On Writing from the New Oceania
Craig Santos Perez
1.
Write
from:
From indicates a particular
time or place as a starting point; from refers to a specific location as
the first of two limits; from imagines a cause, an agent, an instrument,
a source, or an origin; from marks separation, removal, or exclusion; from
differentiates borders. “Where are you from?” In
the preface to my first book of poems, I wrote: “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, USA.’ I say, ‘I’m from a territory
of the United States.’”
from excerptus: “pluck
out” from ex- “out” + carpere “gather”
or “harvest”
From also indicates an
excerpt or a passage quoted from a source. My own passage and migration from Guam to California
often feels like living an excerpted existence; while my body lives here, my
heart still lives in my homeland. Poetry is a way for me to bring together
these excerpted spaces via the transient, processional, and migratory
cartographies of the page. Each of my poems, and each of my books, and
seemingly every breath I take, carries the from and bears its weight and
incompleteness.
2.
Write Oceanic
The
imagination is an ocean of possibilities. I imagine the blank page as an excerpt
of the ocean. The ocean is storied and heavy with history, myth, rumor,
genealogy, loss, war, money, the dead, life, and even plastic. The ocean is not
“aqua nullius.” The page, then, is
never truly blank. The page consists of submerged volcanoes of story and
unfathomable depths of meaning.
Each
word is an island. The visible part of the word is its textual body; the
invisible part of the word is the submerged mountain of meaning. Words emerging
from the silence are islands forming. No word is an just an island, every word
is part of a sentence, an archipelago. The space between is defined by referential
waves and currents .
Oceanic
stories are vessels for cultural beliefs, values, customs, histories,
genealogies, politics, and memories. Stories weave generations and geographies.
Stories protest and mourn the ravages of colonialism, articulate and promote
cultural revitalization, and imagine and express decolonization.
3.
Write
Archipelagic
An
individual book is an island with a unique linguistic geography and ecology, as
well as a unique poetic landscape and seascape. The book-island is inhabited by
the living and the dead, the human and the non-human, multiple voices and
silences. The book-island vibrates with the complexity of the present moment
and the depths of history and genealogy, culture and politics, scars and bone
and blood.
A
book series is an archipelago, a birthing and formation of book-islands. Like
an archipelago, the books in an ongoing series are related and woven to the
other islands, yet unique and different. Reading the books in a series is akin
to traveling and listening across the archipelago.
Because
Guam is part of an archipelago, the geography inspired the form of my from
unincorporated territory book series. Additionally, the unfolding nature of
memory, learning, listening, sharing, and storytelling informed the serial
nature of the work. To me, the complexity of the story of Guam and the Chamorro
people — entangled in the complications of ongoing colonialism and militarism —
inspired the ongoing serial form.
The
first book of the series, from unincorporated territory [hacha] (2008) focused
on my grandfather’s life and experience on Guam when the island was occupied by
Japan’s military during World War II. The second book, from unincorporated
territory [saina] (2010), focused on my grandmother’s contrasting
experience during that same period. The third book, from unincorporated
territory [guma’] (2014) echoes and enlarges the earlier books through the
themes of family, militarization, cultural identity, migration and colonialism.
Furthermore, [guma’] focuses on my own return to my home island after living
away (in California) for 15 years. I explore how the island has changed and how
my idea of home has changed. I also meditate upon the memories that I have
carried with me, as well as all that I have forgotten and left behind.
The
titles are meant to mark and name different books in the same series. Just as
an archipelago has a name, such as the Marianas Archipelago, each island of the
archipelago has its own unique name. The names can be translated as [one],
[elder], and [home]. My first book was given the name, [hacha], to mark it as
the first book, first island, first voice. While one might expect the second
book to be named, second, I chose the name, [elder], to resist that linearity
and instead highlight genealogy, or the past. The third book, which means house
or home, was an attempt to weave together time and space (the house or book as
spatial and temporal). The fourth book, from unincorporated territory [lukao]
(forthcoming, 2017) includes themes of birth, creation, parenthood, money,
climate colonialism, militarization, migration, and extinction. The Chamorro
name of the book, [lukao], means procession.
My
multi-book project also 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. 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.
I
also became intrigued by how certain poets write trans-book poems: such as
Duncan’s “Passages” and Mackey’s “Songs of the
Andoumboulou.” I employ this kind of trans-book threading in my own work as
poems change and continue across books (for example, excerpts from the poems “from
tidelands” and “from
aerial roots” appear in both my first and second books). These threaded poems
differ from Duncan and Mackey’s work because I resist the linearity of
numbering that their work employs.
4.
Write
Cartographic
I
use diagrams, maps, illustrations, colalge visual poetry as a way to foreground
the relationship between storytelling, mapping, and navigation. Just as maps
have used illustrations (sometimes visual, sometimes typographical), I believe
poetry can both enhance and disrupt our visual literacy.
One
incessant typographical presence throughout my work is the tilde (~). Besides
resembling an ocean current and containing the word “tide” in
its body, the tilde has many intriguing uses. In languages, the tilde is used
to indicate a change of pronunciation. As you know, I use many different kinds
of discourse in my work (historical, political, personal, etc) and the tilde is
meant to indicate a shift in the discursive poetic frame. In mathematics, the
tilde is used to show equivalence (i.e. x~y). Throughout my work, I want to
show that personal or familial narratives have an equivalent importance to
official historical and political discourses.
Cartographic
representations of the Pacific Ocean developed in Europe at the end of the 15th
century, when the Americas were incorporated into maps: the Pacific became a wide
empty space separating Asia and America. In European world maps, Europe is
placed at the center and “Oceania” is divided
into two opposite halves on the margins. As imperialism progressed, every new
voyage incorporated new data into new maps.
As
I mention in the preface to my first book, the invisibility of Guam on many
maps—whether actual maps or the maps of history—has always haunted me. One hope
for my poetry is to enact an emerging map of “Guam” both
as a place and as a signifier.
The
“actual maps” in my first book are,
to me, both visual poems and illustrations of the rest of the work. In my
imagination, they function in two ways: first, they center “Guam,” a locating signifier often omitted from many maps.
Second, the maps are meant to provide a counterpoint to the actual stories that
are told throughout the book. While maps can locate, chart, and represent (and
through this representation tell an abstracted story), they never show us the
human voices of a place. I place this abstract, aerial view of “Guam” alongside the more embodied and rooted portraits of place
and people.
“Song maps” refer to the songs,
chants, and oral stories that were created to help seafarers navigate oceanic
and archipelagic spaces. Pacific navigational techniques are often understood
as a “visual
literacy,” in the sense that a navigator has to be able to “read”
the natural world in order to make safe landfall. The key features include
reading the stars, ocean efflorescence, wave currents, and fish and bird
migrations.
Scholars
and navigators describe this technique as “moving islands” because
in these songs, the canoe is conceptualized as remaining still, while the
stars, islands, birds, fish, and waves all move in concert. Islands not only
move, but islands also expand and contract. For example, if you see an offshore
bird associated with a certain island, then you know that island is nearby
(thus, it has figuratively, expanded).
With
this in mind, I imagine that poems are song maps of my own journey to find Guam
across historical and diasporic distances. I imagine the reader is in a still
canoe, reading the songs in order to navigate the archipelago of memory and
story. In this way, books and words become moving islands, expanding and
contracting, inhaling and exhaling.
Craig Santos Perez is a native Chamorro
from the Pacific Island of Guam. He is the author of three books, most recently
from unincorporated territory [guma’],
which received an American Book Award 2015. He is an associate professor in the
English department at the University of Hawaiʻi,
Mānoa. You
can find him on Facebook, Twitter and here: www.craigsantosperez.com.
