[May 3rd marks the 80th anniversary of the infamous broadside through which the Roosevelt administration ordered Japanese Americans to surrender themselves to the internment policy (or incarceration—I’m convinced of the need for that term change, but most folks still know it as internment so I’m using that in my series title). So this week I’ll AmericanStudy images of that horrific history, leading up to a special weekend post on scholars helping us remember it.]
How works from
three different genres can help us remember this shameful period in our
history.
Compared to other
horrific histories I’ve highlighted in this space, it might seem like we’ve
done decently as a nation by the World War II history of anti-Japanese
discrimination and internment. After all, at the urging of the Commission
on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians (CWRIC), the federal
government agreed in the late 1980s to pay out $20,000 in reparations to each
survivor of the internment, an explicit and striking attempt to right an
acknowledged wrong. Yet reparations don’t necessarily equate with remembrance,
and I believe we still have a long way to go in remembering, engaging with, and
including in our national narratives the experiences of those interned Japanese
Americans. The most direct way to do so, of course, is to hear their voices and
perspectives, such as by reading Jeanne
Wakatsuki Houston’s memoir (co-authored with her husband James D. Houston) Farewell to Manzanar (1973). In direct and unsparing prose,
Houston documents just what the internment experience meant for a nine year old
girl and her family; such personal perspectives are vital if we’re to get
inside the internment experience, I would argue.
Houston
published her memoir thirty years after the internment, however, and so the
text, important and compelling as it is, can’t be accurately described as
immediate; as with any autobiographical work, it’s a constructed reflection on
the experiences it portrays. Fortunately, it can be complemented very directly
by another set of works connected to Manzanar—pioneering photographer Ansel
Adams’s more than 200 photographs taken at the camp in 1943. As that
Library of Congress exhibition powerfully illustrates, Adams’s photographs
covered a huge range of internment details: from the identities of individuals
and families to work, leisure, and other activities, and with (unsurprisingly
for Adams, best known for his nature
photographs) plenty of representations of the place, setting, and community
itself in the mix as well. Photographs, especially ones taken by a talented
artist like Adams, are not direct reflections of reality either, of course—but
these 1943 shots certainly provide a window into that moment and place, the
setting for Houston’s memories and a representative internment space to be
sure.
If the
photographs are in at least some key ways pretty close to the internment
moment, at the other end of the spectrum we’d find David
Guterson’s 1994 novel Snow Falling on
Cedars. Written by a European American born more than a decade after
the end of World War II, narrated by another (fictional) European American man
(and a veteran of the war’s Pacific battles at that), and focusing at least as
much on a murder mystery, a courtroom drama, and a love triangle as on
flashbacks to two pivotal characters’ internment experiences, Snow can certainly not be placed on the
short list of vital internment documents. Yet I would argue (somewhat vaguely,
so as not to spoil the novel’s resolutions) that Guterson locates those
internment experiences, and their immediate and lingering, individual and
communal effects and meanings, at the heart of each of his novel’s plotlines,
making his book a historical novel in the truest sense of the phrase: a fiction
about history’s power and presence, about the worst of what it can include and
(again, trying not to spoil!) some of the best ways we can remember and respond
to those memories.
Next internment
image tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Stories or histories you’d highlight?
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