Craig Santos Perez, [åmot]

 

bingo is not indigenous to guam
yet here [we] are

in the air-conditioned community center
next to the village catholic church

i help set the bingo cards
& ink daubers on the cafeteria table

you sit in a wheelchair
like an ancient sea turtle

this has been your daily ritual
but the last time played bingo with you

was 25 years ago when i was a teenager
& still lived on island

hasso’ when you won you never shouted
“bingo” too boastfully

when you lost you simply said
“agupa’ tomorrow we’ll be lucky”

here no one punishes you
for speaking chamoru

here no war invades & occupies life
no soldiers force you to bow (“ginen achiote”)

Poet Craig Santos Perez continues to expand his great long poem documenting, examining and declaring his home territory through from unincorporated territory [åmot] (Berkeley CA: Omnidawn Publishing, 2023), the fifth book in his sequence both set as accumulation and ongoing thread, following from unincorporated territory [hacha] (Kaneohe HI: TinFish Press, 2008; updated edition, Omnidawn, 2017), from unincorporated territory [saina] (Omnidawn, 2010), from unincorporated territory [guma’] (Omnidawn, 2014) and from unincorporated territory [lukao] (Omnidawn, 2017). He is also the author of Habitat Threshold (Omnidawn, 2020), although I haven’t seen that title, so I’m unaware how that book might fit in the larger structure, if at all. As he described the larger project back in 2014 as part of his ’12 or 20 questions’ interview: “My first book was the first book-length excerpt of an ongoing story about my identity, culture, and family in the context of the history, politics, and ecology of my home(is)land, Guahan (Guam). My newest book is the third installment of the series, and its subject matter focuses more directly on migration and militarization. In form, the newest book explores the poem-essay and the conceptual-collage poem.”

An indigenous Chamoru from the Pacific Island of Guåhan (Guam) currently living and teaching in Mānoa, Hawai‘i, unincorporated territory explores home, colonialism, ecological concerns and family, and where the indigenous culture meets colonial influence, set in a geography that still holds in living memory the stories of occupation by the Spanish, the Americans and the Japanese. An unincorporated territory of the United States, Guam is, much like Puerto Rico, politically disenfranchised, and unable to participate in the United States presidential elections. How can a body, and a population, still be held and yet have no say? “today the military invites [us] / to collect plants & trees / within areas of litekyan / slated to be cleared / for a firing range,” he writes, early on in the collection. The poem continues, a bit further: “if [we] receive their permission / they’ll escort [us] to mark & claim / trees [we] want delivered / after removal // they call this ‘benevolence’ /// yet why / does it feel / like a cruel / reaping [.]”

ginen during your lifetime
for guam’s “greatest generation”

            ~

you survived
violent occupation
& the bloody march
to manenggon
you endured
the wounds of
our island stitched
by barbed wire fences
you said goodbye
to your children
as they donned uniforms
& deployed overseas
you prayed
as cancer diseased
half our relatives
you listened
as english endangered
i fino’ chamoru
& snakes silenced
native birds
o saina
i doubt if [we]
will ever receive
true reparations
or sovereignty over
our own nation
i can’t count
how many more
body bags will arrive
with touch boxes
& folded flags

i don’t know if
all your children
grandchildren
great-grandchildren
& great-great-grandchildren
will ever return
guma’
during your lifetime
to show
the abundance
that you
will be
survived by

As a note from the publisher offers as part of the colophon: “‘Åmot’ is the Chamoru word for ‘medicine,’ and commonly refers to medicinal plants. Traditional healers were know as yo’åmte, and they gathered åmot in the jungle, and recited chants and invocations of taotao’mona, or ancestral spirits, in the healing process. Through experimental and visual poetry, Perez explores how storytelling can become a symbolic form of åmot, offering healing from the traumas of colonialism, militarism, migration, environmental injustice, and the death of elders [.]” The structure of Perez’s ongoing long poem feels comparable to the late bpNichol’s nine-volume The Martyrology, or even Robert Kroetsch’s “Field Notes,” both set as umbrella projects constructed through accumulated book-length structures, offering each volume as a further brick, a further room, of something far larger and complex. Comparable, too, to Perez is how everything that Nichol and Kroetsch wrote fell into the larger structure of their ongoing projects, except, of course, for those projects that were deliberately set beyond those particular boundaries. A rich and expansive collection of fragments, fractals, family stories and archival material, from unincorporated territory [åmot] holds elegies for the past and present around a land and people still in flux; of occupation and mourning, loss and family, flora and fauna, documenting the visual literacies of an island and its people, examining what erodes and what holds, and what might already be lost. Or, as he writes towards the end of the collection:

remember            our people
                            scattered like stars
                            form new constellations
                            when [we] gather

hasso’                 home is not simply a house
                           village or island

home is              an archipelago of  belonging