from unincorporated territory [guma’]

Writing about N. NourbeSe Philip's book "Zong!", Nathanial Mackey asks whether reordering history's “linguistic protocols might undo or redo history itself.” Even, as Juliana Spahr added in her blurb for Zong!, “find an answer [to Historical trauma…by] telling and not telling,…naming and not naming.” Craig Santos Perez's trilogy from Unincorporated Territory [Hacha], [guma'] and [saina] is doing precisely that. He is one of many exciting contemporary authors attempting to recalibrate the self within a sense of the nation and its history who is using innovative forms of hybridity to write a new America, defying Anglo-centric perspectives linguistically and visually, re-writing back in the natives that have been written out, forgotten, erased. The goal (as far as I felt it in my reading) is to show personal history as part of a larger contextual History that has long been silenced, one might even argue systematically eradicated from America. Authors like Perez (or Philips or Myung Mi Kim) thus collage, cross-out, fragment and stutter, include visual images and diagrams on their page, incorporate foreign languages and mix or include English errors or variations on definitions—as space for the illegible and unreadable in the reading process, and as a method of revising the History of the self and its nations. At the heart of such disjointed weaving of multitudes of cultures and languages into the loom of the American Literary tradition is the issue of resisting erasure. As a reader, I feel excited to be taken into the spaces that Perez is creating on the page for me, and cannot wait to read more.

This book is the start of a trilogy (thus far) by Craig Santos Perez, and as such is the opening act in an exploration of origin, language (erased and re-sought), family, place (Guam: a part /apart of/from the USA) and a writing style that only grows and depends across the following books from Unincorporated Territory. Richly inter-textual, this is a poetic text which I feel everyone must read. "from" the word that begins every section and subsection in Perez's work implies a space that is not complete, that is a part of, and which readers also play a role in moving towards completion. I cannot encourage my friends, students and others to grab up a copy and give this a read. Taking back the self, exploring ancestry, origins and histories that are rich with variants from codified History, this contemporary author is engaged in a kind of formally innovative polyphonic writing that is exciting and aethetically new while also being entirely grounded in a real that needs to be told/spoken.

Santos Perez has written an incredible collection that weaves its way through both heart and mind. He takes the reader on a journey of understanding - what colonialism does to a people, what war does to a people, what not having a voice does to a people. Most importantly, he has chosen to give us his voice, and we'd be fools not to listen.

A must read

Eye opening and informative. A definite must read.

This s*** is fire, son 🔥🔥🔥🔥

Guma’ covers a topic that is very personal and relatable to many cultures that have been subjected to imperialism. Perez does a good job of making the reader feel sympathetic towards his home country, Guam. At the same time, I found it hard to feel emotion. He discusses a topic that, unfortunately, has happened all over the world. It was almost as if I was numb reading it. It really made me question my compassion as a human being. I could easily spot lines where I should have felt emotion, but didn’t. For example, the very first page of the book points out how Guam is Americanized and modernized, ending with, “Guam is endangered. Guam is one of [our] most curious possessions. Guam is no longer ‘Guam’”(13). This first page really caught my interest, but I didn’t feel a strong empathetic pull either. I was caught in the middle of what I should be feeling, versus, what I actually was feeling.Perez uses clever metaphors trying to translate his emotions towards his native country. In many of the poems, he compares Guam to the Micronesian king fisher stating, “…twenty-nine Micronesian kingfishers to zoos for captive breeding…” (24). He refers to America as the zoo and how it trapped Guam’s culture. There was something very deep and entrancing about his metaphors. Nonetheless, I still compared Guam to all the other cultures that have experienced the same oppression, cultures that run in my blood, yet, it didn’t evoke much sympathy.Similarly, Perez used draft environmental impact statements to make the reader feel compassion for Guam. The DEIS public comments showed the frustrations and concerns of the natives, one states, “I am a 9-year-old girl and I don’t want you to do this because I love dolphins and turtles and want them to be here when I have my own kids” (47). This comment elicited some emotion from me. It did make me put into perspective if this were to happen to my homeland. However, it also just made me more frustrated with myself because I wasn’t that upset reading it. So is the human flaw apathy or that we like to destroy things? Maybe both, considering the two go hand in hand.

This book was hard to get a hold of, but absolutely brilliant and worth the effort! I treasure it as a piece of supreme experimental writing that points the finger at colonisation globalisation and militarism through an everyday lens. Brilliant.