{"id":347,"date":"2013-11-10T15:04:12","date_gmt":"2013-11-10T21:04:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/?p=347"},"modified":"2018-01-06T10:18:09","modified_gmt":"2018-01-06T16:18:09","slug":"the-appositional-project-craig-santos-perezs-from-unincorporated-territory-saina","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/the-appositional-project-craig-santos-perezs-from-unincorporated-territory-saina\/","title":{"rendered":"The Appositional Project: Craig Santos Perez\u2019s from unincorporated territory [saina]"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ryan Clark, Series Contributor<\/h2>\n

Ryan Clark\u2019s series \u201cThe Appositional Project<\/a>\u201d examines poetry that makes use of appropriative writing methods (such as cut-up, erasure, and homophonic translation) to investigate intersections of place and domination\/loss.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

One of the more compelling poetry projects I have come across over the past few years has been Craig Santos Perez\u2019s from unincorporated territory<\/i> series, currently comprised of two titles: [hacha] <\/i>(Tinfish Press, 2008) and [saina]<\/i> (Omnidawn, 2010). In both books, Santos Perez addresses the history of Gu\u00e5han (Guam) and its native Chamorro people. It is a project of repair, one that seeks to incorporate the fragments of Chamorro culture that have survived centuries of colonization at the hands of Spain, Japan, and, presently, the United States. Further, from unincorporated territory<\/i> enacts a mapping of Guam through the author\u2019s layering of political, cultural, and personal memory that serves to locate that which has become dispersed, replaced, and forgotten.<\/p>\n

The act of incorporation is emphasized throughout the series by the preposition \u201cfrom,\u201d which appears in the title as well as at the start of each poem. Rather than writing stand-alone poems, Santos Perez has woven through each book excerpts from several long poems. In [saina]<\/i>, these include \u201ctidelands,\u201d \u201call with ocean views,\u201d \u201csourcings,\u201d \u201cpreterrain,\u201d \u201caerial roots,\u201d and \u201corganic acts.\u201d Each excerpt is therefore titled \u201cfrom <\/i>tidelands\u201d or \u201cfrom<\/i> organic acts,\u201d or even \u201cginen<\/i> aerial roots,\u201d ginen<\/i> being the Chamorro word for \u201cfrom.\u201d Additionally, Santos Perez draws from numerous source texts in his poetry, including Chamorro folk tales, travel brochures and websites, and the 1950 Organic Act of Guam, which again places emphasis on the act of incorporating and bringing together. Just as colonization heavily influenced Guam and modern Chamorro culture (most Chamorros are Catholic, a holdover from Spanish rule), Santos Perez brings different texts and voices into contact with one another in order to create poetry that is multivoiced, multilingual, and multicultured, with multiple levels of mixed identity establishing a never singular and never complete representation of the Chamorro experience.<\/p>\n

While just about every page merits lengthy discussion, I find myself most drawn to the excerpts \u201cfrom<\/i> all with ocean views\u201d (and \u201cginen<\/i> all with ocean views\u201d). Each excerpt consists of two parts: the first includes a series of lunes composed of language appropriated from a variety of travel magazines, and the second features a prose block with the words \u201cgu\u00e5han is<\/b>\u201d followed by language that has been remixed from articles from the website of a Guam news network. One excerpt of a lune section is as follows:<\/p>\n

\u2018reinvented by
\neach new gaze\u2019
\nthe arc of a cliff\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 diver\u2019 funeral
\ncomplete with
\nwater buffalo<\/p>\n

sacrifice\u2019 for those\u00a0 |\u00a0 inclined to\u00a0 |\u00a0 paradise\u2019 \u2018all our
\nemployees are still\u00a0 |\u00a0 native and\u00a0 |\u00a0 we require no
\ntranslations\u2019 (58)<\/p>\n

The opening calls attention to the ways that colonialism so frequently attempts to replace an existing culture with the culture of the colonizer. Even the lune itself is the Japanese haiku re-envisioned as an American form. Guam has been \u201creinvented by \/ each new gaze\u201d for centuries, and this language also calls attention to the tourist industry. At the end of the excerpt, we are reminded how native cultures are exoticized and held up as living tourist attractions. That \u201c\u2018all our \/ employees are still\u00a0 |\u00a0 native\u201d is presented as a selling point, just as one might expect a brochure to mention beachfront access or gorgeous scenery (\u201call with ocean views\u201d).<\/p>\n

In this sense, Santos Perez is making evident the way in which tourism in Guam acts as a sort of neo-colonialism. In a later excerpt, \u201cginen<\/i> sourcings,\u201d Santos Perez mentions that in 2008 approximately 1.179 million tourists visited Guam, spending an average of \u201c$1,650 for a three-night four-day stay\u201d (89). That the majority of tourists are from Japan, a former colonizer of the island, only reinforces this notion. By using travel magazines as his source text, Santos Perez is turning the language of tourism in on itself.<\/p>\n

This serves as a clear example of apposition, and it is a technique that the author turns to repeatedly in the \u201cfrom<\/i> organic acts\u201d excerpts, where he appropriates language from the 1950 Organic Act of Guam, the law that designated the island as an unincorporated territory of the United States. In one such excerpt, subtitled \u201cproclamation no 4347 < 2\/1\/75 40 fr 5129 ><\/i><\/b>\u201d, Santos Perez inserts language from the Catholic rosary, both in Chamorro and in English, into the language of the government document, ending with the mixed lines, \u201cbut literate us from] the independence of the united states of america<\/i>\u201d (101). The \u201corganic acts\u201d poem is the longest that appears in [saina]<\/i>, and it is also the poem that incorporates the most diverse blend of political, cultural, and personal history. On the same page as the above excerpt, Santos Perez draws text from a Chamorro legend and also inserts language from his grandmother talking about how her singing voice resembles that of her mother.<\/p>\n

from unincorporated territory<\/i> is not simply a project of opposition, though opposition is certainly a necessary step in the process of reclaiming Chamorro culture and identity. The project is most importantly one that hopes to incorporate the multidimensional history of Guam and the Chamorro people. In \u201cfrom<\/i> preterrain,\u201d Santos Perez writes, \u201ccould i break \u2018sky\u2019 \/ into pieces of \u2018want\u2019 \/ to gather all \/ that [we] remember did i say words show evidence <\/i>\/ of how we are made<\/i> \/\/ to see<\/i>\u201d (69). The words<\/i> that make up the poetry in these books explore how identity and culture have been formed. How are we made to see Guam, an island invisible on most world maps?<\/p>\n

The evidence must come through language, and so this project is charged with the task of creating Guam as a place in words, of incorporating the various elements of the Chamorro experience. It is a project of mapping, of locating the dislocated, and while this work is ambitious, it nonetheless succeeds through the author\u2019s willingness to engage the act of gathering with an attentiveness to the importance of historical facts, cultural values and stories, and the personal experiences of individuals such as his grandmother. Craig Santos Perez reminds us that \u201cfrom\u201d is a marker not only for location but our relation to location as well.<\/p>\n

\u2245<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Ryan Clark has dedicated years of his life to homophonic translation and is particularly interested in the reparative potential of appropriative writing, including how poetry responds to violence and subjugation, symbolic and otherwise. His poetry has appeared in\u00a0Smoking Glue Gun<\/em>,\u00a0Tenderloin<\/em>,\u00a0Seven Corners<\/em>, and\u00a0Fact-Simile<\/em>, and he also has an essay about teaching homophonic translation forthcoming from\u00a0Something on Paper<\/em>. He currently teaches composition at Savannah State University.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ryan Clark, Series Contributor Ryan Clark\u2019s series \u201cThe Appositional Project\u201d examines poetry that makes use of appropriative writing methods (such as cut-up, erasure, and homophonic translation) to investigate intersections of place and domination\/loss. One of the more compelling poetry projects … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[71,67,68,69,73,72,42,70,235],"class_list":["post-347","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-appositional-project","tag-chamorro","tag-craig-santos-perez","tag-from-unincorporated-territory-series","tag-guam","tag-neo-colonialism","tag-organic-act-of-guam","tag-ryan-clark","tag-saina","tag-the-appositional-project"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=347"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":802,"href":"https:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/347\/revisions\/802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=347"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=347"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.srpr.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=347"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}