Words as Islands in Hacha

from Aerial Roots on page 45: “they thought they had to feed the horse iron until it began to graze opened / ground” the connection between people and horses, like Villarreal’s bestiary.

from Aerial Roots on page 43: “ [kalulot : they say “the introduction” of horses— / “they say” half man half beast—parallel // captivity—the entire island carved / by a grotto—“that it had wings”—fissures,” the ‘parallel captivity’ between horses on a ship, horses on an island, people on an island, which could be like a stationary ship… and then the divisions created by a grotto and fissures. The quotations around “that it had wings”, something “they” say. What are the wings?

from Aerial Roots on page 51: “they say a horse’s bones are made of ivory” reminds me of elephant tusks and driftwood horse statues by the pacific, which I see occasionally in people’s yards. Really worn sun-bleached driftwood looks like bones, so I can imagine horse bones washing up to shore after their bodies were thrown into the sea. And on a darker note, human bones, washed together in a mass grave.

IV Pg. 53: (from Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land) “Islands scars of the water / Islands evidence of wounds”

I was struck by how the poems are formatted: clipped, deeply spaced, woven together in and out of each other—Tidelands and From Aerial Roots were layered together, so I couldn’t always keep track of which one I was reading, or how they picked up on the previous one.

It was a disorienting read, and I started to think how it was similar to being in open water: not knowing up from down or where the ocean stops and the sky begins on the horizon. I started to see each word as an island after page 29, War: in the Pacific Ocean and the map poems that surround it, where islands and countries are represented as just their names on a page. Reading these poems became grabbing on to each word, one after the other, sometimes flowing together sometimes halting, like an archipelago.   

Maybe a bit of a stretch, but the punctuation in from Lisiensan Ga’Lago on page 78 seem like waves:

apuya’tasi       ~

 the contours of a drowned

       anguage                hu                    hu

  i

blind fall thru

                                   fluent margins        ~

                                               

                                     un saddok para i hale                        ~              blood only as context

            ~ ~ ~ : they’re like waves, flowing through, or blindly falling through fluent margins. There’s as much visual interest in these poems as there is interest in the content, for me anyways, because the words and punctuation create landscapes on the page.

The punctuation does a lot of work in these poems, and I’m not always sure what it is, or if each set of brackets and each whatever this is ~ have set meanings when they’re used. Most of the Chamorro words are in brackets, (even the title’s in brackets) or else sectioned off in a kind of vocabulary box. Santos Perez’s preface focuses a lot on vocabulary and definitions: what is meant by certain English words. Vocabulary and definitions continue to be discussed throughout the book: Chamorro, English, Japanese, Spanish.

From the preface on page 12: “In the ocean of English words, the Chamorro words in this collection remain insular, struggling to emerge within their own “excerpted space.” These poems are an attempt to begin re-territorializing the Chamorro language in relation to my own body, by way of the page.”

That the same word is used for both the native language and native people of Guam adds extra import to the use of Chamorro as an expression of or a claim on identity. And revisiting this part of the preface after having read the whole book, I’m able to see how the spacing/formatting works as an ocean of English words with Chamorro word islands in them.