Posted under: Essays
In Jeanne Houston’s book, Farewell to Manzanar, the author refuses to point a finger at her country for her imprisonment because, in a way, she would be pointing a finger at herself. While the novel identifies America’s (and, especially, California’s) long history of nativism and orientalism, Houston at the end places herself outside this tradition, quite willing to wipe the slate of crimes clean rather than engage in a dialogue about what forced imprisonment means.
The main character’s feelings about race, as well as her own ethnic identity, are complex. She talks about the first time that she saw, as she calls them, “Orientals” at Terminal Island. Her use of this term, which was outdated even in the year of the book’s first publication, speaks to the dichotomy of the author’s psyche. Her parents are in part a factor in this, as her father’s constant teasing about her being sold to the Chinese imbues her with a horror for the ethnic “other.” When she first sees a Chinese person, she is absolutely horrified. It’s telling that despite her American identity, she has very little sense of inter-ethnic solidarity.
In the first part of the book, she describes the first barracks they live in as a drafty shack. “Animals live like this,” her mother declares. Yet is the crux of the injustice here simply poor living conditions? If they were imprisoned at a five-star resort, would this still have been right? A prison is a prison, despite the conditions. It seems like at some level Jeanne is blaming herself not just for her Asian-ness, but for the imprisonment. This isn’t farfetched, as in many places in the novel she blames herself for others’ prejudices. Although she takes great pains to say that no one detained in the camps ever perpetrated an act of sabotage against the American forces, she fails to touch on the fact that the internment itself was almost reason enough to fight on the side of the Japanese, a people she had no personal connection with.
By Part II, Jeanne and the family have accepted the camp as a home. Instead of complaining about the conditions, her mother seems quite happy doing her daily duties as a dietitian. Jeanne herself becomes involved in the camp’s many activities: school, ballet, baton twirling. So are we to still believe that the imprisonment is a crime? Jeanne doesn’t seem to think so. Even in Part III, when she is walking around the desolate wasteland in the Owens Valley that used to be the camp, she feels no anger. Even though she was a child at the time of the internment, in this scene she is an adult, and yet feels no anger at her plight. Are we to believe that she has Stockholm syndrome? Has she really brushed the whole episode away with enough repetitions of shikita ga nai? This presumes that the reader is not paying attention.
Instead of just looking at the text and asking the one-dimensional question “why doesn’t she blame America?” we must look deeper at American discourse. America does not tolerate opposing voices, especially ones branded as unpatriotic. Were the book to have ended with a scathing denouncement of American racism, it simply would not have been published. As Mrs. Houston’s friend declares misanthropically in the foreword, “It’s a dead issue. These days you can hardly get people to read about a live issue. People are issued out.” Any account of America’s ills has to be atoned for either by a quixotic love for one’s country that has no rational basis (à la Carlos Bulosan), or by developing a selective amnesia about the horrors inflicted on your people. Jeanne’s selective amnesia seems to know no bounds.
Jeanne never pauses to consider how future generations might be deprived of rights just as she was, save for her limp claims in the afterword that there was a different reaction to the events of September 11. The astute reader is no doubt aware that countless people have been detained as a result of our dubiously named “war on terror” and remain in legal limbo forever in Guantánamo. Is forced imprisonment with no evidence only wrong when 100,000 people are interred? Is it only wrong when children are taken along with their parents? One gets the distinct sense that Mrs. Houston, despite her noble aims, has a myopic conception of civil liberties. Has she read a newspaper in the past ten years? This makes her absolution of America particularly troubling—the slate has not been washed clean. These types of crimes bloom anew with each new “threat,” breathlessly reported by the corporate media. Manzanar seems to have been a botched trial run for a deeply racist society bent on racially profiling its “enemies.”
Oddly enough, the most gripping part of the novel is not the imprisonment itself, but the family’s postwar attempt to blend in. Jeanne is ostracized by her peers in a way that is alien to her experiences at the camp. Despite the fact that she is in prison at the camp, she is surrounded by her peers, which evokes a feeling of camaraderie. Once outside the bubble of the camp, she is confronted with what the pitfalls of the ethnic identity she has adopted for herself. Nobody is willing to treat her as a “real” American. Despite our collective wish that this was an attitude confined to the past, racism is still front and center in our politics. The recent Arizona law that discriminates against Mexicans and South Americans has so far gone unchallenged. And what of the countless families in the country “illegally” because America refuses to grant citizenship to the amount of people that want to come here?
Mrs. Houston can afford to play Pollyanna, but for the rest of us who live in the real world, Manzanar was a chapter in American history that is constantly in danger of reemerging. One could make a convincing argument that the 10-20 million[1] “illegal” immigrants in the United States who are not allowed to become citizens constitute a new subclass of people just as vulnerable as the wartime Japanese. If anything, Jeanne’s unwillingness to confront contemporary parallels to her imprisonment paints the events that took place at Manzanar as a historical oddity. Manzanar was a tragedy with incalculable human cost—a reality that Jeanne gives short shrift to.
Was this imprisonment wrong or not? This is the central question that the author fails to answer, and it is highly bound up by her identity as an American. The ethnic identity that she has assumed for herself is also guilty of atrocities. As an American, she is an unwilling participant in the discourse of American life, which includes a great deal of racism. The final scene in Part III, which is the real end of the novel, exemplifies her troubled feelings about America. She is putting on a show for the white audience, to which she is hyper-visible, but not treated as a person. Even before she is out on stage, she knows that although the school voted for her, she will not be allowed to attend the party afterwards. She knows that it’s all an act, but she must continue to hold up her end, as her classmates can only define her as an amorphous “other.”
Though this novel is intended for young readers, the writer glosses over the horror of her internment by writing a pithy ending that’s supposed to wrap all of this up in a convenient package. Is she really so inured to what transpired there? Has she never stopped to think who caused the imprisonment that led to her father’s existential death? Mrs. Houston is afraid of the “issued-out” masses, which is why she is targeting the young. In the afterword, the author is intent on making sure no one forgets what happened at Manzanar, but she’s light on the details of what it meant for her. Stripped of any hint of moralism, Farewell to Manzanar ends up reading like a reality TV show set in the California desert. The danger is that some public hysteria might just boil up an appetite for some reruns.