We Are Not Free
By Traci Chee
This is a long write-up due to an awareness that we have not featured enough books by Asian-American authors, or with Asian-American characters. This is something we will be correcting as we move forward with this project.
As a Jewish girl born just about 20 years after the end of World War II, I grew up learning about the Holocaust and Hitler’s concentration camps. I learned about it at home, and I learned about it at my private Jewish elementary school. We skimmed over the Holocaust in Middle School social studies, and then devoted a week to it in my European AP class in High School. What I remember most about that class were the other students giggling at the black and white images of skeletal bodies being bulldozed in the French documentary Night and Fog. When I started crying, the one other Jewish student in the class reached over to hold my hand, and later the teacher talked to us both out in the hallway, explaining that laughter is a way for some people to handle nervousness. I studied a lot of Holocaust literature in my English classes at Barnard, and again while getting my Masters. In all these years, I have not had a class that spoke to what happened to Japanese Americans on US soil.
I am extraordinarily aware of how little I know about discrimination against Asians in the US (in the past, and presently, as depicted in this recent NYT article), and how scant my knowledge is of the experience of the indigenous. I have spent many years reading about the Jewish and Black experience in America, and the gaps in my understanding of the experience of other groups in the US is embarrassing to me. And yet, the one way I know to begin to overcome my ignorance is through reading. Books like I Am Not Free by Traci Chee are a good place to start. I also very much hope that between the time I attended High School in the early 80’s and now, the American history curriculum has made critical changes to include the study of what the United States government did to Japanese Americans during World War II.
I want to use this write-up to bring more attention to just a few of the many historical facts presented by Chee.
Executive Order 9066 was issued by Roosevelt only two months after Pearl Harbor, and authorized interment camps, which perhaps more accurately should be called “incarceration camps” (see here for a discussion on NPR of the appropriateness of calling the camps concentration camps). The US government, euphemistically, called these camps “relocation centers” and spoke of “evacuating” 120,000 people, instead of acknowledging that they were incarcerating them.
“I was a POW in an American prison camp”
This is part of the testimony in this deeply moving short film. It is striking to hear how long it took some of the people to share their stories of having been incarcerated – not dissimilar to the experiences of others who have been traumatized, including Holocaust survivors and Vietnam vets (on both sides of the war) who needed years to be able to speak about what had happened to them.
Gaman
Chee twice defines the word gaman -- to persevere, to endure: “It’s a word for when you can’t do anything to change your situation, so you bear it patiently… or as patiently as you can, I guess” (32). Then, just a few pages later, she adds that gaman is the “the ability to hold your pain and bitterness inside you and not let them destroy you. To make something beautiful through your anger, or with your anger and neither erase it nor let it define you. To suffer. And to rage. And to persevere” (39). I think it is a beautiful word, and one that so powerfully speaks to what survivors of trauma have undergone. Out of curiosity, (and because I am the founder of an arts organization focused on poetry and story!) I looked to see if I could find poetry around this word.
Poet Christine Kitano, whose father was incarcerated at Topaz concentration camp when he was 16, ultimately defines gaman as grace — one of my favorite words. You can read more about Kitano’s inspiration for writing the poem below here.
“Gaman” by Christine Kitano
It was night when the buses stopped.
It was too dark to see the road,
or if there was a road. So we waited.
We watched. We thought of back home,
how the orchards would swell with fruit,
how the trees would strain, then give way
under their ripe weight. The pockmarked
moon the face of an apple, pitted
with rot. But of course not. Someone
would intervene, would make of our absence
a profit. When we came, the boat, anchored
at San Francisco Bay, swayed for hours …
the gauntlet of uniformed men so intent
on finding cause to turn us away. And now
again, we wait. We watch. Our American children
press against us with their small backs.
Which gives us pause. For the sake of the children,
we’ll teach them to forgive the fears of others,
the offenses. But what we don’t anticipate
is how the dust of the desert will clot our throats,
how much fear will conspire to keep us silent.
And how our children will read this silence
as shame. However much we tried, we thought,
to demonstrate grace. When the buses stopped,
it was too dark to see the road. Or if there was a road.
It was night. And instead of speaking, we waited.
Instead of speaking, we watched.
Here is another poem, by Kenji C. Liu, also about Topaz, “Gaman: Topaz Concentration Camp, Utah.” It is worth paying particular attention to Liu’s note about his inspiration for writing this poem.
whiteness
In the “Mary” chapter, readers learn about the case of Fred Korematsu. His civil rights case was not overturned until 1983. As the biography on the link shares, “In 2010, the state of California passed the Fred Korematsu Day bill, making January 30 the first day in the U.S. named after an Asian American.” The implicit “whiteness” of America never ceases to amaze me, even with all the rhetoric of the US as a melting pot, a country of immigrants, etc. Chee addresses whiteness directly a number of times:
“Sometimes I get so angry, I can’t see straight. My vision tunnels, and all I can see is my anger: bright, blinding, white. White as this keto bastard standing in our gymnasium, telling us we’ve got to make sacrifices for the greater good. White as a baby’s ass, this guy is. Lieutenant What’s-His-Face…” (105)
And again in the scene with the white teacher where the students are not served ice cream:
“'Stop crying, Miss Jenkins.’ Like I’m the adult and she’s the kid. Like I’m scolding her for something she should’ve known. Because shouldn’t she have known?... I try to soften my voice, like she’s the one who needs protecting, even though she’s the one who’s older.
And white.
I don’t know why, but I kind of hate her for that. For being white. For putting me in that position. For not standing up for me. For being so weak that I have to be the strong one.” (170)
There is so much captured here: tone policing, unrecognized white privilege by the white person, anger, white people’s naievete.
Writing Exercise: How would you describe anger? What color would you use to describe it? How has Chee changed the metaphor of whiteness?
Dr. Seuss
Dr. Seuss’ anti-Asian cartoons in PM Magazine are addressed in this Atlantic Monthly article (alongside his anti-fascist cartoons), and the Conscious Kid and others have brought attention to examples of racism in some of Dr. Seuss’ popular children’s books. This article, which includes some really ugly depictions of Seuss’ anti-Asian cartoons, suggests, as does the Atlantic Monthly piece, that Geisel regretted his depictions of Japanese Americans during World War II. Perhaps. But his art speaks volumes, and I am not able to reconcile some of what is depicted here with my earlier admiration for the author of The Cat in the Hat. The issues surrounding Dr. Seuss and racist imagery have led to Dr. Seuss Enterprise’s recent decision to stop publishing six of his books.
The Mas chapter was especially poignant to me as a poetry therapist. His writing to his dad calls to mind a journal therapy practice of writing to the dead as a means of navigating grief. It is a powerful form of expressive writing. In this same chapter, Chee powerfully depicts the commonalities between the treatment of Japanese Americans and Black Americans, and she addresses the color boundaries, as well as the space between white and Black.
“He and I were standing on the curb, talking, as a group of Caucasian guys approached us, walking three abreast, like they were a great white plow rolling down the sidewalk. Without even thinking about it, I stepped aside, Leonard stepped aside, and I wondered at how we’d been trained to do this, to recede, to shrink, so that Caucasians can have more space” (235).
And this:
“Leonard and I said nothing about it until it was time to return to Shelby, and he was forced to sit in the back of the bus while I hesitated, like I always do, on the border of the “colored” section, before sitting down in a seat marked “white.” Although I am not white, never have been, not in America… ‘This isn’t right,’ I said to him, in the seat behind me. We were surrounded: white face, white ladies, white gloves, white men. We were soldiers, and we were enemies, and there are so many fronts on which to fight.” (237)
Mas reflects an awareness of the inanity of this: these two men going to fight in Europe for the sake of democracy and freedom, and at home, one of them has family and friends incarcerated in American prison camps, and the other has to drink from separate water fountains, and abide by the multitude of other Jim Crow laws. Mas is disgusted at the idea of white people calling a Black soldier “boy,” for what it says about the country he is fighting for:
“Leonard is a grown man, a man in uniform, a soldier, an American soldier, and to them, he was still ‘boy’” (236).
Chee’s novel forces readers to really undertake a consideration of what it means to be patriotic, to fight for one’s country, to be willing to die for one’s country, while paying witness to the racism and xenophobia directed towards you by your government and supposed fellow American citizens. It is impossible not to feel the pain of Mas’ epiphany about what could be called an American schizophrenia:
“I felt the air go out of me, like a flag that’s suddenly been deprived of wind: no longer a high-flying beacon but merely cloth, beaten and limp. I knew, I had known it a long time, I had just never wanted to admit it, like you had never wanted to admit it, you with your dreams, what this country was and has always been.” (237)
and again:
“I want to believe in right and wrong. Here is what’s right. Here is what isn’t. Here is the line. Here is the question: If I go to war for America, if I kill for America, if I support an America that doesn’t support me, am I supporting my oppressors? AM I killing their enemies so they can later kill me? I volunteered. I wanted to serve. But who am I serving…?” (240)
These questions, of course, are the ones that drove Ali to refuse to fight for the US during the Vietnam War; that made Colin Kaepernick and others kneel before football games, rather than stand for the National Anthem; that made Jimmy Hendrix create his own version of that same song; or yielded the abundant art questioning what the “flag” really means in a country that does not yet have equality for all (see here for more discussion of American flag art). They beg the question: What does it mean to be an American? Chee’s poem “American” (310-311) touches directly upon this, as does the art depicted below.
Dorothea Lange, the social-activist photographer, visited the camp at Manzanar, as did Ansel Adams. “She had advised Adams to keep his imagery ‘stripped to the bone of its meaning.’ Her photographs do exactly that. In one striking tableau, she framed a tattered American flag between rows of barracks as an oncoming dust storm threatened to engulf the camp. The image evokes one detainee’s lament, ‘We slept in the dust, we breathed the dust, we ate the dust.’ Lange’s photos were so effective at arousing sympathy, they were seized and suppressed.” (from “Yesterday’s Xenophobia and Today’s: Japanese Internment and Muslim Bans” by Carol Strickland).
“One day you’re going to work, you have dignity, you’re a real person and in a week you’re in jail because of your race [… ]You have no dignity. You have no work. You have no identity anymore and not only that but you’re in a camp with 7-, 8-, 9-, 10,000 other people who are undergoing the same grief, the same loss, the same anger, the same denial, the same depression.”
—Lawrence Matsuda
Incarcerees gather around the American flag in the Minidoka concentration camp. Photo courtesy Wing Luke Museum collection. (text and photo from “Foreigner at Home” by Lisa Edge).
Roger Shimomura, Crossing the Delaware, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC (photo credit).
Shimomura and his family were relocated to an incarceration camp in Idaho. Link above includes educational resources for teaching about the artist and the portrait. You can read more about Shimomura here.
In closing, Chee’s novel can be read as a commentary on the role of storytelling and historic witnessing in art:
“So you remember,” I say. “So you won’t forget?”
“This happened. This happened to us. This happened to kids like her. This can happen again.
We cannot allow it to happen again.” (362)
The paradox, of course, is that like the “never again” trope of the Holocaust, history all too often repeats itself. Children are still taken away from their families; people are othered and rejected from community; people of color are marginalized. And yet: we must never stop witnessing, retelling, reminding.
As Chee beautifully says in her author’s note:
“History is not dead. We have not moved on… I love this country because it is my home, and my parents’ home, and my grandparent’s home, and because I was raised to believe in the opportunity and equality American promises, but this does not prevent me from seeing its problems, seeing all the ways it has failed its people again and again. Rather, I’d like to think that it’s because I love this country that I am here, working in the ways that I can toward making it a better, more just, more egalitarian place for everyone – a place that one day, I hope can truly live up to its promises.” (375)
William Faulkner succinctly put it this way: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Truth and reconciliation with our past are required, with all the intense work that entails. It is the only way we – America – will ever truly become the imagined land of the free and the home of the brave. Until then, none of us are truly free.
Resources:
Please consider making a donation to help stop Anti-Asian violence: https://www.gofundme.com/c/act/stop-aapi-hate
Visit the Japanese American National Museum online, which includes multiple exhibits by Japanese American artists. Register for upcoming event with the authors of the new graphic novel, We Hereby Refuse: Japanese American Resistance to Wartime Incarceration. Per the museum site, this book "presents an original vision of America’s past with disturbing links to the American present. Through the distinct but interconnected stories of Jim Akutsu, Hiroshi Kashiwagi, and Mitsuye Endo, three Japanese Americans who resisted imprisonment in American concentration camps during WWII, We Hereby Refuse exposes the often untold stories of the camp experience.”
Here are some recent news articles about hate crimes against Asian Americans, especially in the wake of Covid, and including the murders in Atlanta on March 16, 2021:
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/03/17/us/shooting-atlanta-acworth
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/11/us/biden-asian-americans-hate-crimes.html
Anti-Asian Violence Resources (includes other opportunities to donate): https://anti-asianviolenceresources.carrd.co
