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White Sound and Silences from Stone: Discursive Silences in the Internment Writings of Mitsuye Yamada and Joy Kogawa In Janice Mirikitani’s collection of poems entitled We, the Dangerous (1995), she takes as one of her central themes the involuntary internment of persons of Japanese descent in the United States during World War II.1 Along with exploring the feelings of helplessness and anger associated with the internment, Mirikitani also examines what it means to be an American in a context in which Asian Americans are still perceived as foreigners and visitors to the United States, even when they are American citizens who consider this country their home. Her first series of poems in the collection, “Looking For America,” includes works that critique the white-centered beauty standards of U.S. culture, the internalization of racism and self-hatred by people of color, and the invisibility of Asian Americans in media representations and national discourse. In Mirikitani’s poem “We, the Dangerous” (1978), she explores the There is a silence that cannot speak. There is a silence that will not speak. Beneath the grass the speaking dreams and beneath the dreams is a sensate sea. The speech that frees comes forth from that amniotic deep. To attend its voice, I can hear it say, is to embrace its absence. But I fail the task. The word is stone. I admit it. I hate the stillness. I hate the stone. . . . Unless the stone bursts with telling, unless the seed flowers with speech, there is in my life no living word. The sound I hear is only sound. White sound. Words, when they fall, are pockmarks on the earth. They are hailstones seeking an underground stream. —Joy Kogawa, Obasan misconception that Japanese Americans during World War II constituted a threat to national security—the “yellow peril”—a remnant of earlier anti-Japanese and anti-Asian hostility and scapegoating. Because of widespread hysteria and racist panic, Japanese Americans during World War II were considered dangerous and/or in danger of violence, and therefore they were incarcerated both for the protection of the American public and “for their own good.” Relating the imprisonment of more than 120,000 Japanese Americans to the pervasive stereotypes about Asians at the time, Mirikitani writes: “We, closer to the earth, / squat, short thighed, / knowing the dust better. . . . / We, akin to the jungle, / plotting with the snake, / tails shedding in civilized America. . . . / We, who awake in the river / Ocean’s child / Whale eater. . . . / We, the dangerous, / Dwelling in the ocean. / Akin to the jungle. / Closer to the earth” (26–27). Explicitly commenting on the association between stereotypes of Asian Americans (animal-like, uncivilized, savage, closer to nature ) and the forced incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, Mirikitani attempts to explode any notion that such an incarceration was necessary or justified. Rather, as she suggests, the widescale removal of an entire group of Americans based solely on ethnic heritage represented an attempt by the U.S. government—and public—to “devour ,” “humble,” and “break” the Japanese in America. Drawing on the strength of their history as Asian Americans and relating the crisis of internment to other atrocities committed against Asian people, Mirikitani writes, “Hiroshima / Vietnam / Tule Lake / And yet we were not devoured . / And yet we were not humbled. / And yet we are not broken” (27). Her words reflect perseverance in the face of racist hostility and adversity and a reclamation of her own identity as a Japanese American. In two subsequent pieces contained in the second section of her book, entitled “Bowl of Rage,” Mirikitani explores the silences surrounding internment . Both “Breaking Silence” and “Prisons of Silence” attempt to account for the multiple silences surrounding Japanese Americans’ experiences in the concentration camps. In her dedication to “Breaking Silence” (1982), which was written for her mother, Mirikitani writes, “After forty years of silence about the experience of Japanese Americans in World War II concentration camps, my mother testified before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Japanese American Civilians in 1981” (56).2 In the body of the poem, Mirikitani includes her mother’s testimony and her own modifications to that testimony, writing, “We 76 w h i t e s o u n d a n d s i l e n c e s f r o m s t o n e were made to believe our faces / betrayed us. / Our bodies were loud / with yellow screaming flesh / needing to...

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