Second in a series of interviews with poets to be featured at Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, April 14-17, 2016. Festival pre-registration available until March 31 on Split This Rock's website.
by M. F. Simone
Roberts
Craig’s
most recent book from UNINCORPORATED TERRITORY [guma’] is the third in a likely perpetual series
of books about the unincorporated territories of the US’s Pacific presence. The first [hatcha], and the second [saina] both consider colonial experience.
But, much of [guma’] (Guam) circles
around community testimony on the environmental impact statement for a project
to develop a US military weapons testing range on what is, for the Chamoru
people, the most sacred place on their islands (listen to an interview at Against the Grain).
Perez
works in a poetics of the documentary, the collage or intertext, and use of
blackouts of existing texts. He creates effects of both textual fragment and
historical immediacy. His methods owe a lot to literary Modernism, but Guam is
a more post-modern sort of thing. It’s a colony once of Spain, then of Japan, and now of the
United States. It’s the origin of a
huge diaspora, a place of incredible importance to US military and foreign
policy -- and it’s mostly invisible to our sense of what the US is, as well
as being very, very small on a map. It is a place that lives mostly in state of
what Derrida called erasure (sous rature).
An
unincorporated territory is a no man’s land, which is not to say that no man is running the
place -- it belongs to the machinery of empire. Perez’s poetics comes organically from the problem of place and
what place means in a region of the world that was integral and whole, and is
now other to itself twice over. Surnames pass through colonizer languages.
Farmland becomes air strip. Native language becomes economic liability. Imported,
processed food replaces traditional diet and culinary practice. Eventually
everything revolves around this dominant stranger who won’t become part of the place -- and won’t leave.
One of the tensions running through these
poems of unincorporated territories is that they’re written from and about places that are still colonies
that, in a post-colonial era, exist to
further another's colonial ambitions.
***
Simone Roberts: I
want to start with a very personal question. It’s not nosiness, but acquaintance-making. Many in the Split
This Rock community know very well what it feels like to live as (post)colonial
or marginalized persons. But, being Chamoru, and being from Guam, is
qualitatively different from these other ways of being and experiences of
oppression. What do you understand as the unique qualities of Guam’s colonial status and the Chamoru who live there?
Craig Santos Perez:
Chamorus are one of the most invisible peoples of US empire, partly because we
are a small population, partly because Guam is the furthest territory from the
US continent, partly because we don’t fit into popular images of Pacific Islanders, and partly
because we speak English and carry US passports. Being from an “unincorporated territory” has taught us that we are a possession of the US but we
are not fully part of the nation. The Chamoru experience is, in some ways, a
confluence of other experiences of oppression. For example, Chamorus have
experienced a similar history to Native Americans in terms of genocide and missionization
and decolonial struggles. Chamorus are similar to other island peoples within
US empire (such as Hawaiians and Puerto Ricans) in terms of how we have been
shaped by colonization, militarization, and tourism. Chamorus are similar to
other immigrant groups in terms of our experience of diaspora, cultural
assimilation, and civil rights struggles.
MFSR: Many in the
Split This Rock community are not academics, and we put a high value on
intellectual accessibility. For readers in and out of the academy, and taking
advantage of your talents as a teacher, would you mind describing documentary
poetics and how you think it contributes to a poetry of protest and
provocation?
CSP: Documentary
poetics is a poetry that documents history, culture, politics, etc (think of a
documentary film). Often, documentary poetry uses actual documents to tell the
story (such as photographs, historical texts, archival material, political
tracts, etc). Potentially, documentary poetics contributes to a poetry of
protest by giving deeper and broader contexts to whatever the poet might be
protesting. For example, if you were writing a poem protesting racist
representations of Muslims in the media, you can include actual quotes from the
articles (the documents), or you can tell a larger documentary story about
Muslims in America.
MFSR: I suppose we could ask the same question about
experimental poetics (to use a huge umbrella term into which I am jamming many
of the modern and postmodern practices). To expand: Experimental poetry gets
labeled as apolitical, or insufficiently engaged, because its poetics
(indeterminate, collage, ambiguous, juxtaposed, etc) delays and refracts
meaning. Rather than experiencing it as allowing meaning to emerge, many
readers (and critics) experience it as fractured, chaotic, inert. But, your poetics puts the lie to this
dismissive stance. Why write in this tradition, rather than the more lyric and
narrative tradition of poetry of witness and intervention?
CSP: Yes,
experimental or avant-garde poetic traditions have a deep history of political
engagement (often radical engagements with anarchism, socialism,
decolonization, and communism). I write in this tradition because I consider
myself a radical poet who is interested in decolonizing and deconstructing
empire. That said, I also write in lyric and narrative traditions of witness
and intervention, as I believe these poetic traditions have something valuable
to offer poets interested in sharing stories of trauma and poems of protest.
MFSR: Beyond some
familiar methods of documentary poetics, your books make many gestures outside
of themselves that become textured experiences for the reader. Some of your
titles are geographic coordinates. We can look those up on maps on the
internet, discover a place, rather than be told what it is or how it’s symbolic in your poem.
the book focuses so much on destruction wrought in Guam, but each
section of the book is named for a tool used to build the latte, or stones that either mark sacred places or were foundations for buildings that elevated them
above storm surge. In the lists of Chamoru military dead, you strike out
everything but their name, making this person more present than their function
for the colonizer. In your recent poems, you’re using more hashtags -- sometimes as links to real
internet campaigns, sometimes as words, sometimes as fragments that go nowhere.
I want first to compliment you on this. It’s a kind of profuse minimalism. For me, much of the
considerable emotional force of the poems is conveyed this way. These
techniques also put the experience of strangeness and dislocation in the
foreground for the reader.
So,
to turn this into a question: what is the value or strategy of strangeness
(which is also discovery) in your poetry? What are the political registers of
these techniques?
CSP: Thanks for
this close reading, and for your compliment. Yes, I am interested in different
poetic techniques that can express, capture, and embody emotions in ways that
invite the reader into the meaning making process. This strangeness is
defamiliarizing and—I hope—creates opportunities for interpretation. Throughout my
books, I have referenced urls, Facebook statuses, Google search engine results,
and now hashtags to speak to the virtuality of poetry and protest, or how
poetry and protest have become so deeply intertwined with the virtual world. To
me, this takes the poem from the page to the web, so to speak.
“Poetry
cannot bring back the dead, nor can it bring back dying languages or cultures.
However, I think poetry, and literature in general, is an important site of
memory, recovery, resistance, revitalization, resilience, and resurgence–especially
in response to historical, cultural, ecological, and personal trauma. Because
the literary is a symbolic space, poetry can inspire and empower us towards
real change. There is no guarantee or direct correlation to action, but instead
poetry opens up a space of possibility and promise. In this way, poetry is like
a prayer that believes in resurrection.”
Let
me extend this idea a little. So many of your interviews touch on what we call “Split This Rock issues,” that I’m working hard to take this conversation into areas that
you haven’t
often been asked to tread. Let’s replace “resurrection” with “imagination” and “world making.” We
want poetry to move us to real change, but I wonder how you feel about its role
in imagining what those changes are: what might the other side of the
postcolonial moment look like; or, for example, what kind of city will Detroit
or Baltimore become as they evolve out of post-industrial wreckage; or, should
poetry be a medium in which positive visions are imagined?
In
short, is there a vision of a post-colonial Guam, and how does poetry figure in
or support that vision?
CSP: As you
note, an important aspect of the anti-colonial project is to expose and
critique the ravages of colonialism. The decolonial then comes in to recover
and revitalize what was lost in terms of native culture, language, history,
arts, ecologies, etc. The vision for a post-colonial Guam is one in which Guam
is a free, sovereign state, in which the US military de-occupies our land (and
that land is once again cared-for and rehabilitated), and the Chamoru people
can finally determine our future in terms of governance, natural resource
management, education, etc. Poetry can articulate and inspire visions of a
sustainable future.
MFSR: I ask
because the modes of critique, complaint, protest, or intervention are deeply
necessary answers to the sleights-of-hand and commercializing of imperial and
domestic forms of state and economic control. The System, for shorthand, needs
dismantling, but I worry that we are not also working on ideas and plans and
dreams and negotiations of the world and social
forms that come next. It’s a difficult question, I know, because part of the
immigrant and the colonial imagination or mindset is to look back to before --
before the colonizer arrived, before the homeland was left -- it’s historical. And some of the customs, habits, strategies,
attitudes, poetics and artistic forms that we will need in whatever’s coming from us do come from these ancestral and even
ancient cultures. For you, though, how or should poetry be more than interventionist?
CSP: In many
Pacific and indigenous cultures, time is viewed as a spiral so that we face the futures with our backs, which
means we look to the past to teach us how to move forward. This is practical as
well, in the sense that ancestral practices will help us deal with modern
problems. In this way, the past, present, and future are intertwined. That
being said, indigenous futurist writing (such as science-fi, climate-fiction,
digital games etc) are becoming more popular because they take our imaginations
into the future, which of course is imbued with the ancestral past. While I
havent written much futurist poetry, I hope to do so in the future!
MFSR: We are
primarily a community of poets, so I want to ask a handful of questions about
your process, broadly understood. How do you interweave (or balance) your roles
as a father, a husband, a professor, and a poet? What’s your go-to snack or beverage when you write the early
drafts? Where do you write? And lastly, what’s the most difficult part of revision for you?
CSP: I am
struggling with how to fulfill all my responsibilities as a father, husband,
professor, poet, activist, editor, publisher, scholar, performer, etc.
Obviously, being a father and husband come first, then a professor since that
pays the rent, and everything else I try to do a little bit each day so that
over time projects actually gets done, even though individual projects take me
a long time. Green smoothies and probiotic drinks for poem drafts. These days,
I write mostly in bed, while waiting for my daughter to fall asleep. The most
difficult part of revision is letting go.
***
MFSR: What's most lasting in its
impression on me is how much power, how much confrontation, and celebration,
you include in a poetics of decentering and displacement.
There's a kind of self you've developed in these poems who is, of terrible
necessity, grounded differently than many other kinds of selves we've seen in
history. As poets, we delight in that for you; and as justice activists, we
applaud and admire your focused and powerful voice for decolonization and cultural
memory on your island and for your people. Thank you.
***
Craig Santos Perez is a
native Chamoru (Chamorro) from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam). He is the co-founder of Ala Press, co-star of
the poetry album Undercurrent (2011),
and author of three collections of poetry, most recently from unincorporated territory [guma’] (2014),
which received the American Book Award. His writing explores themes of
indigenous identity, militarism, decolonization, food sovereignty, ecological
imperialism, migration, and citizenship. He is an Associate Professor in the
English Department, and affiliate faculty with the Center for Pacific Islands
Studies and the Indigenous Politics Program at the University of Hawaii, Manoa,
where he teaches Pacific literature and creative writing.
Perez
lists a number of his interviews on his website: craigsantosperez.com. Of them, I was particularly impressed with these:
At
Perez’s
site, you can also hear some of his poems and see video of him reading.
M.
F. Simone Roberts is the Poetry & Social Justice Fellow for Split This
Rock. Roberts is an independent scholar of poetics and feminist phenomenology,
a poet, editor, and activist. She is co-editor of the anthology Iris Murdoch and the Moral
Imagination: Essays and
author of the critical monograph A Poetics of Being-Two:
Irigaray's Ethics and Post-Symbolist Poetics.
Her poems are coming soon to a journal near you. Descendant of both aristocrats
and serfs, she adventures this world with her consort, Adam Silverman.
