Craig Santos Perez

Images of the dire consequences of anthropogenic climate change and environmental pollution are featured on the news with increasing regularity. While the coverage of those apocalyptic scenarios has become more straightforward, they can be perceived as traumatic, and are, thus, met with denial. This paper investigates how the ecopoetry of Craig Santos Perez proposes an alternative to conventional environmental discourses by highlighting the difficulty of appropriately communicating issues of social and ecological degradation, and effectively calling people to action in the fight against them. By portraying fear, frustration, and a desire for escapism in "Halloween in the Anthropocene (a necropastoral)" (2020) and "New Year's Eve and Day in the Chthulucene" (2020), Santos Perez illustrates the emotional and psychological implications of looming ecological collapse while simultaneously adhering to an environmental justice agenda. The close reading of his ecopoetry is guided by the observation of the poems' different evoked TimeSpaces and their relation to the portrayal of slow violence. In doing so, he practices a radical form of environmental justice writer-activism that renders the depicted circumstances, however, more easily digestible and comprehensible.

In his contribution to Joy Harjo's 2020 United States Poet Laureate project to create a "Map of First People's Poetry," Craig Santos Perez revisits a formative moment that recurs across his poetic and scholarly oeuvre. On the first day at his new high school after migrating with his family from Guåhan (Guam) to California, he is asked to point out to the class the location of his homeland:

Scholars have often noted a poetics of fragmentation in Craig Santos Perez's from unincorporated territory and have interpreted it in terms of an adaption of modernist aesthetic. Building on this work, this article argues that, while Perez's poetry may be adapting familiar modernist poetics, more significantly it presents an aesthetic that is rooted in the relationship between landscape and colonization and therefore in the historical and material reality of what Epeli Hau'ofa called 'the sea of islands': an archipelagic aesthetic. This article further proposes to understand this archipelagic aesthetic, first, as the combined affordances of two forms, the bounded whole and the network. In from unincorporated territory, this archipelagic aesthetic allows Perez to explore interdependence on different temporal and spatial scales because, second, the archipelago is also more than the form of the network and the whole: it is a landscape that has been shaped by colonialism as well as by geology, and it therefore affords a temporal scale that reaches beyond human record into deep time. Furthermore, as a chain of islands, the archipelago affords a relationality that goes beyond continental and territorial categories into the submerged realities of planetary ocean flows.

Linking Cultural Memory Studies, Indigenous Studies, as well as the growing field of Environmental Humanities, my article casts decolonization efforts in Guam not only as a process steeped in history, politics, and economics, but also as a necessary means to address environmental precarity. I use Craig Santos Perez's poetry to highlight the multifaceted scope of decolonization: namely, that it entails the use of the Indigenous Chamorro language, the decolonizing of the imaginations of Chamorro people, who continue to enlist for (and die for) a nation that exploits their lands, waters, and bodies and finally the deliberate retrieval of cultural memory that promotes balance between humans and nature. Cultural memory and decolonization are thus linked. Together, they assuage the environmental impact of settler colonialism in Guam and elsewhere.

Recently, scholars have called for a "critical ocean studies" for the twenty-first century and have fathomed the oceanic depths in relationship to submarine immersions, multispecies others, feminist and Indigenous epistemologies, wet ontologies, and the acidification of an Anthropocene ocean. In this scholarly turn to the ocean, the concepts of fluidity, flow, routes, and mobility have been emphasized over other, less poetic terms such as blue water navies, mobile offshore bases, high-seas exclusion zones, sea lanes of communication (SLOCs), and maritime "choke points." Yet this strategic military grammar is equally vital for a twenty-first-century critical ocean studies for the Anthropocene. Perhaps because it does not lend itself to an easy poetics, the militarization of the seas is overlooked and underrepresented in both scholarship and literature emerging from what is increasingly called the blue or oceanic humanities. This essay turns to the relationship between global climate change and the US military, particularly the Navy, and examines Indigenous challenges to the militarism of the Pacific in the poetry of Craig Santos Perez. W hile this special issue of ELN on "Hydro-criticism" was being written, the largest maritime exercise in history was taking place in the Pacific Ocean. Twenty-five thousand military personnel descended on the ocean area between the Hawaiian archipelago and Southern California to participate in "war games," including nearly fifty naval ships, two hundred aircraft, and five submarines. The twenty-sixth biennial Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercise comprised the military forces of twenty-five predominantly Pacific Rim nations, with the notable exceptions of China and Russia.1 The theme of the five-week-long RIMPAC 2018 was "Capable, adaptive, partners"; its purpose, according to the US Navy, was to "dem-onstrate the inherent flexibility of maritime forces" in regard to everything from disaster relief to "sea control and complex warfighting."2 Past war games had included exercises like sinking warships; this time the agenda listed amphibious operations, explosive ordnance disposal, mine clearance, and diving and salvage work, as well as the live firing of antiship and naval-strike missiles.3 While US imperial interests in the region have categorized the largest ocean on our planet as an en gl ish lan g u a ge n o t es

Since 2006's bilateral US-Japan pact, the island of Guåhan (Guam) has been anticipating an unprecedented buildup of US military and civilian personnel, and a commensurate increase in anti-militarisation and decolonisation activism. This essay reviews the local resistance to the buildup, and examines how the literary strategies of Chamoru poet Craig Santos Perez aim to expand the work of local activism. Drawing on Hannah Arendt's theorisation of political speech in the public sphere and on Arturo Escobar's extension of that public space into " public cyberspheres, " I argue that [guma'], the most recent volume of Perez's three-book project from unincorporated territory, extends the public space of appearance of Guåhan's anti-buildup activism to include the electronic space of online social media. By incorporating the speech emerging from that virtual community into poems, Perez structures and concretises what would otherwise be ephemeral, and invites new readers far from the island of Guåhan into the stakeholding community. Perez's poetic strategies illustrate the way literature can serve as a nexus of activism, charting a way to resist militarisation in Guåhan and beyond.-As geographer and military historian Sasha Davis has pointed out, the modern US military may be global but it " touches the ground " across the world in places that are always local sites (2011: 215). The location of those sites depends not only on the US military's preferences and on diplomatic relationships with other governments, but also on local support of and resistance to US military presence. Because of increasing resistance in sovereign sites like the Philippines and Okinawa, US military strength has been shifting in the last decades to non-sovereign spaces, whose inhabitants have less power to say no (ibid). Those non-sovereign spaces are particularly likely to be islands and, as the US enacts its 'Pacific Pivot', most likely to be in the Pacific region. As Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho (2012: xv) have argued, contemporary militarisation, particularly in the Pacific, is an extension of American and Japanese colonialism: it is precisely the Pacific island sites that endured 20th Century military and colonial occupation whose contemporary non-sovereign political status makes them attractive and available to the US Department of Defense (DoD) as sites for increased militarisation. US military presence on islands and mainlands alike is usually characterised not only by service-members, munitions, and otherwise obvious military components, but also by a variety of commercial and other infrastructure, ranging from temporary construction housing and support facilities to more permanent expansions of ports, airstrips, service