Ideas and Prompts for Week Five: Executive Order 9066

photo by Dorothea Lange.
Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pingnews/286467101/in/photostream/

Hi everyone,

This week we're changing things up a little bit by examining poems. (Plus one incredible film, an auto/biographical documentary that is among my all-time favorites. The production company even quotes me on their website--that's how much I love it! I talk about it all the time!) :)

We're focusing on the Japanese American internment experience this week. Here are the historical facts. After the attack on Pearl Harbor during WWII, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing the "relocation" (i.e., internment, or imprisonment) of Americans of Japanese descent. The War Relocation Authority (WRA) systematically "relocated" over 120,000 men, women, and children from their homes to internment camps (or "relocation centers"). Family life, work life, and children's schooling were all disrupted. Internees' homes were taken from them. They were forced to sign a "Loyalty Oath" pledging their allegiance to the U.S. They lived in roughshod communal barracks made of thin pine, often with dirt floors. The camps were surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by armed soldiers with orders not to let anyone leave under any circumstances. Men of military age, however, could prove their loyalty to their country and leave the camps on one condition: if they enlisted in the military (to fight in a segregated unit).

A tragic chapter in U.S. history, yes. But tragedy begets poetry! Our two poets this week, Mitsuye Yamada and Lawson Fusao Inada, both experienced internment personally. Yamada was interned as a teenager with her family before attending the University of Cincinnati after the war. Inada's family was interned when he was just four years old. Both poets write about internment experience lyrically and ironically. The tragedy that was simultaneously personal and national works itself out in poems that are sometimes brutal, sometimes gorgeous, and sometimes hilarious.

Here are some ideas and prompts for this week's poems.

1. In "Evacuation," the speaker and fellow internees are told to "Smile!" (line 9) for a photograph, and when they do, the newspaper runs the photo with a caption reading "Note smiling faces / a lesson to Tokyo" (13-14). How does this poem capture the experience of internees? How do we see this tension between being "obedien[t]" (10) and being criminalized, between appearance and reality, between friend/citizen and enemy, operating in Yamada's other poems?
   
   
2. In "Desert Storm," Yamada writes:
   
   This was not
   im
   prison
   ment.
   This was
   re
   location. (22-28)
   
   What do you think she means by this? Why does she use the line breaks in this way? Do you see this distinction--between the sanctioned term, "relocation," and the poet's preferred term, "imprisonment"--operating thematically in the other poems?
   
   
3. Rewrite the poem "Cincinnati" as a narrative in prose. What is gained/lost by the change in genre?
   
   
4. Rewrite Lawson Fusao Inada's prose poem, "Camp," as a lyric poem (or even a sonnet or limerick).
   
   
5. Inada's poem "Instructions to All Persons" is paired with an archival document from 1942, "Instructions to All Persons of Japanese Ancestry Living in the Following Area." The latter was a sign that was posted on Japanese Americans' doors and on posts in predominantly Japanese American neighborhoods. How do these two texts--the 1942 sign and the 1993 poem--establish a dialogue? What does Inada change about the original sign; what does he add to it; how does he question it, or "talk back" to it? What do you make of the last four lines of the poem?
   
   
6. "Legends from Camp" is a poem in 25 parts. It incorporates seemingly different topics and characters, from Superman to Buddha, from the "fact" (1) of internment to the "legends" of Bad Boy and Good Girl. How do the different sections relate to each other? What do you think Inada is doing with the concepts of "fact" (or truth) and "legend?"

Enjoy--

Dr. Kulbaga