8. Inada

At the university in Tacoma, Washington, where I teach, I sometimes offer a course in Asian-American Literature. During the week that we study the writings that emerged from the Japanese-American internment camps of World War II, I take the students on a field trip. We drive about ten minutes down Highway 512 to Puyallup and the Puyallup Fairgrounds, which was the site of an assembly center where Japanese Americans from Washington and Alaska were held before they were transferred to more permanent camps. From April to September of 1942, more than seven thousand evacuees were held in Puyallup. The assembly center was named Camp Harmony.

The lesson, of course, is a basic but crucial one: the past disappears. And when we read literature, we read literature in the context of that disappearance.

Today, the fairgrounds are still actively used. One weekend there is a cattle show, another weekend there is a spring fair. When we visit the fairgrounds, however, there’s usually nothing going on. The place is like a ghost town, or a seaside town at the end of the summer. There is material evidence of life, but no life itself. And no evidence of the seven thousand people who had to live in that place for four months. The students and I walk around for a while, and after fifteen or so minutes of wandering around, I begin to feel the students’ boredom. I can imagine what they are asking themselves: what are we doing here? what does this place have to do with the literature we’re reading? The students had believed they were going to see something — some kind of proof. Instead, they have taken a field trip to a place that contains absolutely nothing.

The lesson, of course, is a basic but crucial one: the past disappears. And when we read literature, we read literature in the context of that disappearance. In two of his books, Legends from Camp and Drawing the Line, the Japanese-American poet Lawson Inada does something that no field trip to Puyallup could ever generate in the students’ minds: he restores the past, he proves that the past existed, that it was bright and true. Here are some lines from his poem “Camp,” keeping in mind that when Inada and his family were in the Amache camp in Colorado, Inada was a boy of six or seven:

What is remarkable about these lines is the way we are brought into the kids’ naive jubilation, even as we are also made to understand the dynamics of war between a country and its own people. The kids and the soldiers are just playing, but they are also playing out the absurdity of the larger conflict. What this passage should also remind us is that the experience of the camps was far more layered than the received images that we think of when we think of that time period. As we get farther away from a historical moment, that moment often gets reduced to the equivalent of a historical sound-byte, an entry on Wikipedia. But like other writers who have written about dramatic periods in history, Inada’s writings are like a time capsule, in which kids and soldiers in a Colorado camp are always at play, always enacting the farce of historical and political forces.

9. Coda

Federico Garcia Lorca: “My whole childhood was centered on the village. Shepherds, fields, sky, solitude. Total simplicity. I’m often surprised when people think that the things in my work are daring improvisations of my own, a poet’s audacities. Not at all. They’re authentic details, and seem strange to a lot of people because it’s not often that we approach life in such a simple, straightforward fashion: looking and listening. Such an easy thing, isn’t it?”