References
Note on the piece
In 1942, 120,000 Nikkei (Japanese diaspora) were unconstitutionally and forcibly removed from their communities across Hawaiʻi, Alaska and the West Coast of the United States. Among them, 7,500 individuals were removed from their homes in Seattle and the rural areas to its south, and held at Camp Harmony at the Western Washington fairgrounds. Families lived in makeshift barracks and horse stalls, carrying their lives in single duffle bags.
In the late summer, the Nikkei at Camp Harmony were shuffled onto trains and relocated to the Minidoka concentration camp in rural Idaho. Minidoka held 13,000 Nikkei, where individuals experienced dehumanisation, isolation and extreme weather, vastly different from the coastal climate that the community was accustomed to. The name Minidoka is believed to come from the Dakhóta Oyáte or Newe word roughly translating to either “broad expanse” or “fountain or spring of water,” and the land was immense, a desert stretching out in all directions. The nearest city to Mindioka lies just south, named Eden.
Whilst incarcerated for three years, the Nikkei community, and my family, did what they could to create community in unfamiliar plains – cultivating gardens and decorating barracks, going to school and outstretching hands to a world that was determined to systematically forget them. The Nikkei wrote letters to anyone who would receive them back home, asking for news, necessary supplies and affirming their own existence – their personhood. It is from one of these family letters that this piece arrives.
This poem, then, is an act of arrival through erasure. Through pulling out pieces of my family’s letter, I have attempted to, even haphazardly, uncover and fill in the blanks of the narrative, of our collective memory. As the US government continues to rupture, erase and destroy communities at this very moment, every stone must be overturned, every voice heard and held up on our road to liberation.
Recommended
reading
hooks, bell. “Postmodern Blackness.”
Tuck, Eve. “Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities.”