Mapping the Pacific 

“Over the course of centuries,” writes Craig Santos Perez,

colonialism, militarism, capitalism, and methods of Western academia have tried to make maps of the Pacific that erase and belittle Pacific Islander connections to land and ocean. But Pacific peoples move, create, change, and love in ways that work outside and against systems bent on mapping minds and bodies along lines of Western ways of knowing and being.

The July/August 2016 Poetry features work from the Pacific Islands that maps both mind and body, in highly idiosyncratic—and significant—ways. Dan Taulapapa McMullin’s “Alaska” qualifies as a map in its own right:

is a fairy-tale queendom

  with monsters whom I don’t know

    I only know my friends the fairies

      of Alaska, the Yupik, I mean

        fairies and white mountains

          that disappear into the sky

            bonfire at Drew’s when

              Jerrod said, Dan is

                lovely, except when

                  he bitch-slapped

                    me, which I

                      didn’t, so I said,

                        With my cock!

                          and he said,

                            Well, it’s good

                              it’s small, so

                                I said, Then

                                  it was pure

                                    pleasure,

                                      yes

                                        .

                                          .

                                            .

                                              ?

This poem lives up to its title: from its broad top to its archipelago of punctuation marks, it builds an Alaska out of text. In jokingly describing the Yupik—an Eskimo people that lives in Alaska and Siberia—as fairies, McMullin toys with the tropes of exoticism: his Alaska is a queendom filled with monsters (as well as fairies). Yet his fairies and queens aren’t the kind to populate Grimm’s Fairy Tales. The poem captures not only the shape of Alaska but also the shape of flirtation: it proceeds by implication, trailing off into quiet just as the state trails off into islands (and as mountains, “fairies,” and bonfire flames “disappear into the sky”). It also, of course, provides an anatomical diagram of the body part under discussion—and in so doing, melds both poetry and geography with the human form.

Perez’s poem, “understory,” forges strikingly similar connections. “Understory” refers to an ecological phenomenon: “plant life,” he writes on his website, “growing beneath the canopy of the forest.” After his wife got pregnant, he imagined “a human understory…. Everything Brandy ate, breathed, heard, smelled, thought, felt, feared, and dreamed affected the embryo.” Like McMullin, he links the body with its surrounding world—including the most complex, and ominous, elements of that world. Everyone, he points out, dwells within an understory dominated by “colonial narratives and structures.” In crafting his own narrative and structure, Perez knits all these understories together.

Liquid links his images: the speaker’s wife, Nālani, lies on her side to breastfeed their daughter, Kaikainali‘i, while “outside, mānoa / rain falls.” The poem proceeds in couplets that match the “latched” pair of mother and daughter, and resemble—as in “Alaska”—the chain of islands it describes. And the daughter herself comes to represent tide and island both. Her breath, Perez writes,

rises and
 

falls like

king tides — 
 

her fragile

rib cage
 

appears and

disappears like
 

a coral

island crowning — 

Kaikainali‘i, who encompasses land and ocean, is also as “fragile” as both: islands disappear and reappear—or “crown,” much as a baby crowns at birth—at the mercy of ever-rising sea levels. This association grants a frightening overtone to the rain pattering outside the house: it recalls the water that threatens to overtake the land.

Bodies, too, can be overtaken, and concern over his daughter’s vulnerability—as well as islands’ vulnerability—anchors Perez’s poem. He quotes the historian Douglas Oliver:

“the rape

of oceania
 

began with

guam” — soldiers
 

invade okinawa,

hawai‘i, the
 

philippines, and

south korea —
 

#yesallwomen

Just as water threatens to invade the islands now, soldiers invaded them in the past, with disastrous consequences for Pacific Islander women. Perez’s fragmented style—(“bullets fragment / and ricochet,” he writes later)—echoes that violence.

This poem borrows not just from a history text but also from Twitter. “#yesallwomen,” an affirming hashtag used by women to express the universality of sexual oppression, here takes on an alarmingly personal valence: if all women experience sexual oppression, how can he protect his daughter? How, he writes, to “stop / kaikainali‘i’s body // from becoming / target practice”? The poem offers possible answers:

               #mmaw

#bringbackourgirls
 

nālani gathers

the clippings

The additional hashtags refer to other incidences of atrocities against women—from the hundreds of “missing and murdered aboriginal women,” in Canada, to the 276 Nigerian schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram in 2014. Then Perez zooms back into his cozy domestic scene: his wife, who had been cutting their daughter’s nails, picks up the detritus. How to stop their daughter’s body from becoming target practice? Not just by caring for it in the most basic of ways (clipping her nails, say) but also by “gather[ing] / the clippings,” trying to clear the detritus of the world. And—since “clippings” suggests news clippings—by analyzing world events and their interconnections, by studying understories and writing them, too.