Excavating Empire Through Poetry:A Conversation with Chris Santiago, Author of “Small Wars Manual”

Interview by Rey M. Rodríguez

Chris Santiago's poetry inhabits the intersections of history, memory, language, and empire. In his acclaimed collection Small Wars Manual, Santiago transforms the U.S. Marine Corps' counterinsurgency handbook into a haunting work of erasure poetry that interrogates the Philippine-American War, colonial violence, and the enduring legacy of American imperialism. In this conversation, Santiago reflects on identity, language, artistic responsibility, and the possibilities of poetry as a form of historical recovery.

Many writers can point to an origin story. What is yours? How did writing first enter your life?

I grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the son of Filipino immigrants. My parents actually met on the airplane coming to the United States. It's one of my favorite family stories. My mother later told me that she was the one who noticed my father first.

Growing up, I wasn't surrounded by a large Filipino community. There were Filipino communities in the Twin Cities, but not where I lived. I was often one of the few Asian kids and one of the few people of color in my neighborhood. At the same time, I was surrounded by language without fully possessing it. My parents spoke to each other in a mixture of Tagalog, English, and Ilongo, my mother's dialect. It became this private language between them.

I heard those sounds every day, but I didn't speak Tagalog or Ilongo myself. They felt familiar, like home, but I didn't understand it. I experienced language first as music rather than meaning. Looking back, I think that sense of distance—being close to something but unable to fully access it—may have been one of the forces that pushed me toward writing.

You originally imagined yourself as a fiction writer. How did poetry become your home?

I went to Oberlin College as a music major. I studied percussion and played jazz piano. Writing was always something I wanted to do, but I thought novels would be my form.

Then one of my professors, Stuart Friebert, looked at my work and said, "You're a poet."

He lived and breathed poetry. Through him and other teachers, I encountered writers who changed my life—Lucille Clifton, Li-Young Lee, and many others. At Oberlin, I also became much more aware of my identity as an Asian American and as a person of color. The community there helped me connect literature to questions of history, culture, and belonging.

At the same time, poetry had always been in my life. My mother loved language. She recited poems by Shelley, Keats, Dickinson, and Longfellow from memory. Her voice was my first poetry education.

What do you consider poetry?

I like to think about poetry in expansive terms. 

At CalArts, I teach a course called Poetry, Bars, and Lyrics. We study lyric poems alongside song lyrics. One week, we might read Kendrick Lamar. Another week, we might discuss Stephen Sondheim or Phoebe Bridgers.

What interests me is the spell-like quality of language. Poetry and song can change how we feel, how we perceive reality. They create experiences that move beyond information. They're acts of enchantment in a way.

Let's talk about Small Wars Manual. What was the moment when you realized that the U.S. Marine Corps manual could become the foundation for a poetry collection?

I first encountered the document while researching a novel about the Philippine-American War. I was working in archives in the Philippines and came across this text called Small Wars Manual.

Immediately, I was struck by the title. A manual for conducting "small wars"—what does that even mean?

The deeper I read, the more I realized that the document represented a history that connected many struggles: the Philippine-American War, the so-called Indian Wars, interventions throughout Latin America, and later American counterinsurgency efforts around the world.

Around that same time, I was reading Srikanth Reddy's Voyager, a book-length erasure of a text written by Kurt Waldheim, the former U.N. Secretary-General whose Nazi past was revealed after his political career. Reddy showed me how bureaucratic language could contain violence within it.

I realized that Small Wars Manual needed to become an erasure project. The military document itself would become both source material and subject.

For readers unfamiliar with the Philippine-American War, can you provide some historical context?

The war began in 1899, after the United States defeated Spain in the Spanish-American War.

The Philippines had already fought a revolution against Spain and believed independence was within reach. Instead, Spain transferred control of the Philippines to the United States through the Treaty of Paris.

Filipinos suddenly found themselves being sold from one colonial power to another.

The United States entered the conflict with overwhelming military advantages, but Filipino resistance continued through guerrilla warfare. American forces responded with tactics that would later become familiar in other conflicts: village burnings, civilian displacement, food restrictions, and counterinsurgency campaigns.

Some historians call it America's first Vietnam because many of the dynamics would later reappear in Southeast Asia decades later.

Yet despite its significance, most Americans know almost nothing about it.

Erasure poetry is often described as an act of removal. Yet your work feels equally like an act of recovery. What were you hoping to reveal through the process?

Part of it was simple anger.

These histories have been erased repeatedly. Communities have been erased. Languages have been erased. Memory itself has been erased.

In some ways, I wanted to erase back.

The original document is still available. Anyone can read it online. What's remarkable—and troubling—is that portions of its thinking remained influential well into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The language is full of assumptions about race, civilization, and power. In some places, it's essentially pseudoscientific racism masquerading as military strategy.

By stripping away parts of the text, I hoped readers would see the ideology underneath. The erasure becomes a way of exposing rather than hiding.

The table of contents itself feels like part of the artwork. How did you construct the book?

I wanted readers to see the original table of contents, so I included it with strike-throughs.

The original manual contains many chapters. I erased some completely and omitted others. Once I created the individual poems, I realized the original sequence wasn't necessarily the strongest narrative structure for the book.

I imposed one major rule on myself: every poem could only use language from its corresponding chapter. Within those boundaries, I could manipulate words, punctuation, spacing—whatever the poem needed.

The constraints became liberating.

What can poetry accomplish that history books, archives, or political essays cannot?

History matters deeply, but poetry offers a different kind of access.

We often don't have complete records of marginalized people or communities. Historical archives contain gaps. Poetry allows us to enter those spaces imaginatively.

It's not documentary truth in the strictest sense. But it can bring readers into emotional proximity with a history they might otherwise never encounter.

History is always contested. There is always a struggle over who gets to tell the story. Artists belong in that conversation.

Poetry can create empathy. It can make readers feel the human dimensions of events that might otherwise remain abstract.

How has your experience as the child of Filipino immigrants shaped your understanding of the American Empire?

Language is one example.

No government prohibited me from learning Tagalog, but there were powerful cultural pressures toward assimilation. My parents wanted me to succeed in America, and English was presented as the language of opportunity and power.

That dynamic isn't identical to what Indigenous communities experienced through boarding schools and forced assimilation, but it exists on the same spectrum of cultural pressure.

I often think about what is gained and lost when languages disappear. Language carries memory. It carries a worldview. It carries history.

The fact that so many Americans are proudly monolingual is remarkable when you think about it.

The collection moves between geopolitical violence and intimate family history. Why was it important to place those experiences alongside one another?

My first book focused heavily on family history.

Several of my uncles resisted the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. One spent seven years in prison. Another died while participating in the resistance. Another secretly operated an underground press.

Their experiences taught me that geopolitical events are never abstract. Politics enters families. Empire enters families. History enters families.

With Small Wars Manual, I wanted to move outward from family history into larger questions. Why does the United States support certain regimes? How does power operate across borders? What are the consequences for ordinary people?

The personal and political are inseparable.

Your poems balance historical research with emotional intensity. How do you know when a poem has enough research and when it needs more feeling?

That's one of the hardest questions.

I left many poems out of the book. Some were too documentary. Others may have been too emotional.

Ultimately, a poem has to sustain my interest as both a writer and a reader. It has to be alive.

Distance helps. Trusted readers help. Every writer needs people who can tell them when a poem is leaning too heavily on information or assuming too much knowledge from the reader.

The challenge is finding the place where intellect and emotion strengthen one another rather than compete.

What do you hope readers carry with them after finishing Small Wars Manual?

Curiosity.

I hope readers leave wanting to know more about these histories. I hope they ask questions about the stories they've inherited and the stories they've been denied.

And I hope they recognize that history isn't finished. The forces that shaped the Philippine-American War are still with us. They're still shaping our world.

Poetry can't solve those problems. But it can help us see them more clearly.

Many of the readers of Chapter House are emerging writers—students, community writers, and people just beginning to take their creative work seriously. What advice would you give them?

The first thing I'd say is: read widely and read deeply. Read beyond your comfort zone. Read writers who look like you and writers who don't. Read contemporary work, but also read older work. Read poetry, fiction, essays, history, philosophy, and science. Everything can feed your writing.

Second, be patient with yourself. I think there's a lot of pressure now to produce quickly, to publish quickly, to build an audience quickly. Writing doesn't always work on that timeline. Some poems arrive quickly, but many take years. Small Wars Manual took years of research, experimentation, failure, and revision before it became the book it is now.

Third, don't be afraid of uncertainty. Most writers spend a great deal of time not knowing exactly what they're doing. That's part of the process. If you're always comfortable, you're probably not growing.

I would also encourage writers to pay attention to their communities. Writing isn't just an individual act. It's a conversation with the people who came before us and the people around us. Some of the most important things I've learned have come from other writers, students, teachers, activists, and family members.

And finally, protect your curiosity. Curiosity is one of a writer's greatest tools. Follow the questions that won't leave you alone. Follow the stories that make you uncomfortable, that challenge you, that keep you awake at night. Often, those are the stories you need to write.

What keeps you writing after all these years?

I still feel like I'm trying to understand the world.

Every book begins with a question I don't know how to answer. Writing gives me a way to sit with that question a little longer. Sometimes I find an answer. More often, I discover a better question.

I think that's one of the gifts of writing. It teaches you how to remain open—to history, to language, to other people, and to yourself.

And as long as there are questions that matter, I'll keep writing.

Rey M. Rodríguez has an MFA in fiction from the Institute of American Indian Arts. He recently released his debut book of poetry, Todos Somos Sagrados / All Are Sacred (El Martillo Press 2026), and he is working on a novel set in Mexico City.