felt events

<서울 데카당스-Live> 공연 기록. <Seoul Decadence-Live>, performance, 2014 // Link // Festival Bo:m 2014 http://festivalbom.org/live-seoul-decadence-live

by Akemi Johnson-

Photo: The author’s grandmother (bottom left) in her high school senior yearbook. Canal High School, 1943, Gila River incarceration camp. 

Last month, TheAtlantic.com published the essay “What My Grandmother Learned in Her World War II Internment Camp,” by Helen Yoshida. In it she tells the story of her grandmother, who was one of the 120,000 Japanese Americans imprisoned by the U.S. government from 1942 to 1945. At Heart Mountain incarceration camp, Yoshida writes, her grandmother made the best of the situation by developing the sewing skills that later enabled her “to craft a comfortable life.”

“Like many internees, she did not talk about camp later in her life. Instead, she closed that chapter,” Yoshida explains. Later in the essay, she states her grandmother did tell her about the incarceration, but “did not dwell on the racism and mass hysteria that had driven her there.” Instead, she recounted the everyday: “how she’d spent the time.”

The Nisei (second-generation Japanese American) incarceration experience has been largely characterized by silence. Among a group of Sansei (third-generation Japanese Americans) studied by psychology professor Donna K. Nagata, about three-quarters said their parents rarely or never mentioned that period. Children and grandchildren may have heard about the mundane — the everyday — but not the psychology and emotions.  

Today, with the Nisei generation departing, many of us are left on our own to interpret these silences in our families.    

My late grandmother was incarcerated during the war. She, her parents, and younger sisters were forced to abandon their home in Winters, California and bring only what they could carry to Gila River incarceration camp, in the Arizona desert. Fifty miles south of Phoenix, the camp was in a desolate area where summer temperatures soared over 100 degrees. The some 13,000 inmates lived one family per room in crude barracks — tar-papered, uninsulated, furnished with army cots, and susceptible to the dust and wildlife of the desert. Privacy was nonexistent. A guard tower kept watch. 

Like Yoshida’s grandmother, mine seemed to rally and make the best of things. She threw herself into school: her high school transcript shows she was the Calendar Editor, a reporter for the school newspaper, and secretary-treasurer of the camp National Honor Society chapter. When her class of about 200 students graduated in 1943, she was the Valedictorian.

After the war, my grandmother rebuilt her life. She married and settled in Palo Alto, California. Her family managed to establish a chrysanthemum nursery there, where three generations worked side-by-side growing the big, heavy-headed flowers. The business did well enough that by the time my grandparents had three young children, they were able to buy a three-bedroom house in a neighborhood with good schools. 

Like many others, my grandmother didn’t talk about the incarceration, referring to it rarely and simply as “camp,” as if it had been a pleasant place of capture the flag and swimming lessons.  

But I don’t think that chapter ever really closed. 

Although on the surface my grandmother may have appeared to make the best of her circumstances, leaving behind the war years to carve out her own American success story, her narrative — and her silence surrounding those years — seems to me more complex and opaque.

My grandmother is remembered by her children as overwhelmed and exasperated, critical and unhappy. She suffered from bowel issues and migraines so bad they made her vomit, and she was known to fly into rages—throwing things, wielding spoons and hairbrushes. At the end of her life, my grandmother revealed to my mother that she’d always felt as if she didn’t fit in — like “a square peg in a round hole.”

Researchers have found that the trauma of the incarceration — suppressed out of shame and a community-wide effort to forget — manifested in some former internees in physical and psychological ways. They have found high rates of low-grade depression among Nisei, along with psychosomatic symptoms such as ulcers, hypertension, and migraines. 

I’ll never know for certain what role the camp played in my grandmother’s struggles. That aspect of her life is entangled with others: her individual disposition, larger structures of race and racism in the U.S., her lingering heartbreak over the man — not my grandfather — she’d fallen in love with in camp. Still, I can’t help but feel the weight of the incarceration on my family — even on me, two generations removed. I feel it on all the years, growing up, when I hated my first name and wanted to distance myself from anything Japanese. I feel it on the years I spent later, as a young adult, working to address that by immersing myself in Japan — learning the language, living there, discovering the history of World War II.

The incarceration feels implicit in my very genetic makeup. Since the war, Japanese Americans have married outside their ethnic group at the highest rate among Asian Americans. Over sixty percent of Sansei women and over fifty percent of Sansei men have outmarried. Many of us in the fourth and fifth generations are mixed — although, we’re finding, this has not necessarily translated into a lessening of our Japanese American identity. 

What is certain is that we, as a community, as a nation, have a responsibility to keep that chapter of history open. Thanks in part to the efforts of oral historians like those at Densho, Go For Broke National Education Center, and Discover Nikkei, many Japanese Americans who were incarcerated have revisited that period in their final years, sharing their stories. Others, like my grandmother, never did.

We should not read these silences in simple terms, assuming there was nothing more to say. Instead, we can choose to dig deeper. We should continue to learn about, question, and critically examine all the complex effects of that great breach of American civil liberties.

Yoon Mee-hyang helps Korea’s World War II sex slaves tell their stories

Seoul, South Korea — Yoon Mee-hyang recalls receiving a phone call from a man who identified himself as a Japanese right-winger. He said abruptly, “I hate Korea.”

That curse “prompted me to say, ‘I love Japan,’ ” Ms. Yoon says, smiling broadly.

Yoon, representative of the Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, says that as Japan has shown an increasingly conservative bent, her group has gotten more harassing e-mails and phone calls like that.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has repeatedly denied Japan’s responsibility for its use of sexual slaves during World War II. Many of the victims were Korean women.

Critics say Mr. Abe has played a leading role in glossing over Japan’s wartime history, which has aggravated relations with neighboring countries. When Yoon and elderly survivors of the brothels visited the office building of Japanese lawmakers in June, a group of Japanese protesters showered them with a barrage of abuse, even calling the victims “prostitutes.”

“That was frustrating,” Yoon concedes.

Since 1990, the Korean council has been working on exposing the sexual slavery issue to restore the dignity and rights of victims.

Historians say the number of victims ranged from tens of thousands to 200,000. As Japan was about to be defeated in 1945, the women were abandoned or killed by Japanese soldiers or in Allied bombings.

The Department of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign today (August 28) approved the following resolution:

In May 1989, Edward Said arrived at the Rome apartment of Gillo Pontecorvo, eager to press the Italian filmmaker on the connections between The Battle of Algiers and the First Intifada that was then raging in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. In his account of the interview, Said presents the discussion of these connections as the climax of his conversation with Pontecorvo: “Finally…I was able to get to what seemed to me to be the logical contemporary extension of the political situations represented in The Battle of Algiers”.

In his eagerness to relate Pontecorvo’s 1966 masterpiece to Palestine, Said was voicing a much wider fascination among both Palestinians and Israelis with establishing the film’s relevance (or irrelevance) to the contemporary Middle East. The potential parallels are there for all to see. From the brutality of France’s colonial occupation (complete with checkpoints, house demolitions and separation barriers), to the FLN’s targeting of civilians and urban warfare tactics, The Battle of Algiers seems to invite comparison with Israel’s on-going military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

THIS. this is exactly why white parents of children of color can NOT pretend that racism doesn’t exist. it is your job to understand and prepare your child for the racism they WILL face and you will need help from a larger community that actually has experienced that racism, which is why you are irresponsible if you have made no efforts to connect your child with their ethnic community:

"Still, "we never talked about race growing up," Landau tells his mother, Patsy Hathaway, on a visit to StoryCorps. "I just don’t think that was ever a conversation."

"I thought that love would conquer all and skin color really didn’t matter," Hathaway says. "I had to learn the really hard way when they almost killed you."

When We Talk Reproductive Justice, We Need to Talk About Surrogate Parents

Feature image via Solar Navigator

Surrogacy affords many people an alternative way to bring a child into the world. Whether a person is infertile or cannot deliver a baby without medical risk, or a couple is biologically unable to reproduce together without medical intervention — as may be the case for some queer couples — surrogacy enables a person with a uterus to carry a child on behalf of the…

"The work of art that perhaps galvanised the Harlem Renaissance’s fascination with black nationhood (and black leadership) was Eugene O’Neill’s 1920 play, The Emperor Jones. A thinly veiled drama about the failures of Henri Christophe’s despotic reign over the island of Haiti, The Emperor Jones was an important vehicle not only for actors like Charles Gilpin and Paul Robeson, but also for visual artists as well (Aaron Douglas’s blockprint illustrations for the play in 1926 and Dudley Murphy’s film treatment of the play in 1933). Although The Emperor Jones presented the idea of black nationhood and leadership in a negative, racially atavistic light (no doubt with Marcus Garvey’s ‘Africa for Africans’ rhetoric and his failed attempts at nation building in mind), its focus on black agency and independence was not lost on Harlem Renaissance audiences.”

"The history propaganda and mystique that surrounded Haiti - beginning with the US military invasion and occupation of the island in 1915 - took on a life of its own during the Harlem Renaissance. In addition to The Emperor Jones, scores of novels, plays, ethnographic studies and journalistic exposés used Haiti and its peoples for a range of purposes. While Haiti’s tortured political history and its cultural links to certain African traditions were viewed by many commentators as evidence of its geo-political weakness and savagery, these same attributes wee viewed by others as reasons for recognising the political power among all peoples of African descent and celebrating Africa’s gifts (via Haiti) to world culture. With the removal of the US Marines from Haiti in 1934, this fascination with the island and its mythologies manifested itself in interesting ways, from Josephine Baker’s staged musical portrayal of a caged Haitian songbird in the 1934 film Zou Zou, to two major off Broadway plays dealing with black political intrigue, Haitian style: John Houseman’s and Orson Welles’s Black Macbeth (1936) and William DuBois’s Haiti (1938)."

Read full piece at the Institute of International Visual Arts.

1. There is no “lax enforcement” on the U.S./Mexico border. There are over 20,000 Border Patrol Agents; that number was as low as 9,800 in 2001. We have walls and a system of large, centralized detention centers that didn’t exist just 15 years ago. Now more than 350,000 people spend some time in an immigrant detention center every year. The U.S. spends more on immigration enforcement than all other enforcement activities of the federal government combined, including the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The growing numbers of people in detention—young people as well as families and adults— is being used as a pretext by the anti-immigrant lobby in Washington, including the Tea Party and the Border Patrol itself, for demanding increases in the budget for enforcement. The Obama administration has given way before to this pressure.

2. The migration of children and families didn’t just start recently. It has been going on for a long time although the numbers have recently surged. The tide of migration from Central America goes back to wars that the U.S. promoted in the 1980s, in which we armed the forces, governments or contras, who were most opposed to progressive social change. Many hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans came to the U.S. during the late 1970s and 80s, to say nothing of Guatemalans and Nicaraguans. Whole families migrated, but so did parts of families, leaving loved ones behind with the hope that some day they’d be reunited.

3. The recent increase in the numbers of child migrants is not just a response to gang violence, although this is the most-cited cause in U.S. media coverage. Migration is as much or more a consequence of the increasing economic crisis for rural people in Central America and Mexico, as well as the failure of those economic structures to produce jobs. People are leaving because they can’t survive where they are.

4. The failure of Central America’s economies is largely due to the North American and Central American Free Trade Agreements and their accompanying economic changes, including privatization of businesses, the displacement of communities by foreign mining projects and cuts in the social budget. The treaties allowed huge U.S. corporations to dump corn and other agricultural products in Mexico and Central America, forcing rural families off their lands when they could not compete.

5. When governments or people have resisted NAFTA and CAFTA, the United States has threatened reprisal. Right-wing Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) put forward a measure to cut off the flow of remittances (money sent back to Salvadoran families from family members working in the U.S.) if the leftwing party, the FMLN, won the 2004 presidential election. His bill did not pass but the U.S. Embassy in San Salvador admitted that it had intervened. In 2009, the Honduran army overthrew President Manuel Zelaya after he raised the minimum wage, gave subsidies to small farmers, cut interest rates and instituted free education. The Obama administration gave a de facto approval to the coup regime that followed. If social and political change had taken place in Honduras, we would see far fewer Hondurans trying to come to the U.S.

6.  Gang violence in Central America has a U.S. origin. Over the past two decades, young people from Central America have arrived in L.A. and big U.S. cities, where many were recruited into gangs, a story eloquently told by photographer Donna DeCesare in the recent book Unsettled/Desasociego: Children in the World of Gangs. The Maratrucha Salvadoreña gang, which today’s newspaper stories hold responsible for the violence driving people from El Salvador, was organized in Los Angeles, not in Central America. U.S. law enforcement and immigration authorities responded to the rise of gang activity here with a huge program of deportations. The U.S. has been deporting approximately 400,000 people per year since 2009.

7.  Moreover, U.S. foreign policy in Central America has actively led to the growth of gang violence there. In El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, U.S. law enforcement assistance pressured local law enforcement to adopt a mano dura, or hardline, approach to gang members, leading to the incarceration of many young people deported from the U.S. almost as soon as they arrived. Prisons became schools for gang recruitment. Even in El Salvador—where the leftwing FMLN government at least has a commitment to a policy of jobs and economic development to take young people off the street and to provide an alternative to migration—conservative police and military forces continue to support heavy enforcement. In Guatemala and Honduras, the U.S. is supporting very rightwing governments that only use a harsh enforcement approach. Hypocritically, while punishing deportees and condemning migration, these two governments actually use the migration of people to the U.S. as a source of remittances to keep their economies afloat.

8. Kids looking for families here are looking for those who were already displaced by war and economic crisis. The separation of families is a cause of much of the current migration of young people. Young people fleeing the violence are reacting to the consequences of policies for which the U.S. government is largely responsible, in the only way open to them.

Two and three years ago we were hearing from the Pew Hispanic Trust and other sources that migration had “leveled off.” No one is bothering to claim that anymore. Migration hasn’t stopped because the forces causing it are more powerful than ever.

More enforcement will not deal with the causes of the migration from Central America. In fact, the deportation of more people back to their countries of origin will increase joblessness and economic desperation—the main factors causing people to leave. Violence, which feeds on that desperation, will increase as well.

President Obama proposed raising the enforcement budget by $3.7 billion to address the recent influx of unaccompanied Latin American minors. He called for suspending a law passed in 2008 that requires minors to be transferred out of detention to centers where they can locate family members to care for them, and to instead deport them more rapidly. Both ideas cause more pain, violate basic rights and moral principles, and fail completely to stop the conditions that have led to mass migration.

The New York Times, Carl Hulse wrote that the law transferring minors out of detention centers “is at the root of the potentially calamitous flow of unaccompanied minors to the nation’s southern border.” This report and others like it not only ignore history and paint a false picture of the reasons for migration but also provide the rationale for increased enforcement.

Similarly, New Jersey Democratic Senator Bob Menendez has declared “we must attack this problem from a foreign policy perspective, a humanitarian perspective, a criminal perspective, immigration perspective, and a national security perspective.” He calls for more funding for the U.S. military’s Southern Command and the State Department’s Central American Security Initiative, among other recommendations. Giving millions of dollars to some of the most violent and rightwing militaries in the Western hemisphere, however, is a step back towards the military intervention policy that set the wave of migration into motion to begin with.