Poetic Reclamations and Reconfigurations of the Wasteland in Craig Santos Perez’s Habitat Threshold

Abstract

This article analyzes how CHamoru writer Craig Santos Perez’s poetry collection Habitat Threshold (2020) negotiates both literature’s complicity in processes of colonial “wastelanding” (Voyles) and its capacity to intervene in the discursive production of wastelands. Focusing on the interplay between poetic form and ecological solidarity, this article traces how the poems’ spatial strategies – including the use of italics, bold print, erasures and blank space in the mise-en-page – position the literary wasteland as a central site of, on the one hand, destruction and dispossession and, on the other, of refusal and reclamation. It argues that these spatial strategies bear the potential of refusing wastelanding discourses of desecration, pollutability and terra and aqua nullius, among others, and of reconfiguring the colonial imaginary of the wasteland on the poems’ own terms. This article further suggests that the poems’ formal and relational affordances situate reading as a participatory, implicated and implicating process that is tied to political and ethical questions about the potentials and limits of literary solidarity. Consequently, Perez’s spatial strategies emerge as key to the poems’ articulation of anticolonial land and reading relations of “uneasy” ecological solidarity (Tuck and Yang)