When reading the Haiku from the Japanese American Concentration Camp handout there were several stanzas that really jumped out at me, and I wanted to post them on here. These stanzas really place the reader in the anguish the writers were going through at the time they wrote them.
Black clouds instantly shroud
autumn sky
hail storming against us today also
Winter wind
relentlessly blasting shed
goat bleating
Doll without a head
lying on desk top
one evening
From The Pangolin:
"Fearful yet to be feared," the armored
ant-eater met by the driver-ant does not turn back, but
engulfs what he can
-These stanzas really capture the pain and the injustice of the imprisoned Japanese Americans and really affected me when I read them.
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Molly I had to see what you posted because as soon as I read these Japanese American haiku's I thought of you. I know how you like a happy ending or something a little lighter, you say, but this really pulled on some heart strings. And since the rest of the class seems to think I’m a little "harsh" even I felt moved by these. Does anyone remember that children's novel about the young Japanese girl who lives in America her whole life and then they put her and her family into a Japanese concentration camp? I remember it so vividly. When we think of concentration camps we always jump to the holocaust. I think this is because American’s don’t want to accept that we did the same thing, but we don't have a problem blaming it on other people. (That whole idea in itself is a very common American tradition. blame someone else). But in true "Gretchen" fashion, I can see why American’s put the Japanese into the camps, after all, it was our first world war and we were the underdog ready for a fight. We weren't going to be taken lightly and showing the Japanese what we were doing to their kind that lived in America, instilled a sense of panic to the Japanese. And to take a most appropriate quote from Pearl Harbor "I fear the most we have done is awaken a sleeping giant." and they did.
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