'Signs of Being' author C.T. Perez invites readers to celebrate being CHamoru

 ‘Signs of Being’ author C.T. Perez sat down with KUAM News ahead of her book launch Friday at the Guam Museum. She brought us through her three decades-long journey exploring CHamoru cultural identity through poetry and prose. 

The collection originated as a paper in the late 90’s for her master’s program.  She says it’s also when she started losing her vision. 

"Hand to the sky/ the Ancient stood/ feet bared in the cold depths of the sand/ reaching/ to measure the luminosity/ of the stars/ and the vastness of the skies," Perez recited . It's one of her poems in ‘Signs of Being,’ a collection of poetry and prose exploring the CHamoru cultural identity. 

She describes her book a s a juxtaposition of CHamoru iconography and observations from her senses, saying, "If you peel back all those veils or layers about what Guam is and you find yourself in that moment, you can feel the air, you can smell the ocean, you can actually feel the earth underfoot, you can smell the soil. So it's the way my past, our past as CHamorus, that something from the beginning of time reaches out to me."

It took 30 years to publish the collection, which originated as a paper for her Centers of Pacific Island Studies master’s degree at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. 

"At that time, I was also losing my vision. So my dream of living in the archives and reading everything there was to read wasn’t available to me. And yet there were these impressions and things I had observed about our history. I wanted to put them in writing," she explained.

She says between the black and white pages of the books she wanted to read, she saw the bloody history of her ancestors.  She continued, "The best way I can think to describe it is the sanguine nature, so the blood-red nature of our history having survived through years of colonialism and violence on our island."

That’s when she decided to write about the history that aren’t in the books.

She reached out to different publishing houses on the West Coast, but it wasn’t easy.  "Now think," she described, "this was back in the day when you had to type things out, meet all their guidelines, send it in a manila envelope with stamps and a cover letter. And you wait like weeks and months to hear back."

She recounts leaving Hawaii and going back home, where life took hold.  "Life absorbs. It absorbed me when I came home. Having left as a young adult and coming back to take on responsibilities of family and living, it just kind of got pushed aside. I got involved in disability rights advocacy," she said.

It’s through the help of those like her nephew and acclaimed poet Dr. Craig Santos Perez, University of Guam professor Dr. Anne Perez Hattori and UOG Press that breathed new life to her old manuscript. 

"It’s a very personal and intimate piece of art that I hope people carry and take with them. When they read it, I hope they join me on the journey of self realization, of acclimation of inheritance of legacy," she said.

On the back of the book are blank pages.  She invites readers to join her on the journey by interweaving their own stories and, whether they are CHamoru or not, to ‘celebrate the being of CHamoru.’

Perez noted, "We should welcome ourselves and not always just feel as victims of colonialization, not just always as victims and that we have to beg for money from the United States, but really celebrate who we are– a proud people, a sovereign nation through millennia. And that if we can peel back all the veneers of everything else that has been imposed on us, we can really celebrate being CHamoru."

You can hear more from Perez at UOG Press's book launch on Friday at 5:30pm at the Guam Museum.