A few years following the start of World War II in 1939, and just ten weeks after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt enacted Executive Order 9066 in 1942. From 1942 to 1945, the policy authorized the U.S. government “to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded” (National Archives). That is, the Order was designed to prevent espionage on American soil. While the legislation did not explicitly describe the “persons” to be detained, the Pacific west coast at large soon became a militarized area, which contributed significantly to the forceful relocation of over 120,000 men, women, and children of Japanese descent (including Yamada’s family) in the months following its enactment (Our Documents).

The first page of Executive Order 9066, signed by President Roosevelt on February 19, 1942 (National Archives)

Yamada’s family in particular was sent to “Camp Harmony,” a euphemism for the internment camp established at an assembly center in Puyallup, Washington. Below is a curated selection of poems from Yamada’s Camp Notes and Other Poems, which includes, as the title suggests, poems in which Yamada writes of the pain-filled experiences that defined her life in internment. The succinct, honest style of her poetry beautifully captures the rawness of this pain.

Japanese American evacuees, Camp Harmony (Puyallup Assembly Center), 1942 Photo by Howard Clifford, Courtesy UW Special Collections (UW526) (Fiset)

In the poem “Evacuation,” as disturbing as it is brief, Yamada illustrates America’s disgust towards the Japanese during the World War II era. Photos taken of Japanese prisoners by the press, capturing the prisoners’ forced smiles as they boarded buses to the internment camps, were captioned: “Note smiling faces / a lesson to Tokyo” (“Evacuation” 13-14). Yamada then writes in the poem “On the Bus” how she could only watch, helpless, as her father was forcefully arrested and separated from his family by the FBI, under the suspicion of “Possible espionage or / Impossible espionage. / I forget which” (“On the Bus” 9-11). Thus, in so few lines, Yamada captures the absurd inhumanity of internment, as the U.S. government began detaining Japanese Americans, like Yamada’s father, apparently at random on the single basis of race.

In “Block 4 Barrack 4 ‘APT’ C,” Yamada depicts the dry, isolated landscape of the internment camps, through such expressive imagery as “These sinewed branches / [which] were rubbed and polished / shiny with sweat and body oil” (“Block 4 Barrack 4 ‘APT’ C” 8-10). Yamada personifies the ubiquitous, maddening despair felt in solidarity by the prisoners, writing of the screams of a pregnant woman which emanated throughout the barracks: “Lives spilled over us / through plaster walls / came mixed voices. / Bared too / a pregnant wife . . . she sobbed alone / and a barracksful / of ears shed tears” (“Block 4 Barrack 4 ‘APT’ C” 14-23).

Next, “The Night Before Good-Bye” is a deeply somber poem, depicting the internment’s barbaric separation of families and the fear it instilled in its prisoners. The night before Yamada was to be released from internment, she receives from her mother a recently mended pair of underwear. As her mother hands the garment over, she urgently whispers, “[K]eep your underwear / in good repair / in case of accident / don’t bring shame / on us” (“The Night Before Good-Bye” 18-22).

After 18 months of internment in Camp Harmony, Yamada, in her poem “Cincinnati,” writes of her first experience upon finally being released from the camp. In the urban city, she cherishes her freedom and anonymity, writing: “no one knew me” (“Cincinnati” 8). That is until a passerby spits on her, hissing “dirty jap,” after which Yamada breaks uncontrollably into tears, realizing “Everyone knew [her]” (“Cincinnati 10-11, 41).

Contextualizing one another, the above poems not only provide an excerpted view of Yamada’s life in internment, but also demonstrate the multi-faceted wounds inflicted upon internment survivors at large. During internment, Yamada — alongside the over 120,000 people of Japanese descent sent to camps across the country — was stripped of her family, her home, her language, and ultimately, her sense of self. However, refusing to submit to the inhuman, deeply racist attitudes of this time, and unwilling to let America erase the atrocities of internment, Yamada transmuted her pain into poetry, immortalizing the stories of internment survivors and their adversities.

Works Cited

“Block 4 Barrack 4 ‘Apt’ C.” Camp Notes and Other Poems, by Mitsuye Yamada, Shameless Hussy Press, 1976, p. 15.

“Cincinnati.” Camp Notes and Other Poems, by Mitsuye Yamada, Shameless Hussy Press, 1976, p. 29.

“Evacuation.” Camp Notes and Other Poems, by Mitsuye Yamada, Shameless Hussy Press, 1976, p. 10.

Executive Order 9066, February 19, 1942; General Records of the United States Government; Record Group 11; National Archives.

“Executive Order 9066: Resulting in the Relocation of Japanese (1942).” Our Documents – Executive Order 9066: Resulting in the Relocation of Japanese (1942), www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=74.

Fiset, Louis. “Camp Harmony (Puyallup Assembly Center), 1942.” The Free Online Encyclopedia of Washington State History, 7 Oct. 2008, www.historylink.org/File/8748.

“The Night Before Good-Bye.” Camp Notes and Other Poems, by Mitsuye Yamada, Shameless Hussy Press, 1976, p. 28.

“On the Bus.” Camp Notes and Other Poems, by Mitsuye Yamada, Shameless Hussy Press, 1976, p. 11.

In her essay “Reconstructing Asian-American Poetry: A Case for Ethnopoetics,” Lim argues for an increased inclusion of ethnocentric writings in literary education, in order to offset and correct the “inherent bias of the Anglo-American mainstream” (51). As an Asian-American writer herself, Lim applies this notion to the specific context of Asian-American literature. However, she admits the paradoxical nature of exposing Asian-American writing to society: it is difficult to increase the identification of Asian-American literature and its sources, without patronizing, unintentionally or otherwise, Asian-Americans as “special;” doing so would only reaffirm existing stigmatic stereotypes (51).

What is particularly notable about Asian-American poetry, according to Lim, is its steadfast identity (52). That is, in contrast to white immigrants, Asians have not as readily assimilated into American culture (see this post, which discusses Nellie Wong’s “When I Was Growing Up,” a poem about the pressures of assimilating into white girlhood). Such cultural stubbornness is a central characteristic of Asian-American writing. But the need for incorporating Asian-American writing into the mainstream extends beyond the desire for attention to the culture’s exoticism. In fact, it is the overbearing reliance of Asian exoticism that leads to society’s patronizing views of Asian-American writing. Lim writes that the primary issue is “not whether the diction reflects an Asian-American experience but whether the sum of the poem is greater than its parts — its diction, subject, rhythms, and devices” (53). Stereotypical imagery — e.g. jade, buddha figures, bound feet —  when done in excess, misshapes the “local color” of Asian objects, trivializing them as just another cheap call for attention (53).

To avoid this travesty of Asian culture, then, these “ethnic references” must become “extra-local,” i.e. through the creative use of local imagery, a writer individually rediscovers and tells a historical perspective belonging uniquely to them (53). This extra locality is achieved only through the proper execution of the three levels of ethnopoetics. The first level regards a poem’s stylistic devices — diction, figures of speech, imagery — i.e. the elements of a poem that are easily recognizable as Asian-American (53). However, as mentioned previously, while this level is an essential component of Asian-American poetry, one must be careful not to overuse such devices, as doing so can distract from and cheapen a poem’s thematic impact.

The second level of ethnopoetics is the incorporation of diction from a non-English language, as ethnic linguistics bring the reader closer to the original source of culture. The importance of the second level, Lim explains, stems from the “linguistic survival of first language expressions, whether actual or translated into English, point[ing] to the poets’ awareness that there exists in the original language itself certain values, concepts, and cultural traits which are not discoverable in English” (54). Yamada, in her poems “Homecoming” and “I Learned to Sew,” demonstrates masterful incorporation of these first two levels, unabashedly retaining the Japanese-accented English of both her mother and grandmother, framing for these women their stories of immigrant adversity, at once relatable yet uniquely theirs.

The third and final level of effective ethnopoetics “lies in the contextual realm . . . in the area of intertextuality” (54). Lim notes that this level is of particular importance because careless execution of it is a primary cause of readers’ inability to connect with the text. Asian-American poetry is not inherently better than that of Native Americans or Black-Americans, for example, just because it is Asian-American; but it is inherently different. While that may be obvious, these differences between cultural heritage necessarily affect readers’ experiences with and their reactions to ethnopoetics. In particular, Lim clarifies, variation in cultural context creates “significant differences between readers’ expectations and authors’ intentions, between the untrained readers’ conventional, culture-bound responses and the trained readers’ ethno-sensitive interpretations” (56). That is, the reader’s own experiences meet the poem’s cultural themes and backgrounds in an act of compromise. Lim eloquently accentuates that it is exactly this intertextuality between reader and writer, through the juxtaposition of the other’s “referential field,” that gives life to the text in the reader’s imagination (56). When this intertextual bridge is broken, the referential fields lose meaning, and therefore so does the poetry.

In conjunction with one another, the three levels of ethnopoetics demonstrate that the medium is at its most effective when it includes (i) poetic devices representative of and local to the poet’s cultural background, (ii) linguistic phrases stemming from the cultural source (either in the original language, or a translation of it), demonstrating its marked distinctness from the Anglo-American mainstream, and, most importantly, (iii) an “informed socio-cultural approach which counteracts the privileging of the dominant culture” (59). Cautiously, Lim disclaims that she is not arguing that ethnic poetry possesses inherent literary value simply on the basis that it is separate from the majority culture. Rather, ethnic poetry cannot fairly be assigned meaning until the “unequal relationship between uninformed reader and informed text” is corrected (59). Thus, only through the proper execution of the three levels of ethnopoetics can the medium depart from its esoteric status and towards the unpatronizing mainstream, and thereby create an ethno-sensitive society both able and willing to engage with such literature.

Works Cited

Lim, Shirley. “Reconstructing Asian-American Poetry: A Case for Ethnopoetics.” MELUS, vol. 14, no. 2, 1987, pp. 51–63. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/467352.

In her essay “Invisibility Is an Unnatural Disaster: Reflections of an Asian American Woman,” Yamada addresses the frustrating lack of awareness with which the majority culture regards Asian-American oppression. Yamada, then a professor of English at Cypress College in Seattle, Washington, begins the essay with an anecdote from an Ethnic American Literature course she had taught. In the course, she introduced to her class the works of various politically active Asian-American writers, as a part of the Asian segment of the course curriculum. During one of the class discussions, Yamada recounts how several students mentioned they “were not offended by any of the Black American, Chicano or American Indian writings . . . [as] they ‘understood’ the anger expressed by the Black Americans and Chicanos and they ‘empathized’ with the frustrations and sorrow expressed by the American Indian” (30). Yet, for some reason, when it came to Asian-Americans, some students noted that they found themselves angry at the idea that Asian-Americans could even be oppressed.

Reflecting on her students’ honest, albeit ignorant, remarks, Yamada realized that the invisible condition of Asian-American oppression explained much of the (not so) casual racism she had encountered all throughout her life. She notes one particular interaction in which she was explaining to her college’s administrators how they had infringed upon her rights as a professor. In response to Yamada’s self-defense, the administrators exclaimed how uncharacteristic this was of someone “‘so polite, so obedient, so non-trouble-making’,” and furthermore, how it “undoubtedly [must have been] some of ‘those feminists’,” rather than Yamada herself, that pushed her to raise such a dispute (31). Yamada writes how she ultimately “‘let it go’,” choosing not to challenge the administrators for their racist remarks, because it would have been futile to do so with those unable to even recognize their own racist behavior (31).

Yamada then notes that Asian-American women, even more so than Asian-Americans as a whole, were especially slow to “emerg[e] as a viable minority” in American society (31). With respect to her students’ surprise that Asian-Americans were oppressed at all, Yamada explains that, ironically, Asian-American women not admitting to themselves the reality of their oppression contributes significantly to such a narrative. And herein is the crux of the Asian-American invisibility issue. Through continued dishonesty with ourselves about our experiences with oppression, Asian-Americans can only exacerbate existing stigmatic stereotypes, as Yamada herself had done, passive even in the face of such blatant racism, during the aforementioned dispute with the college administrators.

To further evidence this notion, Yamada remarks how she had, for the past eleven years, happily busied herself with the daily responsibilities as an English professor, a wife, and a mother of four children. Unwittingly, Yamada found herself contentedly fulfilling the role of the middle-class woman, who was her family’s secondary income source, “quietly fitting into the man’s world of work” (32). Thus, the duality of being a woman and Asian-American makes it doubly more difficult to remove the mainstream perception of invisibility.

Asian-Americans have been socially conditioned to expect responses which trivialize their adversity. This powerlessness, Yamada writes, results in feeling unable to make a difference to anyone or anything. If we have been trained since our childhood to allow others to redefine the extent of our adversity, then it is no wonder we feel invisible. Yamada explains that Asian-Americans’ relinquishing of power over their own experiences is due to an inability to separate opinions from their source. That is, the social apathy is viewed as something that “‘can’t be helped.’” This is what mutated Asian-American culture into one of invisibility. Therefore, to move towards visibility, Yamada advocates we must first recognize the fact that we are invisible and to “raise our voices a little more, even as they say to us ‘This is so uncharacteristic of you’” (35).

Works Cited

Yamada, Mitusye. “Invisibility Is an Unnatural Disaster: Reflections of an Asian American Woman.” This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, by Moraga Cherríe and Anzaldúa Gloria, 4th ed., SUNY Press., 2015, pp. 30–35.

Born in Kyushu, Japan to her issei (first-generation immigrant) mother Hide Shiraki Yasutake, Mitsuye Yamada lived in Japan for the first three-and-a-half years of her life, raised by a neighboring family (her mother had returned to Seattle, Washington immediately after giving birth). In fact, Yasutake herself, as the speaker of Yamada’s poem “Homecoming,” shares the profound emotional guilt she felt for leaving her daughter in Japan, and that she had done so only to care for her two sons back in Seattle, one of whom was gravely ill. Powerfully, Yasutake notes that it was the love she had for her children which allowed her to persist through such heartache. She tells her daughter that life would be too painful without such love, morbidly referencing her friend, a mother of eight, who had committed suicide by hanging: “could not know what pains to live / without love / my friend kill / herself hang / her family with eight children / don’t know / how she could / do it for good reason / I think of her often / bring me comfort” (“Homecoming” 51-61). Yamada continued moving back and forth between Kyushu and Seattle throughout her childhood, but remained in America once she began attending Cleveland High School in Beacon Hill, Seattle, a residential area known for its large Asian demographic.

Chinese-American feminist poet Nellie Wong, a contemporary of Yamada, describes in her poem “When I Was Growing Up” of her stark lack of self-acceptance (with respect to ethnicity) during childhood and of how she had desperately longed to be white. She describes the self-hatred for her dark skin: “and no matter how much I bathed, / I could not change, I could not shed / my skin in the gray water” (Wong 50-52). Furthermore, despite having grown up in America, Wong became increasingly self-conscious of her minority status, as “being Chinese was feeling foreign, was limiting, was unAmerican” (Wong 30-32).

Pressured by the profound longing to assimilate into white girlhood, Wong notes how she had even begun to “[feel] ashamed / of some yellow men, their small bones, / their frail bodies,” hoping one day to live in “purple mountains . . . uncongested with yellow people in my area / called Chinatown, in an area I later / learned was a ghetto, one of many hearts / of Asian America” (Wong 37-39, 54-60). Note therein the latter half of the quote, taken from the penultimate stanza, Wong’s subtle, positive change in tone with respect to her views of Asian-Americanness. First describing Chinatown a “ghetto,” Wong quickly appends to the city’s description its status as the “heart” of Asian America, suggesting pride and appreciation where there was once shame and disgust. The final stanza begins, “I know now that once I longed to be white,” a beautiful, succinct demonstration of Wong’s departure from her self-conscious, adolescent self (Wong 61).

Works Cited

“Homecoming.” Camp Notes and Other Poems, by Mitsuye Yamada, Shameless Hussy Press, 1976, pp. 4–5.

Wong, Nellie. “When I Was Growing Up.” This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, by Moraga Cherríe and Anzaldúa Gloria, 4th ed., SUNY Press., 2015, pp. 5–6.