Contrasts

I am not a broken record, I promise. I do comment on forms or structures nearly every week in a blog post, but it is especially true with this collection: I have never seen structures like this before. Maps, definitions, pictures, what feels straight out of a history textbook only rewritten with accuracy... I am struck by the silences in from unincorporated territory [hacha], the poet's use of white space and contrasts. The spaces and contrasts create an echo, and a breath, for what historically has not been said: colonists don't want you on your land. They will relegate you to the ethnic aisle of the grocery store. They will reduce your plants/bodies to a powder.

Take, for example, achiote. Perez sets up a contrast between the corporate aisles of grocery stores and his grandmother's kitchen.

Achiote is recurs across poems in either intimate spaces, such as his grandmother leaning over the plant and warning Perez not to touch his eyes (18) or it is available "in the ethnic aisle of the grocery store" (17). This plant, which is so intrinsic to Perez's life and culture, is commoditized, sold for profit, relegated to the quote "ethnic aisle" of the grocery store, where suburban white people can wander down the row and pick up a packet of the powder, and literally and problematically spice up their lives. An insidious colonization that continues, even when I Google search achiote: Achiote -- what is it, and how to use it? 

I get the feeling that Perez demands his readers read in a specific way, a larger way, across more than just one poem at a time. The "Tidelands" poems are not as impactful when they are encountered one at a time. Or, maybe the experience is just different when done this way? Should I say it like that? But, a magic is lost when you just read one thing, put the book down, and pick it up again.

Perez creates contrast (or white space between A and B, between Tidelands and Aerial Roots, I mean, each time they occur). This begins on p. 42. There is a back and forth, back and forth between a horse, colonization, and tidelands: each Tidelands ends with a different image (grass, mountains, fire, wind, river). These images are grounding and land in my heart. This contrasts with the narrative of the horse and what colonists did to these creatures, horrific actions, and how the horses were unfamiliar to people on the island but they had to take care of them. I don't know how to process it all, and I feel uprooted. Then each Tidelands poem brings a wash of "this is how it is," ending with an elemental image of grass, mountains, fire, wind, river... except on page 52, when there IS no image.

The effects of this contrast is one thing, but there is also the white space that occurs in between that I don't know how to make sense of. In other words, while threads are braided together, what happens in the white space between each thread, even as it winds around another narrative?

From Poetry.org -- I thought I'd place it here, because I wasn't aware until I Googled around that this is one branch in a larger project:


It is from this colonised, militarised position that Perez situates his anti-colonial/anti-militarisation suite of work. from unincorporated territory [lukao] is preceded by 2008's from unincorporated territory [hacha], 2010's from unincorporated territory [saina], and 2014's from unincorporated territory [guma']. Each collection is a branch, an aerial root of a giant banyan tree on its way to becoming an archipelago of self-sovereignty...