“With [Our] Entire Breath”: The US Military Buildup on Guåhan (Guam) and Craig Santos Perez’s Literature of Resistance

Abstract

Since 2006's bilateral US-Japan pact, the island of Guhan (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 Guhan'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 Guhan 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 Guhan and beyond.