From Unincorporated Territory: Guma'
This poetry collection layers Guam’s history, migration, militarization, and family memory, moving between the island’s colonial reality and everyday life.
Work Information
Island memory rises in fragments of poetry.
Combining poems, documents, and fragments, the book layers Guam’s politics with personal memory. It reads as a politically charged poetry collection that addresses both military occupation and cultural continuity.
Review Summaries
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The official page frames it as a poetic response to colonialism and militarization.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Omnidawn Pub
- Published
- 2014-04-01
- Pages
- 81 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 15.24 x 1.02 x 22.86 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781890650919
- ISBN-10
- 1890650919
- Price
- 3413 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Poetry/American
Craig Santos Perez, a native Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam), has lived for two decades away from his homeland. This new collection maps the emotional and geographic cartographies of his various migrations, departures, and arrivals. Through a variety of poetic forms, the poet highlights the importance of origins and customs amidst new American cultures and terrains. Furthermore, this book draws attention to, and protests, the violent currents of colonialism and militarism currently threatening Guåhan, a “strategic” US territory since 1898. The poet memorializes what his people have lost and insists that we must protect and defend what we have left of home. This collection will engage those interested in Pacific literature, multicultural, indigenous poetry, mixed-genre, multilingual experiments, ecopoetics, and those who want to explore intersections between poetry, politics, history, and culture.
CRAIG SANTOS PEREZ, co-star of the poetry album Undercurrent, is author of two previous collections, a finalist for LA Times 2010 Poetry Book Prize, and winner of 2011 PEN Center USA Literary Poetry Award. He lives in Honolulu and teaches creative writing and Pacific literature at University of Hawai?i, at Manoa. CRAIG SANTOS PEREZ, co-star of the poetry album Undercurrent, is author of two previous collections, a finalist for LA Times 2010 Poetry Book Prize, and winner of 2011 PEN Center USA Literary Poetry Award. He lives in Honolulu and teaches creative writing and Pacific literature at University of Hawai i, at M noa.
Reviews
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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.
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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 .
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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.
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A must read
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Eye opening and informative. A definite must read.