achiote Press, “Achiote: a shrub or

small tree indigenous to Central and South America. Introduced to the Pacific and Asia by

the Spanish in the 17th century, Achiote now has firm transnational roots. Achiote

produces pink flowers and red spiny seed pods. People have used the seeds as a dye for

clothing, arts and crafts, as body paint in times of war and celebration, as spice and

coloring for food. Other parts of the Achiote tree have been used to make various

medicinal remedies for sunstroke, burns, fever, sore throat, blood disease, eye and ear

infections, and hypertension. Achiote has also been used as an aphrodisiac. We named

our press after the Achiote tree because we believe poetry has the very same powers to

enrich our surroundings, inspire our passions, enhance our senses, and heal our

wounds.” http://www.achiotepress.com/about.htm, accessed July 15, 2010.

17 The Poetry Foundation runs a blog with posts from different contributing poets at

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet. Perez’s personal blog is at

http://craigsantosperez.wordpress.com/.

18 Rob Wilson, “From the Sublime to the Devious: Writing the Experimental/Local

Pacific,” boundary 2, 28.1 (2001): 124.

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19 Wilson, 123.

20 “The Page Transformed: A Conversation with Craig Santos Perez,” Lantern Review Blog,

March 12, 2010, http://lanternreview.com/blog/2010/03/12/the-page-transformed-a-

conversation-with-craig-santos-perez/, accessed July 15, 2010.

21 Perez, [Saina], 15.

22 Perez, [Hacha], emphasis in original, 8.

23 “The Page Transformed.”

24 My students, like many Americans, I would presume, veer towards two options when

confronted with the paradoxical status of Guam and other unincorporated territories:

they should either be granted independence (Guam as sovereign nation) or they should

be incorporated fully into the United States (Guam as a state of the Union). The binary

formulation of the situation belies the complexity of unincorporation, though, and as

much as activists like Perez advocate for political sovereignty, they also acknowledge the

inevitable messiness of cultural identity for Chamorros and of political alliances necessary

for such a small but strategically located place like Guam. Thus, there is no clear end

point to the struggles of the Chamorro people though there are identifiable, incremental

goals that would offer greater self-determination.

25 These Chamorro words are translated throughout the poem.

26 Perez, [Hacha], emphasis in original, 37.

27 Perez, 39. Gaps exist between words in the original. Because Perez’s poetic lines are so

deliberately placed and spaced on the page, it is difficult at times to retain a sense of

words’ visual placements in relation to each other in in-line quotations.

28 Ibid., 80.

29 Ibid., 70.

30 Vicente M. Diaz, “Pious Sites: Chamorro Culture Between Spanish Catholicism and

American Liberal Individualism,” Cultures of United States Imperialism, Amy Kaplan and

Donald E. Pease, editors (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 312–39.

31 The second volume, from Unincorporated Territory [Saina], continues this experimental

project of interweaving poems begun in [Hacha] with some new formal characteristics.

The overall structure of interwoven long poems remains the same. This second book’s

sections, however, are more regularly divided with a fairly consistent sequence of

excerpts repeated in each. Perez numbers these sections in four languages—Chamorro,

Spanish, Japanese, and English—acknowledging and mobilizing the complex colonial

legacy of Guam in an act of memorializing rather than forgetting the past. Excerpts

“from tidelands” and “from aerial roots” draw forward pieces of the first volume to

anchor the new poems.

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32 Perez, [Hacha], 25 and 88. Again, it is difficult to capture the spacing of words here.

Deleted words on the second page are gaps in the text.

33 Perez, “The Page Transformed.”

34 Perez, [Hacha], emphasis mine, 12. Both Michael Lujan Bevacqua and Diaz, other

scholars also originally from Guam committed to Indigenous and Chamorro sovereignty,

use Chamorro words similarly in their essays. Bevacqua comments in the Notes to his

essay, “The subheadings in this chapter (hacha, hugua, tulu, etc.) are ancient Chamorro

numbers. In modern Chamorro they have been replaced with Spanish numbers (uno, dos,

tres, etc.). I use them to number section headings in my written work as a small gesture

of decolonization.” Michael Lujan Bevacqua, “The Exceptional Life and Death of a

Chamorro Soldier: Tracing the Militarization of Desire in Guam, USA,” Setsu Shigematsu

and Keith L. Camacho, editors, Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia

and the Pacific (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 50. Previously

published in The Contemporary Pacific 6.1 (1994): 86–109. And Diaz points out in a

footnote about references to Chief Kephua Memorial Park in Agana, “I prefer to use the

name ‘Kepuha’ rather than the more conventional ‘Quipuha’ for an added irony found in

the Chamorro orthography. In the vernacular, the name ‘Kepuha’—the seventeenth-

century chief who is said to have welcomed the Catholic mission to Guam—is translated

as ‘dare to overturn’ (as in ‘dare to overturn a canoe’). . . In favoring the use of ‘Kepuha’

to the hispanicied (anglicized) ‘Quipuha,’ I myself dare to overturn histories and practices

that would themselves dare to obscure indigenous meaning systems. But then again, for

the majority of other names and places referred to here in this article, I defer to Hispanic

and Anglo conventions in the tactical interest of communication and out of sheer

historical and cultural necessity” (n. 5, 336).

35 Allan Punzalan Isaac, American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America (Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 1.

36 The Guam Organic Act of 1950 officially transferred control of Guam from the US Navy

to the Department of the Interior and civilian rule though the island remains a key

location for the US Navy which thus maintains significant control of Guam’s resources

and land.

37 Rogers, 182.

38 See Rogers, 170.

39 Cynthia Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 3.

40 Paul Carano and Pedro C. Sanchez, A Complete History of Guam (Tokyo: Charles E.

Tuttle Company, 1964), 1.

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41 See Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho, eds., Militarized Currents: Toward a

Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,

2010).

42 Bevacqua, emphasis mine, 33.

43 A video clip of this exchange went viral on the YouTube web site as commentators at

various blog and online news sites ridiculed Representative Johnson’s seemingly

ludicrous remark. Conservative critics in particular pointed to Johnson’s comments as

evidence of Democrat stupidity. Others argued that Johnson’s remarks were clearly

figurative and tongue-in-cheek, stating in a joking manner a serious point about the

overrunning of the small island with American military personnel. Admiral Willard, in his

response, emphasized that Guam is the Westernmost location of the United States and

thus vital as a military site for the security interests of the nation.

See also, Blaine Harden, “On Guam, planned Marine base raises anger, infrastructure

concerns,” The Washington Post (March 22, 2010), http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-

dyn/content/article/2010/03/21/AR2010032101025.html (accessed August 3, 2010).

44 Perez, 83. The words in the box offer intriguing suggestions of connections to other

poems and images. The only un-struck-through word, “attadok,” appears untranslated

earlier in “from Aerial Roots” (49).

45 The sites listed in order are: http://www.petitiononline.com/haleta/petition.html,

http://decolonizeguam.blogspot.com, and http://jgpo-guam-cmtf.blogspot.com. As of

December 22, 2010, the third site is no longer available. This unstable nature of the Web

and Perez’s weaving of links between a book and the Internet are also suggestive of the

uneven relationships between Guam and other cultural/political bodies that are ever-

changing.

46 Perez, 91.

47 Ibid., 85.

48 Ibid., 87.

49 For a teleological account of development in the region, see Mansel G. Blackford,

Pathways to the Present: U.S. Development and Its Consequences in the Pacific (Honolulu:

University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2007).

50 Craig Santos Perez, from Unincorporated Territory [Saina] (Richmond, CA: Omnidawn

Publishing, 2010), 17. In the notes at the end of the book that explain the footnotes,

Perez also offers himself as a contact person for those interested in decolonial activism

and Chamorro independence.

51 Perez is quick to note that, by and large, he is not an activist like the others who

provided testimony before the United Nations. His literary activism aims to shift

Chamorro and other American understandings of Guam and Chamorro culture, but he

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distinguishes such work from explicit political engagement. In a blog post, he writes,

“i’ve never considered myself an activist; if anything, i think what i do is ‘literary activism’

as i try to raise awareness of the struggles of my people through my poetry. in 2007, i

became involved with a chamoru activist group called famoksaiyan. at first, i held writing

workshops during the group’s annual conferences.” “Poetry, Politics, & Why I am Not an

Activist,” Blog post, (February 24, 2010) Harriet: A Blog from the Poetry Foundation,

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2010/02/poetry-politics-why-i-am-not-an-

activist/ (accessed August 2, 2010).

52 Bevacqua, 42.

53 Margaret Jolly, “Imagining Oceania: Indigenous and Foreign Representations of a Sea

of Islands,” The Contemporary Pacific 19.2 (Fall 2007), 509.

54 Perez, 28–30.

55 Ibid., 34.

56 Ibid., 35.

57 Ibid., 8.

58 Ibid., emphasis in original, 87.

59 Mark Jaffe, And No Birds Sing: The Story of an Ecological Disaster in a Tropical Paradise

(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).

60 [Hacha], 17.

61 Ibid.

62 Ibid.

63 Rogers writes of the origins of “Chamorro” as the name of the Indigenous peoples of

Guam: “By the time Spain claimed Guam in 1565, the indigenous people of the Marianas

would be called Chamurres, the Spanish version of the local term, chamorri, which is what

the islanders called members of their high caste. The early Spanish sailors also

interpreted chamurre to mean ‘friend.’ Eventually, the local people would be known

variously as Marianos, Chamorris, and finally Chamorros after Father Diego Luís de San

Vitores arrived to establish a Jesuit mission on Guam in 1668. The word Chamorro to

describe the island’s people is, therefore, apparently indigenous in origin as well as

perhaps an adaptation of the old Spanish word chamorro for “bald” or “shorn”

(“beardless” in Portuguese), which described some island men who wore only a topknot

on an otherwise shaved head. No known records of Magellan’s stay at Guam reported an

indigenous name of the island, a curious omission for one of the most significant landfalls

in human history” (6). I use “Chamorro” as the commonly accepted spelling for the name

of the people and the language though Perez sometimes uses “Chamoru,” a spelling

considered more reflective of the Chamorro language rather than Spanish.

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64 Rogers writes, “The decline in population from the estimated 12,000 on Guam in 1668

when Father San Vitores arrived to fewer than 2,000 people twenty-two years later was

disastrous” (70). Rogers spells the priest’s name differently than Perez and Vicente Diaz

do; I follow the latter scholars’ spelling except when quoting from Rogers. Perez also

offers different population numbers in his book: “[*after the death of sanvitores, the

native population dropped from 200,000 to 5,000 in two generations as a result of spanish

military conquest]” (21).

65 Ibid., 20.

66 Ibid., 23.

67 Victor Bascara, Model-Minority Imperialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota

Press, 2006), 28.

68 Vicente M. Diaz and J. Kehaulani Kauanui, “Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the

Edge,” The Contemporary Pacific 13.2 (Fall 2001): 321.

69 James Clifford, “Indigenous Articulations,” The Contemporary Pacific 13.2 (Fall 2001):

472.

70 For an analysis of how queer of color critique often forwards a diasporic approach that

dismisses Indigeneity in this way, see Andrea Smith, “Queer Theory and Native Studies:

The Heteronormativity of Settler Colonialism,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies

16.1–2 (2010): 42–68.

71 Vicente M. Diaz, “‘To “P” or Not to “P”?’: Marking the Territory Between Pacific

Islander and Asian American Studies,” Journal of Asian American Studies 7.3 (October

2004): 183–208.

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