{"id":10391,"date":"2022-04-19T22:46:18","date_gmt":"2022-04-19T22:46:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/?p=10391"},"modified":"2022-04-19T22:46:18","modified_gmt":"2022-04-19T22:46:18","slug":"the-generational-grief-of-colonization","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/?p=10391","title":{"rendered":"The generational grief of colonization"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cIn Guam, even the dead are dying,\u201d Chamorro author and activist Julian Aguon writes in his new book The Properties of Perpetual Light<\/em>. <\/p>\n

Aguon, a human rights lawyer and founder of Blue Ocean Law, has watched with anguish as his home island, along with the rest of the Marianas archipelago, has been environmentally degraded due to growing militarization. Known as Gu\u00e5han to its residents, Guam has been a US territory since 1898, and today, the Department of Defense occupies roughly 30 percent of its land \u2014 a share that\u2019s only growing.<\/p>\n

Most recently, the Pentagon decided to relocate roughly 5,000 Marines from Japan to Guam as part of a larger realignment of US military forces in the Asia-Pacific region. Meanwhile, the ongoing construction of the newest US Marine base, Camp Blaz, is nearing completion, despite major opposition from the island\u2019s local residents. Further aggravating Guam\u2019s native Chamorro people, military officials last summer found human remains and cultural artifacts dating back to the island\u2019s pre-colonial Latte period during the excavation of the land, as they seemingly broke ground on ancient villages.<\/p>\n

Guam\u2019s pristine northern coastline has also recently been impacted by the construction of a massive firing range complex, which is an extension of the Marine base. It not only sits atop numerous historical sites, but it\u2019s also dangerously near the island\u2019s primary source of drinking water and would gravely damage the island\u2019s natural resources and biodiversity \u2014 including more than 1,000 acres of native limestone forest and species, such as Guam\u2019s slender-toed gecko.<\/p>\n

On top of this, and in concert with a pandemic that\u2019s taken the lives of hundreds of native Pacific Islanders, Aguon\u2019s book comes at a time when Indigenous Chamorro people face growing erasure. Many Americans still don\u2019t know that people born on the island are US citizens \u2014 citizens who enlist in and die serving the military at a higher rate per capita than anyone in the country yet cannot vote in US elections. In fact, earlier this month, QAnon espouser Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) called Guam a \u201cforeign country\u201d that shouldn\u2019t receive American tax dollars.<\/p>\n

As such, Pacific Islander authors and their perspectives in literature are hard to come by, which Aguon hopes to change by inspiring future generations to challenge the dominant framework that centers white experiences and make their own art to take up space. While Aguon does not settle on one structure in The Properties of Perpetual Light<\/em> \u2014 going from prose to poetry to political commentary \u2014 the common thread is grief, which he uses to talk about climate change; the colonial history and rampant US militarization of the Pacific Islands; and the generational trauma that\u2019s been passed down for centuries. But he also finds power in hope.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s so much beauty,\u201d Aguon told Vox. \u201cAnd as I say in the end [of the book], \u2018A human being is here to be enjoyed, like a sunset or tangerine. We\u2019re not oxen, we\u2019re not here to endlessly plow the earth.\u2019 We\u2019re more than our suffering.\u201d <\/p>\n

As someone born and raised in the Northern Mariana Islands, a US territory just north of Guam, I talked to Aguon about home, his new book, and the need for more Pacific Islander representation in the literary world and beyond. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.<\/p>\n

Rachel Ramirez<\/p>\n

First, I want to talk about the title, The Properties of Perpetual Light<\/em>. In the book, which at its core is about loss, you reference the prayer we say for the dead during rosaries in the islands: \u201cEternal rest grant unto them, O Lord \u2014 and let perpetual light shine upon them.\u201d Then later you write, \u201cPerpetual Light is the Ancient Beauty.\u201d Tell me more about what \u201cperpetual light\u201d <\/em>means to you.<\/p>\n

Julian Aguon<\/p>\n

The whole book is really a process of interrogation, really interrogating the language that we use. The Catholic prayer for the dead \u2014 as I say in the introduction, I\u2019ve recited those words thousands of times. But it is only in compiling this manuscript that I really reflected on their meaning. As kids on Guam, we\u2019re always coming back from somebody\u2019s rosary. It\u2019s so common. We memorize these things, but we don\u2019t necessarily really dive deep or interrogate the meaning of those words. <\/p>\n

In the same way that the earth metals have different properties, what about their spiritual counterparts? I thought of hope and faith, but this idea of perpetual light has always spoken to me. We know from the Bible, the only thing to perceive light is love, and I was like, wow, that\u2019s such a powerful idea. Our love brings things into being. To me, when we\u2019re saying this prayer, we are sort of offering up the only thing we have, which is our love to light the way of the people we\u2019ve lost, and this book has a lot of loss in it.<\/p>\n

Rachel Ramirez<\/p>\n

Being from the Mariana Islands myself, I know how rare it is to find a book written by a Chamorro author, or even a native Pacific Islander author, or even a book about the islands. Why was writing this book so significant to you as an Indigenous activist, lawyer, and author?<\/p>\n

Julian Aguon<\/p>\n

We need artists more than we believe we do, especially in hard times. 2020 was exceedingly difficult for so many of us. Here on Guam, the pain and trauma of living in the reality of a militarized colony really became very clear in an almost palpable way \u2014 you could feel it in the air that we breathe. For example, US military personnel last March came off of these ships, came into the community, infecting the community, violating numerous executive orders, local ordinances, running around \u2014 and I was just like wow, this is really symbolic of a larger thing that\u2019s happening. All of these really deep, longstanding, entrenched inequalities were really laid bare for the whole world to see, and it really made us realize so much of what we think is an illusion.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been influenced by so many writers with different writing traditions. In the islands, we take so much information, but we don\u2019t have enough of our own locally produced literature. I want this book to burn our illusion about certain things, and really dive deep into the pain, and to really explore, walk around, and fill the walls of the cave. As a community, I really feel like we were avoiding these really painful conversations. I want this book to blow all of that wide open. <\/p>\n

Rachel Ramirez<\/p>\n

Relatedly, I want to touch on invisibility. As a kid growing up on Saipan, I never saw our home islands as something largely unnoticed by the world, nor did I realize that not many people knew we were US citizens. It wasn\u2019t until I moved to the mainland US that I really started to understand that there were misconceptions and a dearth of knowledge. Can you speak to this invisibility, particularly the indigeneity of Pacific Islanders who often don\u2019t see themselves represented in literature?<\/p>\n

Julian Aguon<\/p>\n

With this book, in some ways, I was trying to cultivate in the reader a sense of respect for small things. What Arundhati Roy would call the \u201cthe whisper and scurry of small lives\u201d \u2014 that\u2019s partly what gets rendered invisible so often. <\/p>\n

When I wrote the chapter \u201cYugu Means Yoke,\u201d I had just lost my father from pancreatic cancer. My nuclear family was falling spectacularly apart. And I was just alone on a red dirt mountain, and I had to find my way in the world with so little guidance in that particular moment. In some ways, you could say I learned empathy from insects. I was just curious about these small lives. I was wondering if these snails could ever evade their predators. I was paying attention to how slowly they moved and really wanting them to move swiftly enough to save their own lives \u2014 and wanting the same thing for myself, even without knowing that. I was a young child growing up and would soon be struggling with being Indigenous and queer and questing or searching for oneself. <\/p>\n

Diving into and understanding literature, I found that good books are lighthouses, that they light the way when we\u2019re alone. I want this book to be that little lighthouse for the young readers who are also navigating really difficult terrain. Books are lighthouses, but they\u2019re also mirrors in which our faces do or do not appear. I wanted young people from the Marianas or even the wider Micronesian islands to be able to read this book and see a piece of themselves in it, and also inspire them to write their own books or call out the art that\u2019s just latent in them. <\/p>\n

Rachel Ramirez<\/p>\n

The way you used grief and trauma throughout the book as a theme to highlight issues that haunt native Pacific Islanders and the islands is profound. There\u2019s your dad\u2019s passing as you mentioned, but also human remains that were found during the military buildup excavation. Was this approach something that was intentional from the beginning before you started putting together the book? <\/p>\n

Julian Aguon<\/p>\n

I would actually be lying if I said that it was premeditated. The book sort of revealed itself to me while I was writing it because I didn\u2019t really have an agenda or a plan. With all the noise of 2020 and isolation and suffering in every corner, I was just writing because I couldn\u2019t not write. I was thinking about loss and processing it and I thought about how it all started with my first major loss, which is the loss of my father. <\/p>\n

Most people use or handle grief in such a way that has an isolating effect. It cuts us off from other people. This book does exactly the opposite: It uses grief, but it tries to bring it into the heart of the village. It brings people together. I tried to use grief, in some ways, in an Islander way. Our funerals back home are deeply sad like everyone else\u2019s, you know this, but they\u2019re also oddly celebratory. They\u2019re like parties. We\u2019re celebrating the life that one has lived, and the only way to grieve the enormity of certain kinds of loss is to grieve it together. This book is an invitation to do that, and that\u2019s the one aspect of it that made it quite special to me. <\/p>\n

Rachel Ramirez<\/p>\n

I\u2019m really curious about how you didn\u2019t settle with just one structure in the book. You used prose, poetry, political commentary, as the chapter changes. For me, it allowed room for processing and understanding what all that grief meant. In one chapter you talk about the time Guam made headlines because of the threat from North Korea, the next you talk about something personal about your father, then you get into a poem. What inspired you to write it that way? <\/p>\n

Click Here: <\/a>
\nJulian Aguon<\/p>\n

A good book can be like a record or like a music album with different notes \u2014 and you\u2019re hitting the listener in different places. They do range in form like prose and poetry, but they also range in occasions. There\u2019s eulogies marking an actual death versus commencement speeches to young people who are about to step into the world as it actually is, not as they wish it to be. It\u2019s almost like a kaleidoscope of life experiences. I tried to meet readers where they\u2019re actually at no matter where that is in the spectrum of life. What you\u2019re getting into with the switching up of the medium or the styles, is that it\u2019s in some ways like this collage, right? It\u2019s like a lovely mess, but life is a lovely mess. Part of my playing around with some of the structure was about that, and on the other hand, playing around with the structure is also because I think you can only say certain things in certain ways. Poetry does something that the other styles can\u2019t.<\/p>\n

At the end, for example, I\u2019ve just said many things, and I ended with this poem, which was about a flower. It\u2019s just a simple poem about a flower, but about our respect for strength, as opposed to power. I feel like that is such a theme in the book, and I wanted to leave the reader with this impossibly gentle image of this flower, thriving in such rugged and hostile territory. Not only because it\u2019s about an appreciation of beauty, or an announcement of the presence of the beautiful, but also because it\u2019s primarily about an insistence on it, paying attention to small things. The book is not prescriptive. I\u2019m not prescribing the answer. I\u2019m not answering a question. Rather, I\u2019m just enlarging the question.<\/p>\n

Rachel Ramirez<\/p>\n

I remember attending a panel of UN delegates from Gu\u00e5han at New York University in 2019, and the panelists asked the room something to the effect of, \u201cWhen you hear Guam, what do you think of?\u201d Then immediately there was a chorus of the words \u201cisland\u201d and \u201cmilitary.\u201d What can you say about this outside perception, which in a sense conceals the growing issue of climate or militarization in Micronesia?<\/p>\n

Julian Aguon<\/p>\n

I think it has something to do with what Toni Morrison would have described as writing beyond the white gaze \u2014 and in my book, I was trying to stretch that analogy and write beyond the colonial gaze, not what outsiders see. There\u2019s so much beauty, and as I say in the end, \u201cA human being is here to be enjoyed, like a sunset or tangerine. We\u2019re not oxen, we\u2019re not here to endlessly plow the earth.\u201d We\u2019re more than our suffering. <\/p>\n

Part of what happens is this standard narrative gets cast and that account shows we\u2019re suffering and we\u2019re fighting this largest military buildup in recent history \u2014 all of that is true; we are on course to becoming one of the most militarized places on earth \u2014 but it is also true that we come from wayfinders, that we have such rich, spiritual and intellectual sources or knowledge to draw upon. Our homeland is so beautiful. I mean, it\u2019s arresting. So it also is important to highlight what we\u2019re fighting for \u2014 the beauty and the richness and the diversity.<\/p>\n

Rachel Ramirez<\/p>\n

Speaking of beauty, you also center and highlight women a lot \u2014 from the chapter \u201cMy Mother\u2019s Bamboo Bracelets,\u201d where you told a story about a group of women weaving their hair together to build a giant net to save the island from being eaten by a giant fish, to \u201cFighting Words,\u201d <\/em>about your grandmother surviving a traumatic event. Why was deploying that feminist insight such an important theme?<\/p>\n

Julian Aguon<\/p>\n

There are definitely several feminist currents swimming throughout the book. There\u2019s \u201cthe personal is political,\u201d which is a quintessential feminist insight. There\u2019s also the beautiful celebration of defiant people and writers who swam so squarely against the tide. And I have been nourished by Black feminism and other theories of liberation, which have clearly impacted me and my work. <\/p>\n

That\u2019s also where we come from in Guam and in many of our Micronesian islands. We are matrilineal. Originally, for example, the land tenure was passed on the mother\u2019s side or that Chamorro women didn\u2019t use to take their husband\u2019s name. We organized our society based along those lines. That\u2019s naturally where I gravitate to. And in my personal life, my father died very early so my mother raised me, along with random amazing women, mostly women of color, who showed up in my life and nourished me and nurtured me and taught me and instructed me as my life progressed. <\/p>\n

Rachel Ramirez<\/p>\n

I want to close with what\u2019s probably the most basic question. Even though grief is an overarching theme of your book, you also talk about light and hope. Where do you find hope?<\/p>\n

Julian Aguon<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think the two \u2014 grief and hope \u2014 are really disconnected. I think we need to have a deeper understanding of hope. Hope is earned. You have to put in the work. On the ground, when you\u2019re in community with other people and you\u2019re trying to build power, there is nothing like that. That it\u2019s a high that can barely be explained because you\u2019re all together and you realize you\u2019re moved by your shared fate. You realize that our fates are intertwined. <\/p>\n

I\u2019ve never felt more robustly alive than when I\u2019m in community with other people who believe that they can change the world. Solidarity and community-building and building power in and across our communities is the work we have to do.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cIn Guam, even the dead are dying,\u201d Chamorro author and activist Julian Aguon writes in his new book The Properties of Perpetual Light. Aguon, a human rights lawyer and founder of Blue Ocean Law, has watched with anguish as his home island, along with the rest of the Marianas archipelago, has been environmentally degraded due…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10391","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10391","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10391"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10391\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10391"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10391"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10391"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}