Concentration Camps USA, Part 3

between lived experience and the archival record / the creation of state and national memory is a nightmare

“Concentration Camps USA” is a series of literary case studies of the use, multifarious and formulaic, of Japanese American incarceration as a cover for the legitimization and perpetuation of imperial/state violence. This pertains to politicians, institutions and organizations, communities and individuals, including, unfortunately yet unfailingly, ourselves. It is an attempt to trace what might seem at first to be contradictions, but are in fact complementary. For example:

In Part 1, I asked how the same person could both fight for the preservation of a Japanese American concentration camp as a National Historic Site AND thank ICE for “protecting the homeland.”

In Part 2, I asked how the same institution could fight for the preservation of democracy AND celebrate an arch-Zionist WHILE collaborating with a weapons manufacturer DURING a genocide.

In Part 3, I am stretching the question around yet another example. It is reiterative: it involves, like Part 1, a Colorado politician’s relationship with the Amache concentration camp, and, like Part 2, the relationship between democracy and Israel’s occupation of Palestine and ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza.

Any contradiction between, on one hand, memorializing JA incarceration, and, on the other hand, stumping for imperialism, Zionism, state terror, the military, war weapons, et al. is, at this point, only as strong as the naivety, denial, and/or complicity upholding it. The United States has been exploiting injustice and trauma, and their meanings, to enact and enforce violent agendas since time immemorial.

I am currently researching/writing (not on here) about Nikkei solidarity with Palestine—historically and as it has evolved over the last 1000 days, in Japan and the diaspora, especially the complexity and urgency of organizing from within the imperial core. To get to that, though, I have to get through this.

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In May 2023, I was invited to meet with Senator Michael Bennet (D-CO), to talk about Japanese American incarceration. He was going to be visiting Colorado College (where I work) to view the files on the Amache concentration camp in our library’s Special Collections, and he wanted to meet with faculty who taught or had knowledge of the subject. There were four of us, one librarian, and one student, who was writing an article for the school paper. The Senator’s advisor, Brad, sent an email ahead of the visit to explain that the Senator was studying “the relationship between the lived experience and the archival records” of Amache, and that he was doing research for a book. “About democracy,” the Senator told us.

That undying bludgeon, democracy.

The Amache files, ten or so gray archive boxes, were arranged on two tables in a small, glass-walled room on the basement floor. I had spent time with the files before, each time at a loss for what to do with them. They seemed random, un-curated, consisting mostly of donations, nothing that had been actively or informatively sought out. Imagine sitting with a pile of puzzle pieces, most of them solid colors, not all of them from the same puzzle. In these ways, the files struck me each time, sometimes flimsily, sometimes like a blow, as lifeless, with the weight, alternately, of the skin of a corpse and the corpse itself.

I was curious how the Senator did research. He barely looked at the files. He asked questions, but did not write anything down; he didn’t have a notebook. That task belonged to Brad, who recorded everything in a small reporter’s notepad. That, I discovered, is how a politician does research.

I couldn’t imagine, anyway, what the files had to say, exactly, or inexactly, to the Senator, or to any of us, about democracy in America. They did not cohere much more than a muted utterance that Amache did, in fact, exist. They showed, instead, Amache as a project—both assignment and experiment—largely bureaucratic in nature, that entailed the dictation, from an irreducible macrocosm of experience, into a legible, quotidian, containable script, of many thousands of lives. The entire project was underwritten, of course, by white supremacy, white nationalism, Japanese Americans being moved incrementally around the checkered board of settler colonialism and empire—but in order to read that basic reality into the files, you would have to bring it yourself.

We looked, sitting at the tables, like children who had been summoned to a meal at which something terrible was going to be announced. In my mind, the tables came up to our chins. The Senator sat at the head. At one point, he disappeared into a reverie; he was feasting on a meal none of us could see. I doubt any of us felt beholden to anything he said, from the vantage of that reverie or otherwise. It didn’t matter anyway: the book was never written. It didn’t need to be. Besides, we had already read some version of it, too many times, and had been beaten into unquestioning submission by it: The Book of Democracy in America. It keeps getting longer, more outlandish and insufferable, as long, outlandish and insufferable as is the United States of America.

I have been frustrated, for a long time, by the menial exhortation to Never Forget, as if forgetting is the problem. Concentration camps exist because people have Never Forgotten. And people, especially the authors of fascism in America, have never forgotten partly because concentration camps have existed without interruption since the walls of the first prototype were raised, in this country and all over the world. Concentration camps are not an abrogation or disruption of democracy, but one of its inbred adventures.

Because the Senator was, at best, skimming the files, I made a concerted effort to pay more attention to them than I had before. I felt bad for the files, but my attention was also avenging. I call it spite research. Sometimes spite can help you see what you, for being emotionally “mature,” might otherwise miss. It presents an inspiring edge to attention, and sharpens it, allowing you to cut an incision into what you are looking at, an incision through which to slip, and disappear into it. I took off my glasses and brushed the documents, the papers and photographs, with my eyelashes.

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Senator Bennet visited in May 2023. Five months later, in October, I wrote him an email, urging him to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. In the context of a genocide, one being committed by an occupation force that programmatically disregards ceasefires, engaging them for the purpose of projecting an image, ritually phantasmal, of diplomacy, so as to disregard them; in the context of genocide, a ceasefire was obviously negligible, therefore the easiest thing to “call for.” But I knew the Senator wouldn’t call for one, because he had already said he wouldn’t. And yet it seemed, then, like a reasonable way to “follow up” on his visit to the Amache files. It was my way of requesting a progress report on his book on democracy in America.

“If you are truly interested in the story of Amache, to whatever extent you are even able to understand what the story is, then you would recognize the relationship between the dehumanization, dispossession, and detention of the Japanese Americans during WWII, and the dehumanization, dispossession, and detention, of the Palestinian people.” It was not entirely incommensurable, not exactly a false equivalence, but it felt, and continues to feel, absurd to speak of these things in relation to each other. And yet, there is only one way to translate the past, that is, the memory of the former, into the present, that is, the ongoing crisis of the latter. And that is to be unequivocally anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist; that is, to be unequivocally anti-Zionist and pro-Palestine. If your translation of the past has led to the opposite, you might have become the concentration camp.

“Please respond in a way that makes sense,” I wrote.

He did respond, and in a way that made sense not only to him, but to his handlers. According to Track AIPAC, Bennet has received $357,616 from pro-Israel political action committees. For this and perhaps other, equally sinister reasons, he has regularly voted to continue selling arms to Israel. “On the morning of Saturday, October 7th,” his response began, robotically, “Hamas launched a deadly terrorist attack in Israel. Even in a world already wracked by violence, the death and destruction Hamas inflicted that day was brutal—especially the wanton targeting of civilians.” It also made sense that he was parroting the ahistorical talking points of “the only democracy in the Middle East” while writing—more relevantly, pretending to write—The Book of Democracy in America.

(Brief aside: to read about another way to respond to senators who did not call for a ceasefire, find Edward Salem’s poem “Instructions on How to Cry: Performance Scores for Gaza,” the seventh section in particular, from his book Intifadas.)

Because the Senator’s book never came out, or has yet to come to fruition, I have to interpret its drafts in other ways. In his email in advance of their visit to the Amache files, Brad wrote, “We are also interested in the civic commitment to create commemorative sites—the work of individuals and communities, often self-sacrificing and unrecognized for years, to create state and national memory.” The Senator was part of the effort to make Amache a National Historic Site. By emailing us about the creation of “state and national memory,” Brad was underscoring the ideology behind that effort.

To create state and national memory: what a nightmare. It sounds like the mission of a revisionist theme park. Memory that is created to serve state and national interests, memory that is created to create the nation-state itself, is not memory, but the fabrication of a past for the purpose of controlling, or trying to control, the future. It is not the organic development of an understanding of experience, but the fashioning of a destiny. When a man enters the archives with an interest in the creation of state and national memory—when a man enters the archives with the intention of using what he finds to create state and national memory—the archives become not only a tool, but a weapon. The fact of creating memory, of inventing it, does not imply the absence of memory so much as the presence of an already extant, indigenous memory, a deeply rooted relationship with experience and time, that appears, to the creator, as a threat, and therefore needs to be destroyed and replaced by a simulation of that relationship.

Think olive and fig trees replaced by European pines.

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One of the documents I brushed—spitefully, though heartfelt—with my eyelashes was the photograph that appears at the beginning of this essay: 無名の人 / EVACUEES UNKNOWN / REST IN PEACE. This is what I was staring into most intently while the Senator was talking. I wanted to pass like Alice through the looking glass:

The gravestone is in the cemetery in Amache. The cemetery, in the southwest corner of camp, stands in contrast to much of the rest of the site. The foundations of the barracks, thickly overgrown with bushes and brambles and trees, bear the honest implication of time and abandonment, whereas the cemetery, with its mown grass—keeping the bushes and brambles and trees out or to a minimum—betrays, however tranquilly, a more discomfited sense of time and a more dishonest sense of abandonment: the stasis of the American relationship with death.

The cemetery is the disjunctive addendum to the barrack foundations: here lie the dead, there lies their dying.

The photograph in the archive shows weeds, wild grass, a hole in the earth, maybe from an animal or snake, pink flowers like hatchlings. The gravestone’s foundation is exposed. When I visited the gravestone in November 2024 (I wrote about that visit in Part 1), it looked like this:

Between the first and second photograph (twenty-six years ago, in fact), the cemetery was laid with sod. 150 trees were planted and the cemetery was encircled (encaged) by a chain-link fence.

More than 100 people died in Amache. There are only a few gravestones in the cemetery. I contemplated the difference, in experience and sensation, between standing above EVACUEES UNKNOWN and standing above the stones that were inscribed with names. When I stood above Tomoki Ogata’s stone, for example, I pictured him as I had read about him: hanging from a tree.

Ogata was Issei, 61. His body was found by a sheepherder. The tree was near the Arkansas River, three miles from Amache. When I read Ogata’s name, my mind conjured, instantaneously, his body. Then, struggling to come into focus, his face. It was difficult, from there—whether the face ever comes into focus or remains as nondescript and withdrawn as a citrus fruit in the distance—to not reflexively imagine at least some part of him, some part of anyone named, back into life, if only to steady the wayward and ephemeral, somewhat embarrassing grief we experience when we enter someone else’s cemetery.

When I stood above EVACUEES UNKNOWN, however, my mind scattered everywhere. More accurately, nowhere. Is that the same thing? Is that—everywhere, nowhere—where the EVACUEES UNKNOWN were lost?

Evacuees is, of course, a euphemism. In an article about his death, published in the June 24, 1944 edition of the Pacific Citizen (newspaper of the Japanese American Citizens League), Ogata is referred to, double-euphemistically, as an “evacuee resident.” Typical assimilationist obfuscation by the JACL. But is there a way in which, in the case of these prisoners, and under the etymological influence of the word itself, there is something wretchedly accurate about evacuees? Maybe they became evacuees after they died: imprisoned in life, evacuated after death. Because that is when they were, in the end, emptied out.

But of what? Into what?

And also, unknown… to whom?

The Pacific Citizen article states that Tomoki Ogata had “no living relatives in the United States.” What about dead relatives? The local coroner determined that by the time he was found, Ogata had been dead for three weeks (the last week of May), hanging from the tree for three weeks. That is, if we trust the local coroner.

Ogata’s gravestone, meanwhile, says June 27, 1944. 82 years ago today.

How much does it cost to get to the afterlife? Does a soul have to pay only once? Or is it a daily commute? What if the soul doesn’t have enough money? Can a soul get to the afterlife on credit? If so, what becomes of that debt? The day I visited Ogata’s gravestone, there were, on the stone, two marbles, an alabaster-like stone curled into itself like a gourd or mourning dove, and 55 (or maybe 46) cents.

End of Part 3.

To be continued…