American Poets in the 21st Century

by Claudia Rankine

  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 Guåhan is part of an archipelago, the geography inspired the form of my from unincorporated territory 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 Guåhan and the Chamorro people—entangled in the complications of ongoing colonialism and militarism—inspired the ongoing serial form.

  Figuratively, 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 is filled with vast currents, islands of voices, and profound depths. Words are moving islands; sentences are dynamic archipelagoes. The poem becomes a “song map.”

  “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 Guåhan 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 islands moving backwards and forwards, expanding and contracting, inhaling and exhaling.

  TIDAL POETICS

  The Poetry of Craig Santos Perez

  J. Michael Martinez

  Craig Santos Perez’s from unincorporated territory [guma’] and its forerunners from unincorporated territory [saina] and from unincorporated territory [hacha] offer an unrivaled development in the trajectory of ontic, historical, economic, and sociopolitical disclosures, such as borderlands theory, mestizaje, and the decolonial imaginary.1 Perez’s books chart the invisible and inarticulate spaces of Guam’s native Chamorro; they interrupt, transcend, inform, and decolonize the syntax of America’s imperial code. While the sociopolitical and decolonial ramifications of Craig Santos Perez’s work have been pursued in depth by scholars,2 none have examined in depth the poetry’s ontological and epistemological implications for the historical subject. This essay explores what Perez cites as an “oceanic preterrain,” focusing on from unincorporated territory [saina]. Marrying definitions of “preterrain” to water, Perez’s work develops itself into a kind of tidal surface: a solidity without ground. In pursuing poetry as tidal surface, Perez critiques the United States’ biopolitical and economic imperialisms in Guam; as consequence, Perez’s tidal poetics reorients the ontic potentials of the historical subject.3

  In one of the manifestations of the serial poem “from sourcings” in [saina], Perez details the ethnographic term “préterrain.” “‘Préterrain,’” the poem states, “refers to forces that exist within and beyond the ethnographic frame of the ‘field.’”4 The poem’s emphases are on the “forces” operating in and upon the ethnographic field. In order to disclose these forces, an etymological consideration of préterrain is required. As a term, “préterrain” was a neologism the ethnographer Georges Condominas used to describe the colonial site an ethnographer departs and returns to when in the field.5 Later, in order to implicate the hierarchal and recursive power dynamics in ethnographic research, anthropologists Peter Pels and Oscar Salemink broadened the definition of préterrain. In their view, préterrain is the exposure of the dialectical exchanges, both material and ideological, between the ethnographer and her subject that aids in structuring that subject’s representation in the subsequently produced study.6 Thus, Pels and Salemink employ préterrain as the apparatus whereby the fieldwork process is exposed as performing a colonial mediation upon the represented subject.7

  In the aforementioned poem, “from sourcings,” Perez complicates this dialectic of the préterrain by echoing it against Charles Olson’s field poetics. Perez cites Olson’s famous statement made at the beginning of “Projective Verse” concerning the poet’s attentiveness when operating in the “open” of “field composition.”8 One may clearly see the parallel between Olson and Pels and Salemink later in Olson’s essay, where he writes, “It is a matter, finally, of OBJECTS, what they are, what they are inside a poem, how they got there, and, once there, how they are to be used.”9 Olson demands full attentiveness to the range of objects (language, syntax and semantics, meter, space, and so on) operating in the field composition. The purpose of this awareness is “that these elements are to be seen as creating the tensions of a poem just as totally as do those other objects create what we know as the world.”10 Awareness, as Olson has it, aids in the allocation of the energy/forces of the poet into the created and receiving field composition; this created object, which receives and directs those energies in its own agency, transmits those energies to the reader. Each allocation or transmission of energy/force is transfigured by and through the receiving object. This transfiguration of perceptions/energies/forces bonds the poet Olson to anthropologists Pels and Salemink. While Pels and Salemink are explicitly politically oriented, each discerns the aesthetics in the epistemological structuring of an art object (ethnography or poem). The paradigms, as such, are attentive to the politics in the representation or creation of worldviews; to express the matter more densely, the transmission of consciously produced perceptions alters the creating consciousness and, subsequently, the creation ratifies and alters the recipient’s perceptions; the recipient, in the midst of alteration, alters the creation as well.

  The epistemological grounding of each (writer, object, reader) is pulled away from itself by the tide of the others to such an extent that the tidal force is where, in the words of Olson, “the coincidence is,” and thus, where, “all act springs.”11 Olson sees the acts of acts, the act before all acts that allows any act to occur, springing from the point of co-incidence. According to the O.E.D., “coincidence” comes from the Latin com- “together” (see co-) + incidere “to fall upon.” Quite literally, “coincidence” is a falling accomplished together. What is fallen upon is left open. By looking toward the act of acts, Olson implies that in this particular falling, one falls upon the coincidences of coincidences; that is to say, the falling before all falling that allows falling to even occur. As such, this is the field where to be together springs; this is thus the field where individual subjects begin their very distinction. When Perez employs the term “préterrain,” he suggests this unanchored, yet founded, point where “all acts spring.”

  In writing as a diasporic Chamorro, Perez further broadens and compounds the implications of the term “préterrain.” In the same section, he expands the term to include his cultural experience. He cites Fiji Islander and social anthropologist Epili Hau’ofa as critiquing the colonial conception of the pacific islands as “small, tiny, remote, isolated, poor, dependent, deficient, or confined.”12 Perez notes the importance of understanding that this perception stems from the imperial desire for and conquest of landmasses. He thus quotes Hau’ofa at length to stress the deep spiritual, political, and environmental relationship the indigenous have to the breadth and depth of the surrounding ocean waters. Water is foundational to understanding the empirical and ontological implica
tions of Perez’s work. With this in mind, one might reinterpret Olson’s point where “all acts spring” as being, for Perez, a spring of water.

  The very first poem of from unincorporated territory [saina] springs into being with water. Perez writes in “from sourcings”:

  ‘[hanom][hanom][hanom]’

      ~

  what echoes across waters :

  taotaomo’na—

     from ‘taotao’ [‘people’] ginen ‘mo’na’ [‘precede’]—

  ‘people of before’ ‘before time ancestors’ ‘ancient people’ ‘people before

  recorded time’ etc

     while my ancestors did live breathe love die before

     contact before

     colonialism before

     history

  taotaomo’na also exist

     in time in

     our histories remembered forgotten

     in our bodies homes words in

     every breath ‘in

  relation to my own body by wave of the page’ and [we]

  will continue after in

     all afters13

  “Hanom” is Chamorro for “water.” Moreover, Hanom is the name of a freshwater spring on the coast south of Mt. Santa Rosa.14 Guampedia, the website offering historical information to the public on Guam, details how this area was of vital importance to the Chamorro resistance during the seventeenth-century Spanish-Chamorro Wars. The poem, in beginning with this term, ties water, the substance, to the historically significant moment of colonial resistance. “Water” is, as consequence, a term potent with decolonial potentials and material ramifications for the entirety of [saina].

  To unpack the “echoes” occurring “across waters” of the subsequent line, the poem offers what may be read as two contiguous energies or meanings. The first is the translation/etymology of “taotaomo’na.” The word literally means “people precede,” and the reader is given four further translations with the implication that the term has even more potential meanings. The second energy complicates the temporal. Perez writes, “while my ancestors did live breathe love die before.” He syntactically interrupts English grammar by not placing commas to separate the catalog of his ancestor’s actions. In this interruption, one may see a decolonizing of the English language. The actions run together as if they were one action. If the lack of the comma’s pause is a decolonial turn against the separation of these acts, then the “live,” “breathe,” “love” of the line’s catalog is a single act: to live is also to breathe and love, to breathe is also to live and love, to love is also to breathe and live. The acts coincide and, in the composition’s field, are one act. The causal chain is thus decolonized by absent comma.

  The temporal is further complicated by the placement of “before” at the end of the line. One may read through the caesura, the line break, and gather that these ancestors lived before colonialism and, thus, before the colonial orchestration of their supposed history. If one reads with the caesura, “before” occurs at the line’s end and, consequently, the “end” and the “before” coincide. The “end” and the “before,” the time precedent to time, are singular. This occurs in the next two lines. The significance of this opens more in the line “taotaomo’na also exist.” The line may be interpreted as the ‘people of before’ “also exist”; or, the ‘before time ancestors’ “also exist”; or, the ‘ancient people’ “also exist”; or, the ‘people before recorded time’ “also exist.” If one reads through the caesura, then the implication is that the ancestors still exist in remembered and forgotten histories, in the bodies, homes, breath, and words of their descendants, and in the book pages recounting ancestral history. However, if one reads with the caesura, then Perez continues his decolonization of causality and linear temporality. Interpreting “taotaomo’na also exist” with the caesura, the line becomes declarative and literally states that the ‘people before recorded time’ “also exist”—in other words, the ancestors still exist. The ancestors exist not as phantasmagoric entities that are ontologically distinct from their descendants. Rather, they exist as and with their descendants: they coincide.

  Before attending to the succeeding line of the current poem, it is important to note how Perez employs prepositions. He writes in from unincorporated territory [hacha] that the preposition “from” indicates particular spaces and times, a place of departure/removal, and an agent of that departure. Implicit in the act of departure (or “froming”) is the differentiation/creation of borders.15 The preposition “from” acts as the linguistic axis separating objects from other objects. As Perez writes, “Each poem carries the ‘from’ and bears its weight and resultant incompleteness.”16 The italicizing of other prepositions calls attention to the epistemological work, the linguistic préterrain, that the preposition enforces. To recall why the prepositions are used, it may be simply stated—the device indicates the spatial, temporal, or logical relationship of the subject to the rest of the sentence. It is necessary to point out, as Perez appears to, that the English preposition dictates the underlying structure of those spaces, times, and logics. This is to say, Perez identifies the colonial mediations that the English preposition imposes upon representations of Guam and the Chamorro. He identifies the “from” from which “from” comes.

  Perez explores this underlying colonial mediation of the preposition by italicizing other prepositions. Thus, the italicized “in” carries the weight Perez instills in the word “from.” If one notes, again, the lack of punctuation and the subsequent implication of its interrelational process, one may interpret “in time in” as reinforcing the coincidences of the “taotaomo’na.” “In” begins the line and ends the line. Preceding “time” is the “in” before time. What is/in before time? Perez has already provided the answer: “The people of before” or “the before time ancestors.” Therefore, the ancestors precede and are antecedent to “time.” Moreover, the ancestors are “in” time. If one reads through the caesura, the ancestors are “in” “our histories remembered forgotten.” Whether recollected or neglected, the ancestors exist. If this line is read with the caesura, it admits to both remembering and forgetting the culture’s histories. The next line complicates both these remembered and forgotten histories and the spatial-temporal location of these histories. The line reads, “in our bodies homes words in.” If this is read as the continued thought of the former line, it seems to say the remembered and forgotten histories are in the bodies, homes, and words of the descendants. However, the lack of comma use implies that “bodies” are also “homes” and “words” and so on. Further, the line begins and ends with the italicized “in.” Echoing the former line, this “in,” in its echo, carries the implications of that usage—the “before time ancestors” are “in” “our bodies homes words” and will exist after “our bodies homes words.” Moreover, if the caesura is read through, again, all that has been stated is also “in” “every breath ‘in.” Beginning before time with the resultant idea that the ancestors and descendants coincide, this stanza ends with “bodies” being both “homes” and “words,” “homes” being both “bodies” and “words,” “words” being “homes” and “bodies” and, finally, all of this contained in every breath. This line ties physical bodies, locales, and languages into a system of perception and being. The macro is encapsulated as the micro and vice versa. This monadic system of ancestry, environment, and culture has far-reaching implications for the “self.”

  Perez offers a radical reinterpretation of “individual” ontic subjectivities in speaking of his Chamorro ancestors. The poem appears to assert that the “individual” is a collective with and of society and environment. This interpretation may help explain the bracketed “[we]” of the last stanza. The bracketed “[we]” articulates this communal intersection of societal, environmental, ancestral and descendant subjectivities; moreover, the brackets contain and separate the idea of a “[we]” from the line. I
t is as if the idea of a “we” is a foreign concept to the ontic structure of the poem’s articulation: the poem’s articulation is before the idea of “we” because it always already existed as a communal entity living as/with each other and the environment. This is implied by the earlier interpretation of the line “taotaomo’na also exist.” The poem’s articulation becomes a “we” only after the intrusion of the conception of the “I.” The brackets thus have a dual purpose: to contain the foreign idea while also communicating it. Consequently, the “we” coincides with the speaking “I.” Moreover, the foreign coincides with the non-foreign. It is important to note that the “we” is bracketed throughout the entirety of the sequence “from preterrain” and throughout [saina], thereby producing a consistent thematic in regard to ideas of collectivity as embodied by the pronoun. The significance of this factor is disclosed in another poem from the series “from preterrain.” Before turning there, however, the last lines of the current poem have yet to release their energies.

  When Perez writes, “relation to my own body by wave of the page,’” it can be read as subsequent to the previous line to imply that the breath relates the body to the page. This statement echoes Olson’s oft-cited proclamation:

  the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE

  the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE17

  Olson maps the trajectory of the “energies” from the poet to the poem in this statement. In his poetics, the poet’s individual breath aids the structuring of the poem. Perez, in citing Olson elsewhere in [saina], takes up his poetics at this moment in “from sourcings.” If one reads Perez’s line as its own semantic unit, it states that the “self” relates to its own body through the medium of language. If the page is the field of composition, in its absences, white spaces, and typographic construction, the body, in this line, relates to its “self” vis-à-vis these entities. Moreover, this “page” is a “wave.” A “wave” may imply the movement (waving) or the watery substance. The page is a “wave” of water. The body relates to itself by the wave of the water of the page. At the beginning of this essay, the historical importance of “hanom,” water, was cited, and it is essential to underscore that water is crucial to Perez’s understanding of the corporeal body.