Hacha

    I’m in a deep delirium of sickness right now. So I will try to make sense of what I read today but then isn’t that what most Indigenous poets are trying to do when it comes to colonization? Trying to make sense of the clusterfuck that is the so called powers that be. I feel like this is book I will continue to return to, there is so much tenderness, reclaiming of language and history of violence in the pages of Hacha.

    What I like about Hacha is that it starts from the poets perspective, he doesn’t try to make it accommodating to a non-native audience. He lays downs his words and gives the reader a choice to continue and learn or set the book down and continue their day without finishing. As a non-Chamorro person, I am thankful to be reading and seeing a glimpse in the life and experiences of this Chamorro poet. As Perez says on page 21:

After the death of sanvitores, the native population dropped from 200,000 to 5,000 in two generations as a result of Spanish military conquest (21).

There are many parts to this book that are history lessons and there are parts that are poetic in regards to forced assimilation of a dominant language:

“less distances    all
Tonalities

Buried
Fields of burnt soil
        mute arrivals

Try
To stand
Wondrous
With no
Throat” (65).

     I love that last stanza, “try to stand wondrous with no throat.” It really is hard to stand tall with no voice, no hope and no sovereignty. I had to look up what unincorporated meant because I was unfamiliar with the term. It means: In law, an unincorporated area is a region of land that is not governed by a local municipal corporation; similarly an unincorporated community is a settlement that is not governed by its own local municipal corporation, but rather is administered as part of larger administrative divisions, such as a township, parish, borough, county, city, canton, state, province or country.

    Which means the native people of Guam do not have sovereignty over their own land! It currently is a land that is still occupied and being colonized by the united states of america which is still a current control of violence on the land. Violence is also a big part in this book from Perez’s telling of Japanese occupation to Spanish acquisition to American colonization.


    Lastly, Perez writes about the brown tree snake in the book which in a way seems to be a metaphor for colonization rotting and destroying the island. He says, “They say there were no snakes on Guam before World War II (95).” Hinting that the Americans seems to have brought a plague to the island something that can’t be ignored and controlled. The snakes are currently overruling the bird and rodent population and the growth of new trees is dwindling. Due to the two million snakes the ecosystem on the island has taken a toll for continuing wildlife and trees. It’s seems like once the snakes came a halt of some kind has taken place and a decrease in the ecosystem is indeed a violence on the land. The snakes almost represent colonization on the land resulting in an eradication of the birds and trees on the island.