Citizen 13660

This semester, I got to sit in on a colleague's class as he taught Miné Okubo's Citizen 13660, a graphic memoir from way before our relatively recent interest (academic and cultural) in graphic novels. Okubo was a young art student who found herself, along with 110,000 other people of Japanese descent, swept off into internment camps under President Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066. Citizen 13660 consists of some 200 illustrations, each accompanied by a brief narrative, of daily life at a a couple of the "relocation centers."  It's a fascinating book, lying as it does at the intersection of historical importance and literary interest.

Historically, the illustrations provide a rare visual record of the camps. There are, of course, official photographs from the camps, taken by U.S. Government photographers; a good number of these can be found in the Online Archive of California. There are also the famous Ansel Adams photos—allowed, however, on the condition that no barbed wire, guard towers, or armed guards would be depicted.  But since cameras were not allowed in the camps, Citizen 13660 is one of the only—and perhaps the only sustained—depiction of the camps from an internee's perspective.

Beyond its historical relevance, it's worth a read on its own.  There's a fascinating range of things one could pursue if one had the inclination. There's the role of the gaze, for example: Okubo draws herself into almost every illustration, making herself both observer and observed, and using that ambivalent place to focus the reader's attention. And there's the irony created by the gap between the narrative—often a matter-of-fact, even bland recitation of events—and the illustration.

You can see both of these in action in the scene where she goes to the "Civil Control Station" to register:

Citizen 13660, page 18
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On Sunday, April 26, 1942, I reported to Pilgrim Hall of the First Congregational Church in Berkeley to register for my brother and myself—a family unit of two. Soldiers were standing guard at the entrance and around the building.

Just the facts in the text, but a world in the illustration: we watch as she enters, a defiant look on her face, her gaze drawing us to the ambiguous expression on the guard's face. You can see, too, why Ansel Adams was forbidden to photograph guards with guns; the text's "soldier" of course includes the notion of a gun, but there's something stark and disturbing seeing it on the soldier's shoulder.

The unadorned narrative sets up wonderful moments of pathos and irony, too.  A consistently angry or critical narrative—certainly this would be understandable, given the situation—would likely bury the power of those occasional moments of biting irony, such as when she describes the importance of the camp's post office to the internees and concludes, "Letters from my European friends told me how lucky I was to be free and safe at home." Ouch.

Citizen 13660, page 61
(click to enlarge)

Citizen 13660, title page
(click to enlarge)

It's an important book, and I'm glad my colleague is teaching it. Further, it's an important time to do so, as debates about immigration or terrorism often meander into troubling territory. One of the issues with Arizona's new law, which requires police to detain people that they suspect might be in the country illegally, is the question of how the police are supposed to identify such people if not by appearance, and reassurances that racial profiling won't be tolerated ("We have to trust our law enforcement," said Arizona Governor Brewer) ring hollow. And then there's Juan Williams and his fear of people in "Muslim garb"—again, reducing identification of a "problem" population to appearance. 

And appearance was one of the justifications for the Japanese internment; as Frank H. Wu explains in Yellow: Race in America Beyond Black and White, the belief that all Asians look alike was used by the U.S. Government to defend the internment—indeed, to represent it as in the internees' best interest. Wu quotes U.S. Supreme Court Justice Black in the New York Times:

They all look alike to a person not a Jap. Had they attacked our shores you'd have a large number fighting with the Japanese troops. And a lot of innocent Japanese Americans would have been shot in the panic. 

The emotions around immigration reform and protection against terrorism both have the potential to lead to scary things, so we need to be reminded what we are capable of. Citizen 13660 brings the relatively recent past—the Japanese internment was less than 70 years ago, after all—and sets it before us graphically and poignantly.

A thought on Ansel Adams:

In my colleague's class, there was some debate as to how much Ansel Adams' photographs hid the plight of the Japanese and Japanese Americans (two-thirds of the internees were American citizens). The photos tend to portray life in the camps as, above all, normal, and in that sense can be seen as complicit with the internment. I find it hard to argue against this position, but there are nonetheless a few subversive moments in his project. One photo, a long shot of the whole camp, is entitled "Manzanar from Guard Tower"; Adams couldn't include the tower in the photo, so perhaps he decided to include it in the title.

More interesting, though, was this photo, entitled "Pictures and mementoes on phonograph top: Yonemitsu home, Manzanar Relocation Center":

Few things show up the injustice of the internment as starkly as the reminder that Japanese American soldiers were fighting loyally for a country even as it incarcerated their families. Given the ambivalence of Adams' Manzanar project, it's good to note moments like this.

A further thought, this one on "Muslim garb":

If Juan Williams, and those like him, are afraid of Muslims to the point of feeling fearful when they see people in "Muslim garb," imagine what nightmares the Muslims in the wonderful, and growing, Pictures of Muslims Wearing Things blog must be causing...