"A smile could go a long ways [...] And we were all ears"

Going into the readings this week, I put a lot of focus on Mitsuye Yamada’s “Camp Notes and Other Writings.” I don’t know why, but I immediately assumed that I’d write about it. I even (in a very rare moment) decided to pre-write for the post and conduct some small research beyond the handout while I was reading it. I was, by all reason, going to write a post about Yamada and try to make some smart, serious comments on her gender and poetry – but then I read Lawson Inada’s “Legends From Camp” and decided that seriousness is way overrated!

Inada’s ability to take the completely tragic experience of Japanese internment camps and process them into creative, articulate and hilarious poetry is so damn cool. I think that sometimes it is easier to overdramatize tragedies out of a sense of respect to their gravity, but humor can be just as effective an approach. In “Camp” (is that a poem?) he writes, “…to simply know the facts is not always satisfactory. There’s more to life than that.” (3) – yeah, like laughter! As he says a couple of lines later, he is writing about “Aspects of humanity” (3) and, in doing so, proves that there is inescapable humor in the peculiarities of people and the occupants of internment camps are no exception.

I love the “Legends” framing structure under which Inada writes his poetry. In no particular order, I thought that I’d pick out a few to look at in-depth.

“IV. The Legend of the Lost Boy” kind of has it all: poignancy, growth and humor. It starts with a boy who had lost everything: “The road was taken away. / The dog was taken away. / The food was taken away. / The house was taken away.”(10) and most of all, his name. In fact, we learn that initially, “The Lost Boy” nickname is a misnomer: “The boy was taken away-- / but he was not lost. / Oh, no – he knew exactly where he was –“(10) Indeed, he was well aware of his surroundings, bleak as they were, and found his own happiness in chasing the trucks full of water. Until eventually, this same activity brings sadness when the dust from a truck disorients him. A jovial old man leads him back to his mother, who lovingly accepts her “lost boy.”

This story stands out to me for the ways that it redefines things, starting with my assumption that residents of an internment camp would only ever feel helplessly lost. This is not the case with “The Lost Boy” who, despite unfamiliar surroundings, still carries the confidence of knowing his surroundings. Despite all of the prejudice rampant at the time, he is still living with certain people (his mother, the old man) who find him even when he feels lost, implying that community is the source of his confidence and not his physical surroundings.

The other redefinition lies directly within his name. He was not always known as “The Lost Boy” and I think, symbolically, this is a nickname brought on by internment that strips him of his identity – going so far as to contradict it entirely. I think that it is also symbolic how, throughout the course of the poem, this nickname goes from pejorative to endearing. They characters involved had the power to take something negative put upon him and transform it into a source of laughter and hospitality.

Okay, well apparently I grossly overestimated my ability to be concise, so I will wrap this up. But I already drew goofy pictures of “The Bad Boy” “The Good Girl” and Amaterasu, so I will at least upload those later. Another part of poetry that I envy is its conciseness!