Concentration Camps USA, Part 4

final letter to the students in my Japanese American incarceration literature class / with a postscript featuring two of my students, and Mahmoud Darwish

I have gotten into the habit of ending every class I teach by writing a letter to my students. I thought I would share one of the letters: the one I wrote at the end of the Literature of Japanese American incarceration class I taught at Colorado College in Fall 2024 (the last time I taught it). Our final meeting took place at the Amache concentration camp. It was late afternoon, the sun was shining sideways, the shadows were growing long across the barrack foundations. The sun went down, class ended. Because I’ve already written twice on here about that visit (here and here), I thought I would punctuate those accounts by sharing this letter. The class is difficult to teach, as I reference in the letter, because I haven’t yet found or forced a way to separate myself from the subject, so it ends up being a class-length disclosure of a process of thinking and feeling in real time. My thoughts and feelings are all over the place, of course, but their energy is motivated by curiosity, melancholy, frustration, and, in largest part, anger—as it was especially in Fall 2024, as the class was unfolding alongside the genocide in Gaza, which we incorporated into the class’s consciousness and more directly into our conversations. So, my thoughts and feelings were then, as they often are anyway, fevered, distressed, just barely articulate, like I alternate between talking ten thousand words a minute and not talking at all, at least that’s how it feels. By the time the class reaches its end—in the ruins, no less—I am ready to retire: from teaching, from talking, from history.

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Wednesday, November 13, 2024, 8:29 AM

Hi everyone,

Thank you all so much for wandering into the class on the literature of Japanese American incarceration, for being in it with me and each other, and for wandering through it to Amache. Now that I’ve taught the class twice, I’m less convinced that it’s a “class” at all, or that I “teach” it, or that I could even teach it, or that it could even be a class. In some moments, maybe. But for the most part, it feels, to me, like meditation. Maybe because the only way I can conceive of moving through the world as it is, is slowly, gently, without agenda, and yet with intention. The “class,” then, realized itself in the ruins of Amache, in blocks 7H and 6H: all of us arriving together, dispersing into the landscape...

There was a moment, there, when I felt like I was a ghost. The assumption is that the ghosts are there—that some part of the experience of the Japanese Americans, individually and together, stayed on—or inside of—that land, unable, or maybe unwilling, to leave; that a ghost is an expression of the past in the present, facing the future. But I felt, for a moment, that a ghost is actually an expression of the future in the present, facing the past.

I was walking along the foundation—the perimeter, the shape—of a barrack, when I got this text from Margot:

I looked up and north and started walking. Without thinking, I started walking through the barracks—up and over the foundations, through what used to be the living spaces, the lives, of people. As I was walking through the barracks, I realized that I was walking through the walls. There were doorways, thresholds, but I was not walking through them. As I was walking through the lives of people, now thick with vegetation, I realized that I was trespassing, but I couldn’t stop. It was then that I felt like a ghost. I felt as if I was from the future, from incarceration’s future, and that, walking through the walls, through the lives of people, I was collapsing time. Because that’s one of many things a ghost does: collapses time. Because I also have been unable, or maybe unwilling, to leave.

I was thinking about Jami and Cori Nakamura Lin. I was thinking, as I was walking, about how Jami was wearing sandals when she visited Amache. I was thinking about Jami’s young daughter, wondering if she’d return to Amache someday, when she’s older (will she also wear sandals? in a kind of tribute to her mother?) I was thinking about my young daughter, who texted me, while were eating lunch next to the museum, a picture of a tree she drew that morning, a tree that looked a lot like some of the trees I saw at Amache:

“Wow,” the orange-hearted person says to the purple-hearted person. I was thinking about Brynn Saito, who found the koi ponds in Gila River and wrote about them in her poetry. I was thinking about Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi, and how he wrote an entire book about Gila River without ever having gone there. I was thinking about that, and the profoundness of the relationship he built with that place, with that land, through what seems like imagination alone. And yet, it is so much more than that. He told us that every story began for him, in some way, with something his grandparents told him about their experience in camp, which meant, to me, that every story was not only the memorial of his relationship with his grandparents, but the memorial of the moment in which they shared with him a memory, an image, a detail, from camp: that moment of communication, their being together, breathing. Every story, and maybe every piece of literature, is a portrait of how it was and also a portrait of how it continues to be. The literature of Japanese American incarceration is an heirloom. The work of the descendant generations is to polish the heirloom.

The literature is also like how we were in Amache, in that landscape: autonomous, dispersed, but present because of each other. And because of the dead, and what about them compels us to them. The haiku of the Issei contains and possesses, in its few syllables, the panorama of the fantastical stories of Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi, the interiority of Brynn Saito’s transcription of the koi ponds. Janice Mirikitani’s elegies contain and possess the No and the No that the prisoners hand wrote on the loyalty questionnaire. Troy Osaki’s poems about his grandmother, Etsuko, contain and possess, in every gesture, the moment in which Kiku reaches out for her grandmother, Ernestina, in Displacement. The literature is beautiful, in part, because each individual work complements and anticipates all of the others, in all directions. That is, the future is not an echo of the past, but the anticipation of it. To take the literature of Japanese American incarceration as an ongoing and expanding universe is to liberate the consciousness of literature, itself, from a linear conception of evolution, of time. Everything is developing simultaneously and in tribute to every part of it. Which also means that the silence of the elder generations has not yet reached its end; it’s still speaking, still coming to terms with (as Ellie said) the story it is telling...

I am very curious to know what was going through your minds at Amache. Maybe you don’t know, exactly, or not yet. Maybe someday you’ll tell me, or each other. Maybe you’ll share what you wrote or write something new about it. In any case, it’s inside of us. And that is, in the end, the “class.”

Take good care, everyone. Thank you again,

Brandon

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If you’re reading this and were in that class, please comment below with what was going through your mind and/or what you remember.

One of my students, Margot (of the koi pond; she also appears in Part 1), responded to my letter back then, with a letter. She gave me permission to share some of it here (thank you again, Margot):

I felt fairly grounded at Amache, other than when I was feeling judgmental about the jovial, poorly-placed joking of our younger park ranger guide—who, legend says, beat out 34 people to get his job. Generally, though, I was not leaning into despair but curiosity. Curiosity about the stories swirling around me, the nation-building which must occur at a “National Historic Site,” the feeling of a place that seemed impossibly large and like the smallest corner of the world I’d ever seen.

I was very struck by the proximity of the incarceree-built garden and fountain to the mess hall. To me it told a story of boredom, of creation in a space which has the potential to be the opposite of generative. Hungry people looked around at one another and found the motivation to plant beauty around themselves. Most of all, though, I was thinking about the hunger of children. How impossibly angry they can become and how they can never understand why they must be patient in the face of the pain in their stomachs. We were talking a few weeks ago about how we punish the people we love the most, and I saw those foundations next to the food hall as evidence of an attempt not to punish one another. I bet the fountain that circulated on itself, pumping water out of a higher level that flowed down and back around to the top was magical to hungry babies. I’m sure the sound of water was calming to frustrated parents, whose ability to independently feed their children was forcibly taken away from them by this hateful empire.

Inside the recreated barrack, there was the sentence: “Their skill and ingenuity transformed empty barrack rooms into homes.” It holds the very same tone as the propaganda that was created during the time of the camps, assuring the American people of how willingly Japanese Americans went along with their incarceration. That story is still being told. But isn’t it just survival, to continue living as they did? To make meaning and beauty is not an accomplishment, or evidence of submissiveness. Isn’t a home something we all deserve? And what about the homes they had made before, which could never be recovered? Why should anyone give up on a life that is still happening?

Thank you for sharing Yumi’s drawing. It’s similar to the ones I drew at Amache, with the crayons I bought on a whim at the grocery store we stopped at on our way. I do not think it’s corny to believe that she saw the same trees we were seeing, through the collapse of time we were experiencing.

Another student, Nozomi, the Japanese Cultural Program Coordinator at CC—who wasn’t enrolled in the class, but attended almost every day of it—sent me this collage (she also gave me permission to share it; thank you, Nozomi):

Despite it being a class on literature of Japanese American incarceration, the only book I brought with me to Amache was Mahmoud Darwish’s extraordinary self-elegy, In the Presence of Absence (tr. Sinan Antoon), which was the last book he published before he died. It was published in 2006, as في حضرة الغياب / Fi Hadrat al-Ghiyab. Darwish died on August 9, 2008, Nagasaki Day, after undergoing his third open-heart surgery. (He went into surgery on August 6, Hiroshima Day.) In the Presence of Absence is where Darwish describes (in second person) his first visit to Gaza, which comes near the end of the book:

We entered, or snuck into, Gaza in the dark… The destruction left by the military occupation shook you to your core. If you do not dream of what lies ahead, the sea will run away from the fishermen in your language. That night, chopped up by checkpoints, settlements, and watchtowers, one needed a new geographical method to recognize the borders between one footstep and the next and between what is prohibited and permitted…

You walk down the alleyways ashamed of everything: your ironed shirts, the aesthetics of poetry, the abstractness of music, and a passport that allows you to travel the world. You are stabbed by a pain in your consciousness.

The section ends with these words:

I came, but did not arrive.

I came but did not return!

We spent our final hours in and around blocks 7H and 6H, spread out among the foundations. We wandered, wrote, drew, listened to music, took naps, went looking for the koi pond, found it, time traveled into the present. I sat on the southeastern corner of a barrack foundation and read from In the Presence of Absence (page 60):

“He who lives on depriving others of light drowns in the darkness of his own shadow. You will never be free of me unless my freedom is generous to a fault. Then it would teach you peace and guide you home. You, not I, are afraid of what the cell is doing to me. You who guard my sleep, dream, and a delirium mined with signs. I have the vision and you have the tower, the heavy key chain, and a gun trained on a ghost. I have sleepiness, with its silky touch and essence. You have to stay up watching over me lest sleepiness take the weapon from your hand before your eye can see it. Dreaming is my profession while yours is pointless eavesdropping on an unfriendly conversation between my freedom and me.”

End of Part 4.

To be continued…