HAGÅTÑA (The Guam Daily Post) — A poet with Guam roots has achieved national recognition by winning a 2023 National Book Award for poetry during the 74th National Book Awards.
The crowd erupted in applause as Craig Santos Perez was called to the stage to accept the award for his book, “from unincorporated territory [åmot,]” during the ceremony held in New York City on Nov. 15.
“I come from Guam, which is a U.S. territory, one of the last remaining colonies in the world. And when I was growing up in kind of a colonial American school system, we were never taught my own people's literature. We were always taught American literature, and so when I started writing, my mission was to hopefully inspire the next generation of Pacific Islander authors,” Perez said in his acceptance speech.
“Åmot” in CHamoru means “medicine.” His book is a collection of poems which, according to the University of Hawaii where he is a professor, was created to “help heal traumatic wounds linked to colonialism, militarism and environmental injustice in the western Pacific island of Guåhan.”
After accepting the award, Perez read the last poem from his book called the “Pacific Written Tradition.” The poem dispels the belief that the ancient CHamoru people were an “illiterate oral people.”
“Don't believe their claims. Our ancestors deciphered signs in nature, interpreted star formations and sun positions, cloud and wind patterns, wave currents and ocean efflorescence. That's why master navigator Papa Mao once said: ‘if you can read the ocean you will never be lost,'” Perez read from his book.
“The next time someone tells you our people were illiterate, teach them about our visual literacies our ability to read the intertextual sacredness of all things and always remember if we can write the ocean we will never be silenced,” he concluded in the poem.
The University of Hawaii News noted that his intent is to offer healing through experimental and visual poetry. The book is the fifth installment in an ongoing collection about the history and culture of Guam’s Indigenous people.
Perez was one of 10 finalists for the award.
